By Andy Serwer

Imagine if the Founding Fathers were dropped into a Pittsburgh tavern on a fall Sunday afternoon with a Steelers game on. What in the name of the Constitutional Congress would they think?

You'd expect some bewilderment. Why are the patrons, transfixed by curious gladiating on a screen, screaming with delight one minute and groaning miserably the next?

It's actually not a bad line of questioning for us to consider: What is it with our National Football League obsession -- especially the televised version of it? How and why did pro football become such an integral part of the American experience?

"People like that football is unscripted entertainment with tradition," says Jerry Jones, the omnipresent owner of the Dallas Cowboys. "There's the competitiveness of playing tired and hurt. It goes to the heart."

"Players on the field are like Visigoths or mythological characters," says George Veras, who produced NFL programming for CBS and other networks for 40 years. "It's like the Roman Colosseum, with the roar of the crowd, the thirst for a powerful hit. It is incredibly emblematic of what America is in a lot of different ways."

Mark Twain apparently felt the same way when he attended a brutal 1900 Yale-Princeton game. "I should think they'd break every bone they ever had!" the writer was quoted as saying while in the stands, according to the New York World newspaper. But he loved it.

The football/TV marriage

An equally American facet of the game is that it's a big business. The NFL did some $23 billion in revenue last year (about the same as Haliburton or Macy's) -- with a major portion coming from its symbiotic contractual relationships with TV networks. The NFL needs TV for the money and TV needs the NFL for relevance. In recent years, 80 to 90 of the top 100 TV shows were NFL games.

"As viewer habits change and audiences continue to fragment," says NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, "sports, and in particular the NFL, provide the television and advertising communities with one of the most enduring vehicles to draw mass audiences for live programming." In other words, the NFL sees itself in a pretty enviable position.

And why not? Watching the NFL on Sundays, (and Monday nights and Thanksgiving and now Thursdays and Saturdays, but especially Sundays), has become appointment culture in America, an increasingly rare neutral gathering point, not unlike the ideal of religious services on Sunday morning. Except that tens of millions more Americans watch part of an NFL game on a typical Sunday (in excess of 100 million, the league says), than go to church (estimates are 20% of the U.S. population, or some 60 million).

The level of our national obsession with NFL football is a fairly recent phenomenon, the product of some canny figuring by an unlikely partnership of gumptious team owners, New York media suits and NFL executives, who wove television and football together. Breaks in the action provided time for commercials and a scarcity of games made each a spectacle.

"My first experience with the NFL and TV goes back to 1958 when the Baltimore Colts were playing the New York Giants," says Jones. "It's known as the game that put football on the map. I was a teenager watching on a black-and-white TV, and I remember Alan Ameche taking a handoff and going into the end zone. Right then and there, I started thinking about being involved in pro football. There was just something magical about it."

Jones, along with New England Patriots owner Bob Kraft, have been the alpha-dog team owners in recent years weighing in heavily on the NFL's critical TV contracts, says Ken Belson in his new book, "Every Day Is Sunday: How Jerry Jones, Robert Kraft, and Roger Goodell Turned the NFL into a Cultural & Economic Juggernaut."

The AFL's impact

The origin story of the NFL and TV goes back to the creation of the rival American Football League in 1959. The AFL made a deal with ABC that paid the upstart league $10.6 million over five years, significant because it was a collective-rights deal which meant that instead of wealthy, big-market teams negotiating their own contracts, money from ABC would be divided equally. The deal would usher in a bidding war for TV rights that continues to this day.

Not to be outdone by the AFL, the commissioner of the NFL at the time, Pete Rozelle, did a two-year, $9.3 million deal with CBS, which was challenged by local TV stations that had existing contracts with NFL teams. Rozelle lobbied Congress to pass the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, which gave the NFL the right to sell pooled television rights collectively. (The de novo AFL had no existing contracts so its deal had gone unchallenged.)

The NFL shares more of its revenue than the other big American sports leagues (baseball, basketball and hockey), including not only its national TV revenue, but also sponsorships and licensing and even a big chunk of regular-season ticket sales, which has been critical to the league's success. Shared revenue allows smaller market teams to thrive. Exhibit A is the Green Bay Packers, which play in the smallest U.S. city with a professional sports franchise (population 107,000), home to Lambeau Field which seats 76% of its population.

If Jones's Colts/Giants game was a milestone, then the first Super Bowl in 1967 ushered in the modern era of pro football. At the time, it wasn't even called a Super Bowl -- that label came later -- but some 60 million Americans watched on TV (including this reporter) as Bart Starr led the Packers over the Kansas City Chiefs, 35-10. It was the only Super Bowl broadcast on two networks: CBS, which held the NFL rights, and NBC, which had secured the AFL's rights. (The two leagues merged in 1970.)

Over the following years and decades, the NFL crafted ever bigger TV contracts, expanding football to Monday night in 1970 and then the first megadeal in 1978 with ABC, CBS and NBC for four years totaling some $646 million annually.

"The NFL has been so smart about working with the television networks," says Steve Burke, former CEO of Comcast's NBCUniversal. "They've always been really good at making sure that there were five or six bidders for three or four properties."

To Burke's point, the NFL expanded into cable TV in 1987, striking a deal with ESPN. Still, while other leagues have migrated significant chunks of programming to cable, the NFL has stuck mostly to network TV, a strategy now benefiting football as more consumers cut the cable cord. According to CableCompare, by year-end, some 80 million American households (out of a total of 132 million) will be watching TV without cable, mostly on streaming services.

In 1993 the league orchestrated a turning point in television history, when it accepted a bid of $1.58 billion over four years for TV rights to the NFL's National Conference games from an untested partner, Rupert Murdoch -- then in the early days of building the Fox Network -- who beat out the parsimonious Larry Tisch of CBS (which had held it for 38 years). The move by Murdoch (who controls the parent company of The Wall Street Journal), helped elevate Fox into a major network. "The Fox deal is the greatest example of a loss leader, where one plus one is three," says Jones, who believes that though the economics of NFL deals may not be profitable per se for a network, it's necessary to attract and retain viewers and advertisers.

Some network executives aren't convinced. "I would think that on average, every NFL rights holder has lost money over the past 20 years," says a longstanding TV executive. "The NFL goes in with these seemingly crazy asks, and then everybody signs up. But you don't have a choice because the idea of losing [the NFL] is petrifying."

The NFL's current contracts are for 11 years through 2033, totaling some $110 billion including new streaming-platform deals -- for Amazon.com ("Thursday Night Football" on Prime), for the YouTube TV "Sunday Ticket" subscription package on Alphabet's Google, and Christmas Day games on Netflix. It's a massive increase in revenue for the league -- and cost for TV and now the streamers.

Eye on the world

As for the future of the NFL and media, a number of avenues are obvious, there is of course global expansion, (or exporting this form of American exceptionalism -- if that's what you call a Jets game), gaming (EA Sports' Madden NFL 26 features "a new AI-powered machine learning system for gameplay"), gambling in all its permutations, and reality shows like "Hard Knocks" (HBO) and "Quarterback" (Netflix). "The NFL is like lava," says longstanding former ESPN anchor Bob Ley. "It is inexorable, and there is no stopping it, do not get in its path."

"We're focused on developing the widest and biggest possible fan base for all our partners," says Hans Schroeder, the NFL's executive vice president of media distribution. "We had 190 million people watch some part of our regular season last season, and we're up 7% from where we were last year. Over 85% of our games are distributed by broadcast TV, but this year marks the first time that every one of our games has digital distribution too."

Can the relationship between the NFL and the media keep growing to the sky? One would think not forever. On the other hand, football runs deep into those most American of traits: tradition, competition and, yes, some bloodlust too. Those Founding Fathers would likely understand that.

Andy Serwer, a fair-weather fan of the Commanders and their previously named incarnations, is editor at large at Barron's. He can be reached at reports@wsj.com.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 03, 2026 12:00 ET (17:00 GMT)

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