Number
38
National Football League
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It may be hard to believe now, but the National Football League wasn’t much when Pete Rozelle took the reins in 1960. Although it had been around for 40 years, the NFL was a distant second to the college game in terms of fan support. Its 13 franchises were worth an average of just $2 million each. Television rights for all games sold for an underwhelming $4.65 million. Two clerks and one temporary employee comprised the entire workforce at league headquarters. Baseball was still the undisputed national pastime.
Rozelle, a 33-year-old public relations executive, was general manager of the Los Angeles Rams when he was named the NFL’s sixth commissioner. He had big plans when he assumed control, and in less than a decade, he realized most of them. He first renegotiated the league’s national TV contract, which brought the games into many more homes and considerably boosted its income and its profile. He then engineered a merger with the upstart American Football League that unified the sport’s warring pro factions and created a dynamic 26-team alliance with franchises in major cities from coast to coast. He convinced ABC to broadcast a national “game of the week” every Monday evening, establishing an event that became one of the most popular of all regular programs on television. And he initiated a seasonending championship contest that came to be called the Super Bowl.
Things didn’t always go as smoothly for Rozelle or the league, of course. Bigtime labor battles, highly publicized contract disputes, serious injuries that ended careers and put popular players in wheelchairs, inappropriate (and even criminal) behavior both on and off the field, owners who surreptitiously moved established franchises to new cities in the dead of night—these were just a few of the unfortunate episodes that marred the NFL’s otherwise impressive performance as it evolved through its second 40 years. But no one could deny that the league emerged from this period as the dominant sports organization in the world. Or that Pete Rozelle, who retired in 1989 and died in 1996, was primarily responsible for the way it irrevocably changed both professional athletics and the enormous business that it has become.
At its most basic, American football is a rather simple game played on a rectangular field of grass (or, in recent years, an artificial surface made to look like grass). Two teams of 11 players apiece march up and down this field for 60 minutes, trying to score as many points as possible. They do so by carrying or throwing an oval ball into the “end zone” defended by their opponents, or by kicking the ball between two upright “goal posts” permanently set there. Naturally, as with most activities of this kind, there are many nuances that complicate the process and increase the enjoyment for spectators who understand them.
The game that’s now played in the NFL began in the latter half of 19th century as a rough-and-tumble combination of other sports. It is generally acknowledged that the first true match in the United States was played in New Jersey. In it, Rutgers defeated Princeton, 6 to 4—although the differences between that 1869 contest and those held today are actually as numerous as the similarities. Play was exceedingly fierce (like rugby), and the winner was the one who scored the greatest number of goals (as in soccer). There also were 25 players on each side, who could advance the ball only by kicking it or butting it with their head. A variety of similarly bizarre regulations held sway in the games that followed, until standardized rules were instituted in 1873. An intercollegiate schedule was drawn up at the same time for the teams from Princeton and Rutgers, as well as those from Yale and Columbia. The distinct American version of football now known began to solidify soon after.
The early game’s extremely violent nature contributed to dozens of serious injuries, and even some deaths. This prompted President Theodore Roosevelt to call in 1905 for immediate and far-reaching changes in its play. A subsequent drive to increase safety and more closely monitor competition resulted in formation of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), which also initiated the post-season bowl games that remain popular to this day. A move to establish professional teams already was underway, with the first surfacing before the turn of the century. The NFL was founded at Canton, Ohio, in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association. Part of its eventual success must be attributed to the fact that Jim Thorpe, the distinguished Native American athlete, was selected as its first commissioner. Before the NFL, teams really didn’t last too long.
The league’s current name was adopted in 1922 by Joe Carr, Thorpe’s successor. Carr held the top spot until 1939 while teams like the Akron Pros, Columbus Panhandles, Frankford Yellow Jackets, and Staten Island Stapletons came and went. Carl Strock followed as commission for a single year; he was replaced in 1941 by Elmer Layden, who remained in office through World War II. When veteran player, coach, and owner Bert Bell took over in 1946, the advent of television finally helped league officials bring their sport to the masses. Bell remained the boss until his death in 1959, when Pete Rozelle came aboard. It was then that professional football as we know it today really arrived.
When Rozelle entered the fray, the NFL had two conferences with a dozen total franchises: the New York Giants, Cleveland Browns, Philadelphia Eagles, Pittsburgh Steelers, Washington Redskins, Chicago Cardinals, Baltimore Colts, Chicago Bears, Green Bay Packers, San Francisco 49ers, Detroit Lions, and Los Angeles Rams. The year he took control, the Cardinals were moved to St. Louis and Dallas was awarded a team; another, in Minneapolis, was added in 1961. Many more cities around the country wanted to get in on the burgeoning action, however, and a rival league had sprung up in 1959 that was far stronger than any of the insurgents that came before. And while the NFL initially tried to ignored these upstarts, the so-called American Football League began to make inroads into its previously exclusive territory with teams in Boston, Buffalo, Denver, Houston, New York, Oakland, Dallas, and Los Angeles. By the time the L.A. team was moved to San Diego and the one in Dallas was shifted to Kansas City, the AFL was worrying Rozelle and his peers.
For a time, the NFL refused to even recognize its new rival’s existence. But when the two leagues began aggressively bidding for top players, the resultant financial competition threatened profitability on all sides. Rozelle, in what would become one of his two greatest moves, understood the implications and started working toward a merger that was announced in 1966 and consummated in 1970. In what proved to be his other great move, he initiated a championship game between the leaders of each league that kicked off on January 15, 1967. With its name taken from a then-popular hard rubber child’s ball that bounced incredibly high when thrown to the ground, the Super Bowl was born.
Since the NFL and AFL were considerably unequal in terms of talent at the time, nobody expected much that first year. They weren’t surprised, either. Played in the Los Angeles Coliseum, the inaugural match was quite unlike anything that came before (or since, as observers were soon to learn). The highest priced ticket was just $12, but about one-third of the stadium’s 95,000 seats still went unfilled. CBS and NBC both broadcast the clash, paying a mere $1 million each for the rights. And even before Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers finished demolishing the Kansas City Chiefs, 35-10, fans turned away with a yawn.
That was soon to change. By the time Broadway Joe Namath guaranteed (and then delivered) a victory for his AFL New York Jets in Super Bowl III, the Roman numerals used to differentiate the annual events no longer seemed falsely imperious. The Super Bowl had become a national preoccupation, and football a national religion. Rozelle built upon that in everything he did, from marketing his stars to merchandising related products. And it worked. When the league recently negotiated a new five-year TV contract with CBS, it pocketed $2.5 billion—more than 500 times what it realized from Rozelle’s first broadcast contract in 1961. Franchises jumped even higher in value. Magnificent new arenas were built across the nation to accomodate them. And cities without teams were soon competing with one another for new franchises as well as those that grew disenchanted with their existing homes. New rivals like the United States Football League sprung up, but throughout it all the NFL and its franchises continued to grow stronger.
Stirrings of labor unrest in the NFL first surfaced in 1970 and 1974, when player boycotts during the preseasons caused a few changes (added money to the pension fund and better fringe benefits such as insurance) and helped them organize. After the NFL signed a $2 billion five-year TV deal in 1982, players resentful of the increasing revenue streams pouring only to owners demanded 55 percent as their share; the owners refused and the first work stoppage in league history followed, canceling 98 games over eight weeks. The settlement included significant increases in player salaries, but the owners were able to fight off their demand for a fixed percentage of team income.
With the issue unresolved, the NFL Players Association struck again during the second week of the 1987 season, canceling 14 games and bringing on the debacle of briefly using replacement players to resume the season (an ignominious period in American professional sports history that was resurrected fictionally in the recent movie called The Replacements). The ending this time was acrimonious at best and an antitrust suit filed by the players was one result. Negotiations eventually led to the 1993 Collective Bargaining Agreement between players and owners, which among other things featured the initiation of free agency (making the NFL the last major pro sports league to grant it) and a salary cap (that would come into being once player costs for all teams reached 64 percent of designated gross revenues). The cap was triggered the following season and has been in effect ever since. Growth has pushed it higher each year, from $34.6 million per team the first year to a projected $68 million in 2001 (up from $62.2 million in 2000). While it has raised the average salary of players and kept owner profits high, it has forced “creative” payroll structuring and resulted in a lot of generally equal teams with a couple of highly paid superstars and a huge mass of moderately compensated supporting players. It has also made football free agency the least effective of the major sports, and, critics charge, made the game less fun to watch.
Under Paul Tagliabue, the commissioner since Rozelle retired, another kink in the league’s armor may be the off-field behavior of some of its athletes. Former great O.J. Simpson is undoubtedly the most notorious, accused (but not convicted) of murdering his ex-wife—but that happened long after his playing days were over. Other more recent acts, including the substance abuse and charges of violence that have been filed against current players, may prove more problematic if they turn fans off to the game and influence the advertisers who now pay as much as $67,000 per second to advertise during the Super Bowl. But if the fact that hundreds of thousands are now willing to pay the average cost of $45.63 to see a game in person, and tens of millions more are fanatical about parking themselves in front of a TV set every Sunday afternoon, the health of this not-for-profit behemoth seems assured for many years to come.