The NFL conducts a month-long campaign to "help fight breast cancer" by selling pink merchandise and having players wear pink towels and gloves.
The NFL donates proceeds fro its awareness campaigns to the American Cancer Society.
"The money that we receive from NFL has nothing to do with our research program," ACS spokeswoman Tara Peters told VICE Sports. All NFL donations go to ACS' CHANGE program, through which the organization awards grants to "community based health facilities" located within 100 miles of an NFL city for educating women about breast health. The ACS could not provide the names of any of these health facilities, but it says that these centers have answered questions about early detection of the disease for at least 72,000 women in the last three years and screened 10,000 women at little or no cost.
Karuna Jaggar, who heads the Think Before You Pink campaign, a watchdog for the country's breast cancer programs, finds the NFL's Crucial Catch campaign's public health message, "Annual Screening Saves Lives," highly misinformative.
"Screening doesn't save lives and screening mammography … is different from diagnostic mammography," Jagger says. "The NFL has no business providing medical advice to women that is outdated, unproven, and misguided."
Jagger quotes well-regarded and independently conducted research that shows screening mammography has no overall impact on survival rates of women with the disease.