said on Women\u2019s Sports Now<\/a> that the league\u2019s research shows that people who have played football at the youth level are more likely to remain fans of the sport for life. In the past, those youth football players were almost exclusively boys. Now there are hundreds of thousands of girls playing flag football, and the NFL says the sport is only going to continue to grow.<\/p>\n\u201cData shows that if you play the game you are more likely to be a lifelong fan,\u201d Goodell said. \u201cI think that\u2019s a true statement and a fact. So if young women are playing the game and they\u2019re getting that exposure early on . . . they have the opportunity to be exposed to football, and that\u2019s why they fell in love with it. I\u2019ve always said, it used to be, the guys used to say, \u2018I\u2019m going down to the basement, I\u2019m watching football, I\u2019ll see you at dinner.\u2019 Or they go on Sunday afternoon to a football game. Now they\u2019re going with their family. And when I go to a game, the No. 1 thing I look at in the stands, I\u2019m looking to see how many women are there, how many families are there, how many young people are there. That audience mix has changed dramatically in our stadiums. It changed in our events, the draft \u2014 I can\u2019t even tell you, it\u2019s probably 50\/50 at the draft, and I just think that\u2019s a really significant thing for the growth of the NFL, to have a fan base. Women are fans too, and they\u2019re awfully good fans or great fans.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are now at least 40 states that have girls\u2019 high school flag football programs, and 23 states have state sanctioned varsity flag football championships. The NFL has a stated goal of seeing girls\u2019 flag football as a high school varsity sport in all 50 states.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell says the league\u2019s support of girls\u2019 flag football is a long-term investment in making…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":715557,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[349,99],"class_list":["post-715556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-nfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=715556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715556\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/715557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=715556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=715556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=715556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}