A Match Made in the Airwaves Part I
By Stephen Turk
As I sat on Sunday watching football, with a nacho cheese globule running down my replica jersey, a dwindling pitcher of beer, and in the midst of an important conversation with my friends as we discussed what food we would order at half time, I had the most painfully obvious epiphany. Football and television is truly the most successful marriage in sports.
So as I dug into some potato skins, I wondered, how did we get here? Clearly the NFL is top dog in the American sports world today, and while that has certainly been the trend for several years, the figures back it up in no uncertain fashion. A recent Forbes article found that the average NFL team is worth over a billion dollars. While that figure is impressive in its own right, the average MLB club is worth just 
under 500 million, less than half.
None of this is particularly provacative, saying television helped make the NFL what it is today is like saying the sky is blue or college basketball is better than the NBA. But what makes the relationship far more interesing is the context and the story around the thing.
As stated above, the prevalence of professional football and the prevalence of the television go hand in hand. What we call the NFL today had rather meager beginnings.
Professional football existed but was terribly disorganized; players jumped around teams and owners signed players who were still in college. Not too terribly different than today’s practices, but a lot less profitable. In 1920, a series of meetings in Canton, Ohio (appropriately the site of the Pro Football Hall of Fame) brought together a few scattered teams to create the American Professional Football Association (which was renamed a few years later as the National Football League).
Back in the early days of the NFL, the country didn’t really need anymore sports heroes to look up to, it was pretty stocked in that regard. Babe Ruth was making more money than anyone thought you could make from sports and did it by hitting more balls over the fence than people thought possible, the White Sox were being banned from baseball, Ty Cobb was still swiping bags and hitting balls all over the field. Boxing was still big, Man-O-War was retiring, and Honus Wagner had already retired, so not only were there current stars, most sports already had rich histories to cite. Sports had enough drama to go around, and football offered little.
But there was the NFL for better or worse. Over the next couple of decades, the sport held on. Teams came in, dropped out, changed cities. A few college stars made the jump and found success, which brought an improved degree of marketability to the sport, most notably Red Grange, the Galloping Ghost. There was a depression (it’s likely that when FDR compared his approach to the New Deal to that of a quarterback, he meant in the college game which was far more popular) and later a second world war that interrupted things for a while, but the sport managed to hold on. The Cleveland Browns came to prominence in the late forties and into the next decade with a string of championships, the Rams were the first team to televise all their games in the early fifties, a college draft was instituted, and in 1956 the Players Association formed, giving a new legitimacy to the sport.
All of this helped, but at the end of nearly forty years, the pro game was still outshone by baseball and college football. A college football ticket at the time could cost twice as much as a ticket to an NFL game. The NFL was missing that something that they could call their own, that extra umph was lacking.
All of this brings us to the 1958 Championship Game. The game between the New York Giants and Baltimore Colts, now known at the Greatest Game Ever Played, has importance far beyond just being a really good and dramatic game. Football had been shown on t.v. before, but this game was nationally televised, and the league couldn’t have asked for a better audition.
Check back as we go back to the future, and fill in the blanks.
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