How the NFL became America’s game

Peruse the National Football League’s financial playbook and you will discover a game plan laced with more slick twists and sweet slants than any Super Bowl strategy.

In fact, it should be required reading for all CEOs.

Page One: Go deep. From the minds of master innovators came on-field tweaks that turned a once-stodgy sport into a made-for-TV bonanza, and fresh boardroom ideas that sparked a raging revenue engine.

Page Two: Don’t fumble the basics. By staying true to some thick-armed American values, the NFL’s architects built a base of rabid consumers who come to worship each week with wallets wide open.

Page Three: Timing is everything. The league not only came of age alongside television in the 1960s and ’70s, it blossomed in an era when sports emerged as the new American religion.

Over the past half century — as pro baseball, basketball and hockey took turns sputtering — the NFL buffed its blue-collar budget into a champagne economy by soothing labor discord, spreading the wealth to all its franchises and ensuring that midmarket teams can win on any given Sunday, or in any given season.

“What you have,” said Joe Theismann, a retired Washington Redskins quarterback and former ESPN analyst, “is the perfect business model.”

The financial picture is prettier than an 80-yard spiral. Five of the 32 NFL franchises are valued at more than $1 billion dollars and another 17 NFL teams are on the cusp of joining that party, according to a Forbes magazine appraisal. Only three other sports clubs on the planet are worth more than $1 billion: baseball’s New York Yankees and soccer’s Manchester United and Real Madrid.

In 2006, league revenue topped $5.8 billion, reports Plunkett Research, Ltd. That same season, the NFL signed the richest series of TV rights deals in history, worth more than $23.9 billion through 2013. Meanwhile, game attendance broke records in 2006 when stadiums were filled to 90 percent of capacity. In our living rooms, CBS, NBC and Fox pulled NFL TV ratings that eclipsed average primetime shows by a whopping 66 percent. Between Sept. 9, 2006 and Jan. 21, 2007, 12 of the 20 top-rated individual programs were NFL games.

(MSNBC.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC News.)

And then there’s the Super Bowl, a national couchfest that Forbes estimates is worth $379 million, making it the most lucrative sporting event brand in the world.

But the real story of NFL riches opens seven years before the first Super Bowl, back in 1960 when then-commissioner Pete Rozelle had a chat with Wellington Mara, then the owner of the New York Giants. Rozelle believed the league’s future success was rooted in revenue sharing — the idea that NFL broadcast profits should be distributed among all teams instead of being horded by a few winning franchises that got all the network attention.

“The Giants were the dominant team in football broadcasting then, and Pete Rozelle had to get them to make an enormous sacrifice,” said Marc Ganis, who runs SportsCorp., a Chicago-based sports consulting firm. “To Wellington Mara’s eternal credit, he did exactly that.

Rick Stewart / Getty Images file Pete Rozelle's vision to insist on profit sharing helped create parity — and profits.

“Imagine if in the 1960s the commissioner of baseball had the same vision and had approached the New York Yankees, asking for the same cooperation,” Ganis said. “Imagine how different baseball would be today.”

Revenue sharing remains a backbone of NFL finances with about 75 percent of the broadcast money going to the 32 clubs. Under that system — and, later, with the help of a strict salary cap — teams and their fans could realistically dream of winning any game or reaching the Super Bowl in any season. Rozelle’s long-range hope of real parity was solidified by changes in scheduling and in the college draft order — adjustments that gave slumping teams a chance at quick redemption.

Contrast those moves to Major League Baseball, where small-market Pittsburgh hasn’t enjoyed a winning season since 1992. Each spring, before the first pitch, Pirates fans know their club has no crack at success given baseball’s economics. Like other small-city teams, Pittsburgh can’t spend enough to attract top talent.

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In the NFL, Rozelle’s socialistic plan was critical. But television made it matter. At first, the link between the small screen and the big game was merely happy timing, the sharing of a mutual growth spurt.

“They were siblings that benefited each other,” Ganis said. “The NFL understood this before any (sports) entity out there.”

By 1970, however, the NFL was fluffing its image, making an overt grab for more face time. Rozelle offered up “Monday Night Football.” With colorful booth personalities like Howard Cosell and Don Meredith, the ABC broadcasts became bigger than the games.

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