NFL continues reach for female fans through breast cancer awareness

The NFL's annual breast cancer awareness campaign, always in October, has long been the league's most substantial plan to appeal to women.

Stadiums will be awash in pink starting Thursday when the Minnesota Vikings visit the Green Bay Packers.

With the NFL under attack over its handling of players accused of domestic violence, its efforts to raise awareness toward breast cancer could fall flat; after all, the off-the-field trouble led Procter and Gamble to remove its sponsorship of the event.

"It will be harder to take it seriously, absolutely," said Anne Osborne, an associate professor of communications at Syracuse who has spent the past five years researching the NFL's female fan base. "I think even before all of this, you would hear people routinely say that they don't get the connection between football and breast cancer. It's not a natural connection. For some people it seemed like just a PR effort to acknowledge women's presence around football. Now in light of all of this, it will ring as sort of hollow."

The NFL, however, says it won't scale back its efforts to raise awareness of breast cancer, an initiative that began in 2009, but rather emphasizes that this campaign is one of its most tangible ways to prove the league values its female fans.

"I strongly believe this is not the time to pull back on a campaign that reaches so many people across the country," the NFL's new vice president of social responsibility Anna Isaacson told USA TODAY Sports. "Clearly, the NFL has been under a lot of pressure, but it's not an either-or proposition for us. We can support breast cancer awareness and also make a difference with domestic violence and sexual assault campaigns."

Cancer survivors are honored at halftime ceremonies. Players wear pink accessories with their game uniforms, which are auctioned off with the proceeds donated to the American Cancer Society. Since 2009, the NFL says it has raised nearly $7 million and nearly 10,000 women have received screenings.

The campaign will culminate with what the NFL and the American Cancer Society have called "A Crucial Catch Day" on Oct. 25 with breast cancer screenings available in every NFL city.

Isaacson said the NFL is still considering a formal acknowledgement of domestic violence awareness month in October, but the league has yet to decide how or what would be the best way to handle such a large-scale effort. The NFL has learned from its six-year history with the breast cancer awareness campaign it can't make those decisions alone.

"I think we're always clear that we need to listen to the people that do this every day and rely on the experts," Isaacson said. "We know what we do well, we know what we're experts in: We're experts in football, and we need to rely on outside experts and non-profit organizations to help us make those decisions."

The NFL has already decided it could make a tangible impact in its anti-domestic violence efforts by helping fund the National Domestic Violence Hotline and the National Sexual Violence Resource Center.

Another possibility could be financially supporting domestic violence crisis centers at a local level, said Ruth Glenn, the executive director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. It would be a way to focus efforts on the victims, people often overlooked as shown in the NFL's recent fallout from missteps.

Running back Ray Rice was released by the Baltimore Ravens and suspended indefinitely by the NFL after video surfaced last month of him knocking out his then-fiancée in an elevator in February. Rice, who avoided felony charges by entering a pretrial intervention program, was initially suspended two games by the NFL, a punishment NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell later admitted was too lenient.

"One of the things that we lose track of is the assistance that these local programs need to provide services to victims. Local programs are doing hard work, and sometimes we don't get to hear from them. I am sure they are all at capacity now. We are a national organization and our capacity has been stressed just taking phone calls, so I can't imagine what the local programs are going through," Glenn said.

But until the NFL adopts a formal domestic violence campaign beyond its initial actions of the last month – forming a committee, bringing in female advisors with expertise, funding the hotlines and running public service announcements – the spotlight again will return to breast cancer, one of the few direct links players have to acknowledging their female fans.

"As a player, I know that just honoring them has been great. As far as the particulars and how deep it goes, that would be for the league office. I know that when I play and I wear the pink, I'm honoring the people I know who have gone through it," Eagles quarterback Nick Foles said. "That's why I play. That's why I wear it. That's why we wear the pink. … I wear it because of what it symbolizes."

But as the NFL this month goes pink, the league can still expect some backlash from a female fan base struggling to reconcile their feelings.

Osborne, the Syracuse professor whose book "Female Fans in the NFL: Taking their Place in the Stands" will be finished this year, said she doesn't believe the domestic violence crisis will turn away the most ardent female fans, but it could have new fans questioning their loyalty.

"I think this has brought to a head a lot of feelings that women have had about the authenticity of the NFL's efforts to connect with them," Osborne said. "If the NFL had had really strong and mutually respectful relationship with female fans before this happened, they probably wouldn't have made the mistakes they made, wouldn't have been so completely tone deaf on this issue early on, and they could have avoided this. This would have been something they recognized as an issue a long time ago."

Contributing: Jim Corbett