Scorp said:

trying to cater something to appeal to a certain age group makes the outcome more predictable than the result one is trying to achieve

whereas, when the history of the game spoke for itself, that history is what drew people to support the NFL....

The older football audience is going to eventually die off. So if they don't try to reach millenials, football & other sports will die too. MMA is more a millenial era thing than boxing. MMA is still new, unlike boxing. It's like children don't generally listen to their parents or grandparents music. So in the same way they're not going to be as interested in their parents sports. Look at Jim Thorpe era football. They don't have the same kind of uniform as today. At one time ragtime, Hawaiian music, & jazz was pop music. You won't hear any of that on a Top 40 rasio station today. Pinball machines were popular before video games came out. Technology made pinball less popular. You didn't need a big machine in your house with video games and there's many different games and not just one like with the pinball machine. People have moved on. People in general don't care about the history of something. How many people today watch silent movies or westerns? They watch superhero movies. Millenials are less likely going to watch Gone With The Wind or John Wayne, Katharine Hepburn, & Mickey Rooney playing Chinese & Japanese people. Look at the fuss about Scarlett Johansson in Ghost In The Shell.

Football has gotten some bad press in the last few years like players beating their girlfriends/wives, the Jerry Sandusky coverup, and other things that have turned many people off. Parents are starting to not want their children to play football because of concussion reports. There was even a Will Smith movie about concussions. Other people see football & boxing as violent, so that probably is a factor as well. Performers singing songs in halftime has little if anything to do with football losing popularity.