A Match Made in the Airwaves Part II
By Stephen Turk
So it’s football season now, and that means all attention in the sports world goes there. I’m not complaining, I love football, but I don’t imagine that while watching the first nationally televised football game, too many people were downing hot wings, wearing replica jersey
s, or were able to see the game on a 160 inch high definition screen. But on December 28, 1958 those seeds were sown.
And that is really one of the most interesting things about that game that endures. What we can do now is look back at the timeline of professional football and pickout the moment things started to really come together.
The 1958 game has a lot going for it, especially in the whole “t.v. made the NFL what it is today” argument. There’s simply too much to talk about concerning the game itself, so we’ll skip the whole thing for now, and get to it at some point in the future. The take home point is that the game gave the country the very first NFL overtime in its first nationally televised game. The nation got to experience the excitement of sudden death together.
For decades the league had been trying to establish itself. What they needed was a medium, a grand stage to show that professional football could be just as enthralling as baseball, college football, and boxing. I mean, people wouldn’t go around painting themselves up as they do today if the product wasn’t worth it.
Football now had an audience and a medium to take advantage of. Johnny Unitas became a 
sports hero. Lou Sahadi puts about as succinctly as possible in One Sunday in December:
“Unitas had become a national treasure. Every high school quarterback and the ones in college wanted to be like Johnny Unitas. Barbers around the country put down their combs and scissors and began using electric razors to sculpture Unitas crew cuts. High-top shoes were a must for every kid who dreamed about being like Unitas.”
The NFL has a truly marketable star, someone with the Babe Ruth appeal that the sport had lacked. Guys like Bart Starr and Jim Brown joined Unitas as faces of the game. The national attention led to the creation of the AFL which later led to the Super bowl and eventually the merger between the leagues. Football was in.
Television and football, the importance of the relationship now recognized, the two continued to grow together. Football is a visually arresting sport, and t.v. allows for spectacle, something that has been honed and perfected over the years. The flashiness of technology heightened to drama of the sport with slow motion and instant replay. As the years went on, the formula was expanded and perfected.
Commercials, vital sources of income for the league, have been timed to perfection, cutting out all the down time in between changes of possession, time-outs, and other such delays. A more recent development, the computerized lines indicating the first down and the line of scrimmage, simplify the game to be accessible to everyone, and have become such a staple of the game that the question “how do they keep changing that line on the field?” can be fairly common at gatherings.
It’s important for a sport to have a culture, the things that you automatically associate with that sport. For instance, while baseball fans today might paint their faces, that is a wholey football thing. And a good reason to do that, besides to look really cool, is to attract enough attention to yourself to get on t.v. Just che
ck out your average Raiders fan. Words don’t exist to describe that on radio.
You could go on and on when listing the things we associate with Football that can be traced to t.v. Football on television has led greatly into the sports bar phenomenon. Try eating fifty wings in the grand stands, it simply can’t be done. My entire thinking on this matter came from my consumption of nacho, wings, and beer; my attendance at Super bowl parties; frequenting of sports bars; and reverence for huge televisions. All of those aspects are now undivorcable from the football experience, and not a single one of them is exclusive to, say, actually attending a game of football.
When you put all of that together, throw in the aggressive merchandizing and licensing, and the sports celebrity that t.v. (and the internet!) has brought to new levels, and it is really no surprise that footballs teams are making billions.
So what does it all mean? We can trace the rise of football and the rise of the television together. We can tell that football is making more money than any other sport in America. I think what it means is football simply has been more adaptable. It is enjoying its time in the sun. Will it get overthrown by baseball again sometime? Who knows. In this information age, anything is possible. Even this:
Yikes!
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