The Rise of the NFL & Television's Real Transformation of American Football
The History of American Sports
Chapter 8 · The Rise of the NFL & Television's Real Transformation of American Football
Baseball's Rival, Playing Catch-Up
Through the 1940s and much of the 1950s, professional football trailed well behind both baseball and college football for genuine national attention. Baseball had its own decades-old "national pastime" status; college football had generations of institutional loyalty and tradition behind it. The NFL, by comparison, was still a regional, second-tier product in the eyes of most of the country — right up until one specific game changed that almost overnight.
December 28, 1958: The Greatest Game Ever Played
The 1958 NFL Championship Game, played at Yankee Stadium between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants, ended 23–17 in the Colts' favor — decided by Alan Ameche's 1-yard touchdown run with 6:45 left in overtime, capping a 13-play drive Johnny Unitas had directed himself. It was the first game in NFL history decided by sudden-death overtime, and the rule was so new that even the players on the field weren't entirely sure what was happening. Unitas himself later recalled: "When the game ended in a tie, we were standing on the sidelines waiting to see what came next."
NBC broadcast the game nationally, drawing an estimated 45 million viewers — a genuinely enormous audience for the sport at the time, and one widely credited with convincing television executives and advertisers alike that football's own stop-start structure (the exact discrete-play feature Chapter 1 identified) made for uniquely compelling live broadcast drama.
Pete Rozelle's Real Structural Fix: Equal Revenue Sharing
The single game proved football could captivate a national television audience; what turned that into a durable business was a structural decision by NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle. By 1966, he had persuaded league owners to share national television revenue equally across every team, regardless of market size. A team in Green Bay, Wisconsin — a genuinely small media market — would receive exactly the same broadcast revenue as a team in New York or Los Angeles. That single policy is widely credited with the competitive financial parity the NFL has maintained ever since, a real structural advantage baseball's own more market-size-driven economics, discussed in Chapter 5, never adopted in the same way.
A Rival League and a Real Merger
The American Football League formed in 1960 as a genuine competitor to the NFL, and the two leagues spent several years in a real, expensive bidding war for players. On June 8, 1966, Rozelle announced that the two leagues would merge — combining into a 24-team league (growing to 26 by 1968 and 28 by 1970), unified under a single draft, sharing television revenue under Rozelle's own equal-split model, and organized into the two conferences, the AFC and NFC, that structure the league to this day.
January 15, 1967: A Championship Game Not Yet Called the Super Bowl
The merger's own championship game was played on January 15, 1967, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum — the same publicly funded stadium whose integration requirement, back in Chapter 6, had pressured the Rams into signing Kenny Washington and Woody Strode in 1946. The Green Bay Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs 35–10, in a game officially named the "AFL-NFL World Championship Game." It was broadcast simultaneously on both CBS and NBC — and, in a detail that surprises most people given how the event eventually grew, it didn't sell out. Of the Coliseum's 94,000-seat capacity, roughly 33,000 seats went unsold, with local newspapers openly criticizing the $12 ticket price (equivalent to roughly $116 today) as too steep.
Lamar Hunt's Real, Half-Joking Naming of the Super Bowl
Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt is the real, documented source of the name "Super Bowl" — and by his own account, he never intended it seriously. His children were fans of a wildly popular Wham-O toy from 1964 called the Super Ball, and Hunt, mulling over what to call the new championship at a summer 1966 planning meeting, blurted out "Super Bowl" almost as a joke. He put it in writing the same way: in a July 25, 1966 letter to the league office, he wrote that he had "kiddingly called it the 'Super Bowl,' which obviously can be improved upon." Nobody ever did improve on it. Years later, in January 1970, Hunt himself told the Associated Press, "I guess it is a little corny, but it looked like we're stuck with it." The name was applied retroactively to the first two championship games only once it had actually caught on — Super Bowl III, in January 1969, was the first game to carry the name officially from the start.
Monday Night Football: Turning a Weeknight Into an Event
Television's transformation of the sport didn't stop with the championship game. ABC launched Monday Night Football on September 21, 1970, with the Cleveland Browns beating the New York Jets 31–21 — a fittingly symbolic matchup, given that the Browns' own real 1946 integration (Chapter 6) had happened under an entirely different football league. Producer Roone Arledge deliberately built the broadcast as a genuine television spectacle rather than a plain sports telecast: twice the usual number of cameras, an expanded three-person broadcast booth (Howard Cosell, Keith Jackson, and Don Meredith for that first season), heavy use of instant replay, and on-screen graphics well ahead of what other sports broadcasts were doing at the time. Advertisers paid $65,000 per minute for that first broadcast — and the game still captured a real 33 percent share of the entire television audience that night, proof that football could now command a weeknight the way no other American sport had managed before.
Two Different Sports, Two Different Kinds of Transformation
| What Changed the Sport | Baseball (Chapter 7) | Football (This Chapter) |
|---|---|---|
| The real driver | A labor dispute over player rights, decided by an arbitrator | A single televised game, a revenue-sharing policy, and a league merger |
| Legal mechanism involved | A 1922 Supreme Court ruling exempting the sport from antitrust law | A 1966 act of Congress granting a narrow, merger-specific antitrust exemption |
| Who benefited most directly | The players, through dramatically higher salaries | The league and its owners, through a much larger television audience and shared national revenue |
Questions to Sit With
The 1958 championship's own famous nickname came from one magazine writer's article title, not from any broader public consensus at the time. How much of a sport's most repeated historical "fact" is really just one well-placed piece of writing that happened to stick?
Rozelle's equal revenue-sharing policy gave small-market Green Bay the same television income as New York or Los Angeles. What tradeoffs might a league accept by prioritizing competitive parity this way, compared to a system that rewards bigger markets with bigger revenue?
Lamar Hunt never intended "Super Bowl" to be taken seriously, yet it became one of the most recognized names in American sports. Can you think of another case where something meant casually or as a joke ended up becoming a permanent, formal institution?
Quick Reference — The NFL's Rise & Television
- The December 28, 1958 NFL Championship Game (Colts 23, Giants 17) was the league's first sudden-death overtime game and drew roughly 45 million NBC viewers — but was blacked out in New York City itself, and its "Greatest Game Ever Played" nickname traces to a specific Tex Maule Sports Illustrated article title
- Pete Rozelle's equal revenue-sharing policy, in place by 1966, gave every team the same national TV income regardless of market size — a real structural advantage over baseball's own more market-driven model
- The NFL and rival AFL announced their merger on June 8, 1966; unlike baseball's 1922 court-created antitrust exemption, football's merger received a narrow, explicit antitrust exemption from an act of Congress, signed October 21, 1966
- The first AFL-NFL World Championship Game (Packers 35, Chiefs 10), played January 15, 1967 at the LA Memorial Coliseum — the same stadium tied to the Rams' own 1946 integration — did not sell out, with roughly 33,000 of 94,000 seats unsold
- Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt coined "Super Bowl" half-jokingly after his kids' Wham-O Super Ball toy, first in a July 25, 1966 letter; the name only became official starting with Super Bowl III in January 1969
- ABC's Monday Night Football debuted September 21, 1970, with Roone Arledge's genuinely spectacle-driven production approach turning a weeknight football broadcast into appointment viewing
What's Next
Next chapter: Basketball's Modern Era: From the ABA Merger to Global Icons — the real 1976 NBA-ABA merger and how Michael Jordan turned basketball into a genuinely global sport.