When the Super Bowl comes to town, it brings revenue, prestige and a good time. It also brings a searing spotlight, an opportunity for the host city to showcase its greatness … and an opportunity to point to where changes could be made.
Super Bowl LVII marks the 30-year anniversary of one of the NFL’s most overtly political acts, stripping the Super Bowl from a state — Arizona, which is also the site of this year’s game — over its refusal to acknowledge a holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. It was an uncharacteristic, even unexpected move for a league that’s spent its existence holding to a pose of neutrality — and that made the league’s act such a significant one.
Still, it’s happened on multiple occasions — in Arizona, in North Carolina in 2017 and Georgia in 2021 — and as American partisanship increases and the walls between sports and politics crumble, it could happen again.On Nov. 2, 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed into law a bill honoring King with a federal holiday on the third Monday in January. The law took effect three years later, and soon afterward, most states approved their own version of the law.
“I think it’s tragic for the people who worked so hard to get the game there,” Braman said at the time. “But I think it would be an affront to our public and our players if the game was played there.” For more than two decades afterward, politics and sports ran on largely separate paths in the public consciousness. By the mid-2010s, though, the increased connectivity of the social media age, the increasing access of marginalized groups to larger platforms, and the increasingly vocal partisanship that followed both those changes, intertwined sports and politics on a day-to-day basis at a level not seen before in American history.
In 2015, the NCAA considered moving its headquarters out of Indiana after then-Gov. Mike Pence signed into law a “religious freedom” bill that critics said allowed for discrimination based on sexual orientation. A followup law amended the “religious freedom” bill to block discrimination, and the NCAA remained in place.
"Georgia voters sent a clear message after Democrat Stacy Abrams led the charge to move the MLB from Atlanta by overwhelmingly supporting Governor Kemp and keeping Republican majorities in the State legislature,” Ryan Caudelle, executive director of the Georgia GOP, said in a statement to Yahoo Sports. “Liberal ideologies have caused harm to Georgians, not the conservative values the Georgia Republican Party support that make this the best state to do business and raise a family.
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