NFL Super Bowl Ad Goes Back to Flag Football Future

Two years later, the National Football League and its creative partners at 72andSunny have placed girls and women’s flag football at the center of their latest Super Bowl ad. The two-minute “NFL Flag 50” airs immediately after halftime and takes viewers back to 1985, where Liberty High School and U.S. Girls’ Junior National Team flag football player Ki’Lolo Westerlund shows up as the new girl in school to the tune of Yello’s “Oh Yeah” (aka day-bow-bow).

Awash in big TV perms, male jocks hoarding the varsity jackets, and seemingly little knowledge of the Title IX education amendment a decade earlier prohibiting sex-based discrimination in schools, the ‘80s setting is slowly dragged into the present day by Westerlund and some noteworthy teammates.

With heavily disguised former NFL punter and current ESPN personality Pat McAfee as a principal excited that girls’ flag football has become a varsity sport, this stand-in for a John Hughes movie high school gets an education from flag players, including Serenity Simon from Miami’s Palmetto High School, Keiser University and U.S Women’s national team player Ashlea Klam, and U.S. flag football veteran and 2022 Super Bowl ad star Vanita Krouch. Together, the flag football players rock the school’s retrograde jocks like a hurricane as Scorpions provide the soundtrack.

“The biggest difference is the first [Super Bowl flag football ad] sparked the global excitement, and it was all about the Olympics and the giant stage,” said Marissa Solis, svp of global brand and marketing for the NFL. “This time it’s more personal: It’s about high school, seeing the journey of these young ladies, and making it an official high school sport, and it starts in local communities.”