Television
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.
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.
