To learn more about my subculture, I have decided to take a
look at the main online hub of professional football: NFL.com. It is an
incredibly popular website, due to the popularity of the sport. Each team has their own website, links to
which are placed at the top of the home screen of nfl.com, marked with the
team’s emblem. Below that is a bar
listing general terms including: fantasy, news, video, scores, schedules,
standings, stats, watch games, tickets, and shop. Scrolling over each, the visitor is given a
quick snapshot of what each will entail if clicked on. The NFL logo is to the left of this bar,
along with a pink ribbon behind it for breast cancer awareness month. The schedule of the upcoming games is listed
below this bar, giving a two/three-letter abbreviation for each team and their
opponent. In order to understand several
of these names you must be an insider of the subculture.
An advertisement for pizza hut is placed in the center of
the top of the page, hard to miss.
Written on the ad is, “Score a Pizza Any Way You Want”, a play on the
word “score” which is used specifically for this website. A giant picture of two players reveals the
main story of the website, the game that is on right now. The caption underneath is “Ruling the
air—Richard Sherman has owned Larry Fitzgerald in previous matchups. Will his advantage continue? READ”. “Ruling the air” is a statement that almost
anyone outside of the subculture would not understand. Most of the side article titles such as this
would not make any sense to an outsider: “Rank’s 11 Sleepers: Graduation day
for Keenan Allen”, “The new King of Corners?”, and “Drive the Jaguar”—just to
name a few.
Scrolling down the home page, more advertisements for Pizza
Hut are found as well as one for the NFL Shop.
One thing I noticed in particular about this website are the amount of
pictures and videos compared to the amount of text. There are so many forms of visual media and
very small amounts of writing. The
subculture of professional football is not stereotypically known for being
incredibly intelligent, so you would think they wouldn’t want to read much, but
they like pictures. One of the pictures
at the very bottom of the page has the caption “Why do you love football” and
it is a picture of a family (including a mom and daughter) watching football
together. I think it is interesting to
note the infrequent appearance of women in the photos. But, also to see when women are used and how they
are used. The next time something about
a woman comes up, it is the ever-annoying ad “53 year old Mom Looks
27”.
Fantasy leagues are the most directly fan-involved
activities offered by nfl.com. Here fans
can interact with one another as well as play “make believe” with their
favorite players. I was not completely
confident that I knew exactly how Fantasy Football worked, since I have never
done it. So, I clicked on the “Fantasy”
link, then “Help” and under the “FAQ” headline was “What is Fantasy Football”.
It explained very clearly, but without too much or too little detail. The rituals of the “Fantasy” commitment
involve deciding which players to keep on your starting lineup each week and
then staring at each game to see how many Fantasy Points you rack up then,
comparing your score to other fan’s teams.
This website covers so much information, but it is very
professional. It looks like a lot of
work goes into maintaining it and that the job is done by several people who do
this for a living. The NFL’s marketing
specialists must work hand and hand with the website management due to the incredible
number of advertisements. This is
definitely the main site for anything and everything professional
football. It is a wealth of information
and could be used in a variety of ways.
I will definitely be coming back to check it out. www.nfl.com
The NFL website! Love it! You really hit the jackpot in terms of content with this one! By your descriptions it sure looks like those marketing agents do a good job of appealing to their target audience. Considering this is such a popular sport in the US, the conveniently placed Pizza Hut ad and the picture/video reliant site says a lot about our culture, or at least the culture of Professional Football. I thought it was great how you described the fantasy football leagues as fans playing make believe. Usually playing pretend is seen as something of a phase that people tend to grow out of, but here we see that many adults too can get a good time out of roleplaying of sorts! There's something to be said here about the idea of growing up and what exactly it entails. All in all it looks like you did a great job of analyzing the digital landscape, keep it up!
ReplyDeleteWhat better place to go for an online response than directly to the website for the NFL? It's definitely full of information, and, as you said, plenty of visuals for the football fans to look at. I found it interesting that you pointed out that the website is directed at the stereotype that football fans are unintelligent, and I think that this speaks volumes about our culture. This along with the fact that the site is definitely geared towards men, as you pointed out. It's crazy to think about how male-dominated the sports world is, not even just football. It's clear from this website that for many people, football and the NFL can be quite the obsession.
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