Olympic flag football is solution to NFL’s decades-long problem of failing to capture deep global interest

“This is a good of the game issue maybe more than the good of the team,” one NFC team president said entering this week’s meetings. “But that’s what the league has always been built on. … It’s a great opportunity around the [Olympic] Games and gives the NFL unprecedented growth [opportunities] as well as an amazing lead into training camp.”

Added an AFC team president: “It’s a smart way — and I honestly believe a carefully thought-out way — to finally be part of that global stage every four years. I get the injury [concern], but every other major professional sport in America has been part of the Olympics for 30 years or more now. The NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball have all been able to shoulder that risk. Now [the NFL] can be a part of it with moderately less risk than what happens on an NFL field.”

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While logistics of making an Olympic flag football team while also playing in the NFL aren’t yet known, some of the guardrails are, among them:

• The league would allow one player on each NFL roster to try out for one country’s Olympic team — leaving the door open for multiple players on a single team to play in the Olympics if they are eligible for non-U.S. rosters. For example, one player could try out for the U.S. team, while another could try out for the Canadian team if they meet ancestry requirements. Each team’s international pathway player could also try out for their country’s team.

• Flag football teams would need to meet a standard of medical care and playing surface mandates to be eligible for NFL players. It would also need to augment all parts of its schedule so that the player’s NFL schedule would take precedent over everything else.

• Insurance coverage across the league to protect players in the event of an injury that derives from any flag football-related activities. Beyond that, a salary cap credit to any team that loses a player to a flag football-related injury.

That’s still a rough outline of the hurdles to even make NFL player participation possible. And it clearly acknowledges that there will be some athletic risk involved — something that has also been shown in some youth flag football studies indicating injury rates to be far lower than contact football, but hardly injury free. Given that reality, there’s a palpable reticence inside the personnel executives whose entire world is a team-first mentality.

“Pandora’s box,” one longtime and high-ranking AFC executive said. “Think of the Robert Edwards injury years ago, blowing out his knee playing flag football on the beach.”

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A 1998 first-round draft pick of the New England Patriots, Edwards put up 1,446 yards rushing and receiving, and 12 total touchdowns as a rookie — only to have his career derailed after suffering a frightening knee injury playing flag football at the Pro Bowl. He barely avoided amputation after the injury and didn’t play again until the 2002 season, when he had a brief one-season comeback with the Miami Dolphins that saw him play sparingly.

That’s the flag football nightmare scenario for those who remember it, and it’s why some NFL contracts have clauses written into them that prohibit any participation in flag football. Of course, for a league trying to solve remaining barriers to global consumption — and crack Jones’ “daunting” question of how to get people in China to pick up a football — the potential rewards sometimes mitigate the potential risk.

And it’s not just franchise owners who are interested, either. George Atallah, a former high-ranking executive with the NFL Players Association for the past 16 years, has been talking to NFL players for years about the possibility of the Olympic experience. Now the founder and CEO of SOMEBODY consulting firm, Atallah’s years of union experience gave him a blunt vantage: If there are coaches and front-office executives out there assuming star players won’t get on board with being an Olympian in flag football, they’re wrong.

“I disagree that stars won’t want to play,” Atallah said. “NFL players would be geeked. My opinion, from talking to players the last couple years about this, is that star players absolutely want to participate. And if the closest high-profile analog sport is the NBA, almost all of the players who have won a gold medal who are superstars, point to that medal as one of the top two highlights of their careers. And I think the same is going to be true for American NFL superstars. The gold medal, it just hits different when you’ve got the American flag behind it.”

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In turn, Atallah noted, the sport itself hits different for the world population when it doesn’t require the necessity of a large amount of expensive equipment. He pointed to soccer being a worldwide phenomenon, and the fast absorption of basketball across the planet — which was largely aided by needing only a ball and something to aim for with it.

“The flag football opportunity gives the league a chance to grow the game with very little barriers to entry — for both players and fans,” Atallah said. “That’s the whole thing. Soccer, it’s a field and a ball. Basketball, it’s a ball and a hoop.”

Atallah also noted that flag football also takes away the gender barrier that has forever existed on the playing field in the NFL. So not only does it put a football in the hands of new fans watching it on the Olympics for the first time — it puts that ball in potentially every hand.

Every hand … possibly every country … revisited and grown in between every four years of a worldwide Olympic audience. Allowing NFL players to be a part of that may not be the NFL’s solution to finally breaking down doors to a truly global fan base, but it might be the best one yet. And that’s why it was front and center on the agenda of NFL team owners this week.