The NFL is a business, first and foremost. In 1996, Financial World magazine valued the worth of the average NFL franchise at $174 million. Consumers spent $3 billion dollars on NFL team related merchandise. On average, more than 12 million viewers watch a regular telecasted game.
And it is television that feeds the most money to this ever hungry beast. Originally, each NFL team sold its broadcast right individually.
However in 1961, thanks in part to President John F. Kennedy, Congress passed the Sports Antitrust Broadcast Act, which paved the way for the NFL to market its games as a package. This first package was sold to CBS for $4.65 million.
Three years later it was up to $14.1 million. By 1974, with the addition of Monday Night Football, it was a robust $57.6 million. A 1978 poll showed that 70% of the nation’s sports fans followed football, compared to 54% pursuing baseball.
The prices escalated accordingly. By 1984, the networks were paying the NFL $434 million. In 1998, CBS paid $4 billion dollars for eight years, ESPN shelled out $600 million and ABC added an additional $550 million a year all on top of the $1 billion the FOX network had already paid out to the NFL.
Today, in 2009, the NFL earns nearly $6 billion a year in TV revenue alone.The only way these numbers can be recouped is via the ratings, and the resulting advertising revenue. But how has football become America’s #1 spectator sport?
Certainly, it offers drama, violence, and raw emotion for 12 hours every Sunday in the fall. Cinderella stories, remarkable comebacks, and unabashed tragedies in every play, game and season.
However, to develop these stories and keep those ratings soaring higher, I believe the NFL fixes (or scripts) its games to get the maximum output from its product. Super Bowls are not won, they are awarded. Some because of the stories they provide, others as rewards, but each for a reason:
Green Bay for bringing tradition back to the game; Denver and John Elway in 1997 for their long suffering seasons (perhaps at the League’s insistence); St. Louis and Tennessee in 1999 for their willingness to relocate for the League;
in 2000, the re-located Baltimore Ravens for their long time owner Art Modell, whose commitment to the NFL reaches back to the 1960s; and most recently, in perhaps one of the most blatant examples of scripting an entire season, the 2001 New England Patriots. In an immediately post 9/11 America, what more symbolic team could the NFL crown its champion than the Patriots who were the biggest underdog in Super Bowl’s 36 year history.
In 1971, former NFL star Bernie Parrish wrote, “With $139 million at stake for the owners, $84 million for the television networks, and up to $66 billion for organized crime’s bookmaking syndicates, and with what I learned as a player, no one will ever convince me that numerous NFL games aren’t fixed.”(26)
Now, thirty years later, with the dollar figures 10 times what they were then, one would have to be naïve to believe that the NFL would leave everything – its name, its money, its very existence -- up to chance.
