As most of you who are regular readers of my in-season column "Hello Wisconsin" know, I am a high school English teacher. Throughout the school year, I do regular "this or that" polls on my white board in class. Students pick which of the two options they prefer.

The choices are extremely varied. Some days they'll be about music, some days about study habits, some days about pop culture, some days about food, and so on. Over the last several years, I've noticed an interesting trend: the sports polls tend to get the lowest engagement.

When I talk to students about sports, this begins to make sense. The vast majority of students in my classes do not pay a lot of attention to sports. There are still the handful of diehards that you would expect. Nothing like when I was in high school, however, when what was happening in the sports world was one of the primary topics of conversation at lunch, in the halls, and during classes when we were supposed to be doing our work.

Something else I've noticed: football interest is especially low. When I run polls regarding which sport they prefer, football just about always loses. When I run football-related polls, there is very low participation compared to most other days. Of the relatively few students who do vote on the polls, the Bucks and Brewers tend to get more interest than the Packers.

I began wondering if this was all just me reading into things too much, so I did a little bit more research about teenagers not seeming as interested in sports, and especially football, as they once were. As it turns out, this isn't just my experience--there's all kinds of discussion happening out there about this. And it sure seems that it's become a fact: Gen Z (currently ages ~13-28) and Gen Alpha (currently ages 13 and below) would seem to be less interested in sports than the generations preceding them.

Some interesting statistics and studies:

• A 2021 study showed that only 23 percent of Gen Z describe themselves as "passionate" sports fans, compared to 42 percent of millennials, 33 percent of Gen X and 31 percent of baby boomers
• In the same study, 27 percent of Gen Z describes themselves as "anti-sports," which is triple or more the percentage of any of those other older generations
• Just 31 percent of Gen Z watch sporting events live. Compare this with the 75 percent of those 55 and older. The younger viewers are much more likely to only watch highlight clips after the fact.
  • Sort of related: Gen Z is spending 7.2 hours per day on average in front of screens, by far the highest total of any generation

The NFL is well aware of these statistics, of course. A league that has the NFL's current Golden Goose status (for now) is going to do anything it can to continue to stay successful and grow. There's a reason why the league continues to push into new regions of the world and spread its international series; it may well sense the future of the fandom in America starting to ebb away.

Of course, there's also a reason why the league continues to embrace platforms like TikTok and athlete relationships like that of Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift. The league wants to meet young fans where they're at and find ways to connect with a segment of the population that lives more of its life digitally than anyone that has come before them.

But ultimately, what is unavoidable is that the way younger fans choose to consume games themselves is going to be drastically different than what we have historically seen. Younger fans lack *something* required to watch games live, whether it's interest, attention span, both, or something else entirely. As they get older and have children of their own, that will result in their preferred methods of enjoying the game being passed on to their children; that is, if they even have enough passion about the sport to pass it on to the next generation.

This makes me wonder what the future of Packer fandom looks like. I'm still below the age of 40, and have young children of my own (my oldest, Charlie, is watching me intently as I type this right now, haha). They've begun to show some level of interest in football, but is it going to end up being the same sort of obsession I had as a kid in the 90s, who spent hours memorizing player names, stats, and trivia? Is that sort of young fan eventually going to be an artifact of a past form of fandom? 

And with those questions in mind... is the league close to going past its peak popularity, if it hasn't already?

For now, the NFL remains the king of the sports world (far and away, as a matter of fact). But there almost certainly are some executives keeping an eye on these trends with some level of nervousness for what the future may hold.