Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. Hi Monica. Hi. Hi Aaron Weekley. Hi. We have a really fun and special episode. We love and you've probably heard us talk many times about Acquired, one of our favorite podcasts. They do these incredible deep dives into different companies, the history of the companies, their finances, everything. And the Super Bowl is upon us.
That's right. And so I thought it was your idea. I was about to say you had a great idea.
Well, I had the idea to bring them in to do this.
You did. And then they had the idea, what about the NFL? Which, what timing. So we're going to learn the history and the finances of the NFL.
And it's... would you... I need you to give me a testimonial. It's so much more interesting than probably anyone would expect, right?
It's so interesting. I don't care about NFL. When they suggested it, I thought that's a good idea for timing, but I don't... I'm not that... I wanted the roast, sure. But you know what, it was so fantastic and I was talking about it all night at your party.
Acquired is hosted by Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal. Please, if you like this, check out Acquired. There is certainly a business that will interest you. Costco. Everyone should listen to the Costco episode and be reminded what a beautifully run business, very ethical, lots of integrity, and it's such a good company. And now I'm obsessed with it. I've been in the Costco religion for years now. Shot two movies in Costco. Yeah, please enjoy Ben and David on the NFL.
Okay, gentlemen, we are so tickled that you came.
Yes, thank you for having us. This is kind of a freebie for us because normally I would have had to do a ton of research and that is now falling on both of your shoulders.
So Ben and David, you guys are the hosts of Acquired. Does it get back to you how much we talk about Acquired?
Good, good, good, good. You never know if we're in a vacuum or not. I know even my Hermès hiccup seemed to have made its way back because you liked it so much and you wanted to buy one of the old bags.
Yeah, she got... I don't think there's anything wrong with... like, thank you. It is a truly unique thing in the world and they make it by hand and it's special.
Yeah. Wait, why'd you get in trouble?
Ah, too rich. Yeah, I get it. When I was poor, I hated people like that.
I don't have one. That's the whole point is I don't even have one. I just want one. There's something interesting about what we find offensive or gratuitous and what we don't. Because like a piece of art, right? No one's mad at Picasso's worth $150 million. So like that's kind of rad. But for some reason this is very triggering for people. You're mad at the person who owns it.
What I think the counterintuitive thing that I didn't realize till we did the episode on them is like there is the spectrum between a functional object and art and Hermès is somewhere along that spectrum where stuff you buy from Amazon is about the product. Yeah, you're buying history and brand when you're buying Hermès as much as you are the product.
Yes. Well, I'll tell you, I think it was your Hermès episode that got me interested because our friend Eric, who has zero interest, he was a lawyer who quit and now he just trades stocks, and he called me up and he's like, I got to get some stuff.
This is how it happened. This was so funny. We were at a dinner and we both had these like Goyard card case holders or whatever, me and this other person, and one was a dupe. And so he was looking at both of them and he goes, you know, the saddle stitch is the most impressive stitch. I was like, excuse me, how do you know that? And it was because he had just listened to your episode and he got all of us like totally in.
Yeah, all he knows about is the stock market. He vaguely knows law and he knows peptides and somehow Hermès.
Natalie Portman is a soccer team owner, I think.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You've heard of her. So at any rate, it's really, really great to have you guys. A little bit of background on both of you because this was a question of mine when I started listening. I was like, why is it these guys have such a deep knowledge on all these things? And then as you cover different companies, I would say Meta, that Meta episode which was phenomenal, I was like, they had to be programmers or something for them to understand the tech as well as you guys both did. I'm sure one of you was better than the other. Ben, yeah, you have a computer science degree, that makes a little more sense. But I'm just like kind of trying as I listen as a fan of the show to try to piece together how it is you guys ended up with this podcast. So let's just start with it. It really was just an endeavor for fun, right? You both have your own careers, you both have different disciplines. So Ben, kick us off with kind of how you came to the podcast.
David and I met at a Passover seder and we sort of instantly hit it off.
You know those friends where you keep thinking we should do drinks more often and you try and then it's like every two or three months you're like, why don't we see each other more often? Well, at one of these scheduled drinks that actually happened, I brought up the idea. I gave David two pitches. One was Acquired and the other was a podcast that was a much worse idea.
I would love to know the worse idea.
It was companies that successfully innovated more than once.
Been very... I was going to say I can't imagine you get a ton of episodes. You might run out. Yeah. Okay, so but you went to Ohio State.
Congratulations. Didn't you guys just win?
Thank you. They did. National champions.
Well, I went to UGA, so I also have a national championship. Congratulations. Background. Just saying. Just throwing that out there. You and I did a lot. We've done so much.
Yes, yes. I see you. Another fisherman now.
Okay, why did you end up at Ohio State?
Grew up in the Cleveland-Akron area. I applied to nine colleges, but my entire family went to Ohio State. And we were touring and we were opening different gates, walking around the Horseshoe, and one was open. And so my dad and I walked all the way up to the top of the South Stands. We're looking out over all of campus and I'm looking out over the field and realizing I could go to a lot of games if I come here, you know, the family history and all that. But I think there's a specialness to being in a place like that and looking around at what your future could be.
Yeah. I'm going to keep this really brief because Monica will kill me, but just off the top of your head, what's the greatest amusement park in the history of the world?
Yeah, of course. That's an easy question. You got that right. Halfway between Cleveland and Detroit.
Yeah. Cedar... Every time we have any guests on within the tri-state area, we'll do 20 minutes on Cedar Point and she cannot stand it.
I hate Cedar Point now. I'll never go.
We should have done it on Cedar Point. Yeah. Top Thrill Dragster, Magnum XL-200s, the Gemini, the Demon Drop, the Corkscrew.
Yeah. They were just acquired by Six Flags. You really could do an episode on them.
We actually should. Yeah. You just turned me on to Defunctland, yeah, this YouTube channel.
It's like, well, Ben, you can tell it better than me, but it's like Acquired episodes of like old defunct amusement parks.
Oh, oh, that's fun. This could be the first thing that got you interested in Cedar Point if they actually did an Acquired on them.
Too successful to do it on. They need to... like, have you ever heard of Action Park? They just made a documentary about it in New Jersey.
Yes. This was like the YouTube channel that popularized people looking back and being like, that was completely insane that Action Park existed. And then kind of took it from there and made... I forget the stat, but I just read it as well and it was, I want to say it's in the order of like six trips to the emergency room a day that it was open. That like a badge of honor. And I think Adventureland, that movie is based on it.
Yeah, I think the writer of that film or director worked there.
The nuts one. And people would go upside down and they would come out with lacerations and yeah.
Okay, so you graduate with a computer science degree and then you end up moving to Silicon Valley. Is it Seattle?
I was going for a job at Microsoft or Google and I had an offer from Microsoft. I made the mistake of saying I'm waiting to hear back from Google. And they said, when are they going to tell you? And I said the date. And they said, well, we are not going to extend your deadline. You can tell us before you hear back from Google or that's it.
Oh God. Your first lesson in negotiating.
Yeah, that's a rookie mistake. So I have no idea if I would have gotten a job at Google or not, but I wanted to go to the West Coast. I wanted to be in tech. I grew up in Ohio and that was my ticket in.
In retrospect, do you wish you had worked at Google or no?
It worked out great. I live in Seattle. I've been there, what, 12, 13 years now. It's been awesome. I met David there.
You wouldn't have Acquired.
No Microsoft. Okay, now David, you go on kind of a fancier route, if we could say. You... I don't have any national championships.
Undergrad at Princeton and then Stanford graduate school. You have an MBA. And what's your undergrad degree in?
Oh boy. French literature.
Oh, you romantic son of a... The long hair and the angular features. Yeah, you want to mix, you know, you're a babe, right? You're aware of that, right? You're a babe. You must know this, right?
Yeah, what a stud. Ben, you're hot too. I don't want to leave you out.
I grew my hair long during COVID. It didn't play as well as...
Yeah, that's an enviable head of hair. So, okay, how do you end up...
I always wanted to work in venture capital.
Not the easiest thing to do with a French literature degree, right?
Just sort of randomly I learned about the industry, Princeton actually, and was like, I would do anything to do this. Sounds like the coolest thing in the world. And I got an opportunity a couple years later to join the biggest venture firm in Seattle. I didn't know anybody in Seattle. Headhunter called me and I was like, hell yeah, I will move to Seattle. I will do that.
Am I not wrong in that headquarters of venture capital is generally those in Silicon Valley?
Oh yeah, yeah, definitely. Definitely.
Have you read Nate Silver's new book by chance?
It's about gambling and it's about venture capitalists and it's about risk-taking. Free... what's... Thomas Friedman? No, is that... no. Sam... Sam Altman. Friedman? No, Sam Altman. Sam Friedman. Sam Altman, which is also in the book, is OpenAI. Sam B something. Friedman. The one that... Altman. Friedman. God, this is where they're going. But I kind of want to... we're going to keep that in because of you coming through. He just blew Princeton, Stanford, UCLA, and Georgia out of the water. Ohio State, new.
Okay, so you end up there and you are employed in that capacity that led to the Passover seder where Ben and I intersected.
And then we were trying to recruit Ben to join us at Madrona, at the firm. And then we ended up working together. And so that's how this beautiful friendship began.
This is great. How many years ago was that?
That we started Acquired. 11 that we met. So David and I were just in Taiwan doing this crazy interview with Dr. Morris Chang, who started TSMC, one of the very few trillion-dollar companies in the world not on the west coast of the United States. The guy, 93 years old. I mean, he was around at the beginning of Moore's Law. He's a central figure in semiconductors. And we realized that we were doing that interview exactly 10 years to the day from the dinner, from the drinks where we decided to do Acquired.
That's awesome. Isn't it crazy where these podcasts can take you?
We were in the hotel in Taiwan. You texted me in the morning. We're like getting ready to go over to his office to interview. And you're like, this is the 10-year anniversary. Like, what a way to spend our 10-year anniversary together, halfway around the world.
Yeah, yeah. We're interviewing you on our seven-year anniversary. And I feel equally... Is it really? Is it?
No, but it'll come out probably. No, the 14th is our actual anniversary of the first episode out. Our first recording, I don't know.
Okay, what... I should know this. What gave you guys the idea to do this crazy thing? Oh, wait, I think I know this. If Wikipedia is accurate, you wanted the opportunity for people to experience what an AA meeting is without necessarily having to become an alcoholic.
Pretty much, yeah. Could we do in public what happens in an AA meeting? But I think there's a lot of explanations. They're all kind of true and there's not one. But probably more accurately is Serial the podcast, because Monica and I were both consuming it. And at the time, Monica was babysitting. And we would fight for hours in the kitchen about whether Adnan was guilty or not.
I'm like, you're not a dude. You don't understand. Yeah, dudes do weird... I know, kids like... Yeah, that's not... It's not shocking.
You know, we would fight nonstop. So we had a hobby of arguing with one another, which turned into arguing about just everything.
Yeah, we thought that's good. That's a good engine for a show.
Yeah. Oh, good grist for the mill. That's... they're going to know a lot of the... yeah, it's like, yeah, sure. Oh, I love that. Good grist for the mill. Serial like paved the way for this whole industry. Okay, so you guys start doing it and it's just for fun, right? You don't have any aspirations.
I can't imagine, nor did we, that it would be a business.
And at this point, it's also a nice little business that you guys have, I'm imagining.
Yeah, it's our whole thing now.
Yeah. Oh, you're completely retired from all that.
Yeah, we are full-time podcasters.
We do some investing, like as part of Acquired, kind of on the... but all our previous careers we have sunset. And now this is...
What year did you guys make that decision? And did you guys get together and be like, I think I'm ready to...
Did actually, yeah. David did it three, four years ago.
Wow. Oh my goodness. And Ben, you?
Last year. Okay. How does it feel?
Right. That's a good answer.
We're entrepreneurs who took the least risk out of any founders I've ever worked with. By the time I... well, we're doing a different thing. Yeah. But by the time I went full-time on it, it was an extremely good business, very established in the world. It's not like, you know, I put down my life, a passion, built...
Yes. And I would say you're a little bit inoculated, and I'm not qualified to say this, but I do think you're a little bit inoculated from both a plateau and a decline because the folks that are already drawn to it, it's for me, it's like This American Life. Like, I'm never going to not be interested. It's not a pop culture phenomenon. You didn't have a guest on who talked about some sexual escapade with someone. And that, you know, it's... I think you have such a solid foundation of a listenership that will only grow as people like us talk nonstop about it. Thank you for doing it.
In any given month, a third of all consumption of Acquired is episodes older than six months. Like from 10 years ago to six months ago.
I believe that for sure because you get brought in for a certain topic you're interested in and you go, oh, fuck, I got to listen to every single one of these. You start shopping, as I did.
Okay, so because the Super Bowl is upon us, it was Monica's brilliant idea that what if we could do kind of a mini Acquired episode about the NFL.
Oh no, we're not going to take credit for that. It was my idea to bring them in to do an episode for us. Okay. And then they brilliantly came up with the...
To be honest, for you, yeah, it really did. It always was a little suspicious. We workshopped like, what, six or seven different ideas throughout the world. Taylor Swift's car collection, this candle company, I can't get the handle.
Love anyway. Wait, is Taylor Swift a car collector?
No, no, no, no. But you know, they have a great episode on Taylor Swift.
I know that. That's why I had the throwing car collector because they already did Taylor Swift and it didn't make any sense.
Revealed there's something we didn't find.
I bet she has a collection of SUVs she gets driven in, is my guess.
That's probably right. She should.
So the NFL, I think what a great time to learn all about the NFL. So it'll be very fun for us and we're very appreciative to let you walk us through the history of it and the economics of it.
I was wondering if you were actually going to do this or not. I kind of had this feeling we're going to arrive at the studio and we're going to kind of like, it's not actually going to get handed over to us to do, like prepare the script as if it's like, okay, we're ready for an Acquired episode. But I was very ready to like just throw this away and be like, oh, we're just doing...
I mean, we will be interjecting because we can't help ourselves, like a live studio audience for an Acquired episode.
Yeah, I looked at the transcript the first time we did the NFL episode four years ago. It's 40,000 words. And then I made a version to send... actually David started the version to send to you, which I think is like three or four pages. It's not bad. But what is obvious to me is each bullet point is like, it's clear, like the Browns win for a decade, ruining the thing. Well, that you're not going to say that sentence. We're not going to hear more about that. Like, this is a very concise, bullet-pointed outline. So yes.
Well, our recording day typically is an eight to ten hour day.
It is. And it's just straight through because we never can remember. People say, like, why don't you split it over multiple days? But you probably know this, you lose the thread in your head. Voices sound different. So that eight to ten hour day turns into a three to four hour episode when we cut because we sort of produce for each other too. I'll be at home in Seattle, David's at home in San Francisco, and we're both saying like, eh, do that again but shorter, do that again but punch up this part, that part's actually not very interesting.
You're co-piloting one another. That's nice. You guys probably have a little ego that if you're able to take that from...
We have large trust with one another. We've had good hard conversations that have sort of led us...
Yeah. Okay, so the NFL. NFL, here we go.
Football is by far America's favorite sport. The Super Bowl is watched by over 100 million viewers every year in approximately two-thirds of America's households.
My favorite Super Bowl stat is that the weekend with the fewest weddings per year happens on the Super Bowl weekend. You know Seth Green? He's a geek, admittedly. He loves the Super Bowl because he goes to Six Flags because nobody's there. He's like, he basically like rents out the place.
Sunday afternoons when in Seattle there's a Seahawks game on is actually a great time to go to Costco.
Another fantastic episode of yours that really turned me on to Costco. That's my favorite company.
New, my favorite company too.
Yeah, I've shot two movies inside of Costco.
And I loved it. One was just nights for six weeks. I had a bicycle I rode around. I had a little thing in my... employee of the month. I had a little notebook in the back of my pocket and I would find items I wanted when I got home. And I had just accumulated this list of wants for six weeks.
Awesome. Such an admirable company.
My favorite thing in your deck was of the hundred most viewed broadcasts of the entire year, 72 of them were NFL football games.
And in previous years it's been higher. It's been closer to like 80, 82 to 85. Last year because of the election there was things that people watched en masse. But basically America watches NFL games, college football games, the Thanksgiving parade, and presidential debates. And other than that, nothing cracks.
Kind of the punchline of this episode is the NFL props up the media industry at this point. Like, accepting the streamers, which that's a whole another conversation, like the economics of that. But like linear television would be dead as a doornail at this point. And like probably all the other conglomerated media companies, again, except for the streaming part of it, like there's nothing else that people watch on TV anymore.
Yeah, and it has the most coveted audience, which is they're watching it live and they're going to sit through the commercials.
Yeah. So award shows are not making the...
The award shows do okay. That is one of the, you know, 20 that are not.
Got it. Interesting. Okay, also interesting, like just ESPN, right? And Fox Sports, like looking that ESPN was responsible for, I don't know what, some enormous percentage overall of Disney as a corporation. You go like, oh, sports is historically every year it's a little bit worse. It's getting eroded.
Yeah, but there were moments, right, where that was just the crown jewel in this thing with all the IP. And sports really in America means like the NFL. Like it's not baseball anymore.
Yeah, basketball's basketball.
Complicated thing, but yeah, it's basically just the NFL. The fact that the NFL is the thing that America watches is extremely intentional and has been finely tuned every year for 100 years, really. World War II was, I think, the NFL more than anybody else. NFL collectively, the teams and the players are different, but the NFL as a collective embraced this is an entertainment product and we need to put the best entertainment product on the field, but really on the television screens of America. And that is what we're optimizing. It is the most incredibly produced content you see. I mean, the 17-camera production, the whole director, producer, I mean, it's... you kind of forget the graphics, storylines.
Yes, that it's a show while you're watching it. I don't think of it like that. My 10-year-old was watching the Lions game with me a few weeks ago and she goes, how did they know that was going to be the score? And I go, what do you mean? She about the graphic. There's this like incredible graphic package that happens instantaneously and she naturally is assuming someone would have to design that a day or two ago. And I go, no, no, no. Isn't that incredible that they have these real-time graphic packages that they just emerge like instantaneously? We take all this for granted.
The NFL invented that. Like that didn't exist before Pete Rozelle. And then the NFL kind of collectively realized that like, oh, television is this incredibly powerful thing. There's basically two chapters to the rise of the NFL. There's riding the television wave and then there's riding the fantasy betting wave. One sort of tapers off right as the other one picks up. So it's this classic like stacking S-curves in business parlance.
Interesting. So when is it invented and when does the NFL form?
Yeah, let's get back to it. Go to Princeton.
Princeton was going to be relevant here. So American football was invented, quote unquote, I think it was 1868, I want to say, between Rutgers and Princeton is canonically the first.
69 was close. But football for decades, you know, really until World War II was a college thing. And it was like, it got very popular around the turn of the 20th century, but it was like an elite Ivy League. This was where the future, you know, government and military leaders of America sort of proved their mettle was on the gridiron of college football. It was amateur. It was sacred.
Yeah, to the extent professional football existed at all, it was like, it was like a dirty thing and shameful that people would be paid to do it. It was profaning this like sacred American elite rite of passage for young men.
And in fact, so this, the crazy, the formation of the NCAA happened because the game was super violent. Like there was no padding. There weren't any of the rules. Many, many deaths. Like lots of college men died playing this game from head injury before leather helmets. And there was a thing called the wedge formation where it, very rugby-like, where you would just... there's no forward pass.
Oh, yeah. That's so... this was basically rugby.
Oh, interesting. And people try to just like line up behind one person and just all pile on. And it was like the extreme... nobody's wearing helmets.
It was the tush push without helmets.
Yeah, they would just make one human the vanguard of the spear. And I can't remember when 11 players was standardized, but for a long time it was like, you know, student body, like it was like student body right. Everybody who wanted to show up and played. There were no rules.
So it was, it was so President Teddy Roosevelt, this was in 1911, I think.
His son was at Harvard, got seriously injured playing football. And so he called all the Ivy League presidents together and was like, y'all need to fix this. We can't have all these serious injuries and deaths among our country's best and brightest here. And that was in response, the university presidents, the Ivy League presidents instituted the NCAA. That was the beginning of the NCAA.
So it was kind of organized around safety initially.
Yeah, yeah, by the President of the United States.
Yeah, that kind of like made the game safer. I think they started introducing some padding. That's when they introduced the forward pass.
Neutral zone formation gets banned.
You're right, the forward pass. It starts to resemble football like we know it today. Yeah. And was it hard to get this done? Because I'm thinking about now, like people are talking now about trying to put more restrictions on some of these things because of CTE. Obviously that had to come up.
You couldn't wait. I'm proud you waited that long to say CTE.
That's a huge part of it.
It's huge. I am conflicted watching football because it's one of the most entertaining things in the world to watch. Amazing storylines, ways to communicate with your family, reasons to get community together. And it's extremely dangerous.
It's extremely dangerous. And the NFL knew it for a long time, right?
Like it's just weird to hear that they all came together and they're like, yes, let's do this. And they were able to do it. And now that feels impossible.
But it was in the wake of many, many deaths.
There are many, many deaths. It was a different time too.
It was, but like instant deaths, not like 30 years later.
I would even argue they had, if we had watched two dozen NFL players drop dead, remember with Damar Hamlin a couple years ago when he laid there with... yeah, very scary. That was a really profound moment, I think.
Yeah, you could also make a case that they were even less safety-oriented because, you know, a bunch of people died already. And keep in mind, there's no money on the line at this point in history, right?
That's true. That's the big difference. It's not even, we're not even talking Ohio State, Michigan here. This is like an institution of the elite. It's almost like cosplaying European, like the Ivy Leagues trying to be as cool as the English colleges that they were emulating in the late 1800s. America still had this like little brother syndrome to England.
It's a shame Ben's taken. I talk about little brother syndrome.
Little brother energy. I'm a little brother and you can be a little brother and not have little brother energy. It's very specific. But yes, this is what it sounds like America was doing.
Yes. Okay, so that's the origin of football. The NFL started in... all right, Ben, Ben, in fact, here.
Yep. Canton, Hupmobile showroom.
The NFL back then was, well, first of all, it was called the American Professional Football Conference.
Wow, has a nice ring to it. The American Professional Football Conference.
I think you could probably say thinly veiled marketing attempt for mostly automobile dealerships.
And it was these individual local teams in small markets that were, until the APFC...
I messed that up. Than NFL. It was not like an organized league. It was like people would start their own team.
Exactly. And then call around and say like, anybody else want to play some games against us and maybe some people come watch.
Was very loosely organized.
Local car dealership will sponsor the whole thing.
Exactly. In fact, the Chicago Bears were the Decatur Staleys.
Yes, because it was in Decatur, Illinois. The Staley... what company? Staley?
No, but it has a ring to it. They should have done that.
Cornstarch. This is why you have a producer. This is, yeah, he real-time's nice.
We're like flashing forward a little bit to the Decatur Staley. But this idea that you couldn't really in good conscience have a proper professional football team. It had to be, oh, we all work at the same company.
Like a company softball team.
Exactly. That's exactly it. It was a company softball team. So there's a Canton team, there's the Columbus Panhandles, there's the Akron Pros. I mean, this is the original. This grew in... stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.
So there's 14 teams. Teams sort of came and went. If you... there's some great infographics on this. You kind of look and the modern teams have sort of been there for a long time. The early ones are a complete mess of like this team was in one year but not that year. And then the next team, you know, it's constantly cycling through. And so there's a few of these original APFC teams that survived. The Bears, like we've been talking about, the Cardinals, and the Packers were sort of the original surviving...
The Packers, the only like legacy of this era. Like why is there an NFL team in Green Bay? So was Packers, was that a nod to meatpacking? Why was it the Packers? Do we know? Can we get a real-time fact check?
The Indian Packing Company.
Okay, I assume it was probably like the Staley, like, you know, whatever the company was that was sponsoring this.
And the other reason they needed a sponsor was because it didn't make any money. And so everyone was doing it sort of for the love of the game because they were, you know, otherwise you just are... I think they're paying players already, but at the very least...
Well, they're employees of the company, right? There's like operational stuff to do to market the team and to get people to come to the game.
And so every single team is loss-making.
And do we have any sense of what the attendance was of these? Are they playing in like high school stadiums? Are they playing in college venues?
I think in this time it was like sub 10,000, maybe sub 5,000.
Right. So this is state of play till World War II. Nobody has ambitions. Like there's no vision of the NFL as we know it today. So 38 years of that basically.
So 1920 was when the... 25 years.
Then World War II happens and that leads to a couple things. One, the whole west coast of America, you know, here, Southern California, all this probably like happens. Television. Small market teams can't really survive because there's so many people that are going to fight in the war that you sort of have, I think this is when the Staleys moved to Chicago. The Cleveland Rams would eventually move to LA. In World War II, the Steelers and the Eagles actually combined to form the Steagles because they could not field a full roster.
They eventually decoupled and went back to their original teams. Theos, where all these GIs come back and they need, you know, they want an entertainment product, you know, all the building of a modern American...
Importantly though, the GIs are not, you know, Ivy League educated people. They have no affiliation. They have no reverence for this sacred institution of the elite, you know, of the past, profaning the college game. That means nothing to them.
So like I'll add, the end of World War II is the birth of the Hell's Angels. You also have a lot of young men who are now bored out of their fucking mind.
Yeah, totally. Yeah, totally. Even before everything the NFL has done to make it an entertainment product, just go see a high school football game. Like it's entertaining, a compelling thing to watch.
So after the war, an upstart rival league to the NFL gets started and that's the AAFC.
The AFC, right. All-American Football Conference.
AAFC. And the centerpiece of that is Paul Brown. So this guy, Paul Brown, folks may not know that name. The legacy of the Browns, the founder of the Cleveland Browns.
I didn't. And I've always wondered why a team would be named the Browns. So finally, that's... it's a great color.
Yeah, a great color, but also it does have poop connotations.
Yeah, it does, it does. But now we know it's a human name.
Yeah, it's not the first thing I would probably pick. Blank slate.
Steagles. To add even more confusion to this, he would go on later in his career to coach the Bengals and the Bengals stadium was named after him. So Paul Brown Stadium is in Cincinnati, not Cleveland.
Oh, wow. Okay. And what was his background? He's, I imagine, a business owner of some... I mean, he's got some money.
No, no, he's a football coach.
He's like the first modern football coach. So he coached, I think it's the Massillon Tigers high school football. He eventually goes to Ohio State and then Navy, right?
He's Ohio State's football coach and he's the first one who is deciding, let's watch game film and let's get everyone in a room and let's be analytical. A full built-out coaching staff.
That's dedicated. Oh, we need a quarterback coach. We need a defensive coordinator. We need an offensive coordinator. We need to employ these people year-round because we need to do recruiting. We need to plan in the off-season. He gave the players like written tests on the... We all know now it's like, oh, football's like a physical game, but it's also a mental game. Until then, like nobody was like acknowledging the mental game. Nobody was honing that.
Which is arguably the more difficult part of the game.
Oh, God, yeah. And he's pioneering the earliest stats. You know how you can, you talk to like football-obsessed people now and there's, you know, 30 different stat lines that they can quote you other than the score and, you know, third-down conversions or a few primitive stats. Paul Brown, they didn't really exist pre-Paul Brown. And he's the one coming up with one of the metrics that we care about to do better in each game.
Do you think he is just observing baseball and recognizing the power of them having kept all these stats?
That's the other part of the background here is like, is baseball. I mean, baseball was the national pastime. It's not like professional sports writ large weren't big. It's like, no, professional sports was baseball.
Yes. Right, right. So where we're sort of at is the NFL is resting on their laurels. They're like kind of the only big football league and all the little ones that were the barnstorming teams have kind of fallen by the wayside. And there's major market cities that are NFL teams now, but they're like classically, they're not seeking to innovate. They're like, this is good enough.
There's some interesting parallels here with wrestling.
Like wrestling, all these regional divisions they chopped up have TV rights and someone, you know, McMahon was smart enough to start trying to accumulate and...
Yeah, this is where the McMahon characters start to emerge.
And Paul Brown, he goes and fights in the war. And then when he comes back, he was well-known enough as a college coach, I think particularly from his time in Navy, that a group of entrepreneurs that said like, oh, we should make another professional football league in major markets all across the country, take advantage of television. And our marquee thing is we're going to sign Paul Brown to come coach in the league. Our product's going to be significantly better because this person is innovative. And they were so confident. There was already a Cleveland team, the Rams, Cleveland Rams, the now the LA Rams in Cleveland. They start with the new league. They have a Cleveland team for that league too. That's how confident they are that Paul Brown is like a big deal. They're like, that's great. You already have the Rams in the NFL. AAFC is going to have the Cleveland Browns. And so what happens is they build this league, but they haven't discovered all the stuff that we talked about about making the NFL a show and keeping it really competitive and trying to make sure that the best teams play the best teams and the worst teams play the worst teams. So what happens is Paul Brown just freaking dominates.
Paul Brown goes 47 and 4 over the first four seasons of the AAFC, wins all four championships, loses four games in four years.
Just saying, I want to play this team now.
Like, it doesn't matter. He's just so much better, so advanced. So they blow the Rams out of the water in Cleveland. They're like getting 10x the attendance and the money is all in the gate.
TV is not a big thing yet, right? They're starting to do it, but the Rams in Cleveland, they're like, we just got to get out of here. This is when they move to LA.
This starts to see, they get blown out of town.
Yeah, they get blown out of town. But to LA, where it's like, oh, what is LA? LA is all these GIs coming back from the war. It's the beginning of the television industry. It's, you know, the automobile, et cetera, all that glitz, glamour.
People that understand marketing also.
Yes, understand marketing. Meanwhile, the AAFC is actually a failure because it's not interesting to just watch the Browns run the table over and over. So the Browns sell out all their home games. No other games make any money. Like the Browns go on the road, sure, some people want to come see Paul Brown, but like they don't want to see their team get decimated, you know? And then the other teams aren't that good.
So the league, the Browns are like crushing it, but the league is floundering. Actually folds 1950. They had only played four seasons. The Browns, 49ers, and Colts joined the NFL.
Which that does the thing you're talking about, David. There's now two Cleveland teams. It's a big problem.
And the San Francisco 49ers are sort of established. So there's now this like real West Coast presence for the NFL. And it's funny that like it wasn't even as if there was a merger or some consideration.
Yes, that's nuts. They got very lucky. They got to basically buy a company in bankruptcy. The AAFC had no better option.
Yeah, it's funny. I keep going back to we had Kate Mara. She and her sister, Rooney Mara, they are the grandchildren of the Steelers owner and the Giants owner.
And I asked her like, you know, my assumption is they grew up incredibly wealthy. And she's like, yeah, we were obviously had a lot of money, but you have to understand my grandparents... I'm like, yeah, where'd they get the money to buy a team? And she's like, it didn't cost anything. They were both of them were bookies. They were like, yes.
Wow. So back in the day, yeah, if you were just like a wheeler-dealer bookie, you could, you know, you could own a team.
Which goes to say, and that's what is going to be one of my questions, when you're living, when the entire income of the endeavor is just the live audience tickets, I can't imagine they were terribly profitable at this stage.
Well, I think if you were the Browns and you were selling 60, 70,000 tickets...
They weren't that big yet, but yeah.
The first Browns game sold 60,000. So I don't know if every game was, but like, no, they were, the Browns were, they were crushing it.
And were they playing 12 games a year?
I don't know. There were eight teams in the league, I think. Maybe they played each other twice. So that would have been 14 games, I guess.
Okay, so I mean, you know, you got an arena, you got a staff, you got a lot of players. So some money, but not some money. I just can't imagine anyone at that point owning the team because they have any sense it'll be worth billions of dollars or that it's some cash.
That's still right. That's still the at this point in time. Okay, I think many of the entrepreneurs who started those AAFC teams did it because they wanted a professional football team. Some of them probably saw television and like, maybe this might be a way to like make some real money here.
Yeah, and I don't want to jump ahead or behind, but I feel like this would be a good time for me to learn what the actual arrangement is between the NFL and the teams. They're owned by individuals.
They join this league. What does that mean to join the league?
So until a couple years ago, the NFL was a nonprofit organization.
It then switched. It's now, but it doesn't matter. It's a thin layer on top of the teams. It's not like the commissioner is the boss of the teams.
No, he works for the owners.
So the league exists at the... exactly. The real power is the 32 team owners. The NFL is this agreement that they've created with each other that governs how the game is played.
And...
What the rules? They hire the commissioner to represent their interests, but what really matters is, I don't think it's a democracy. I was going to say what the majority of the owners want, what the most powerful owners think is good for the sport. Those early years of the NFL, my assumption then would be that they are just given a budget, that they're going to operate at net zero from these team owners. It's not like that organization itself is going to try to generate money per se. It's just a governing body that need exist. It gets distributed out to the teams. Well, how's Goodell have a $70 million a year contract? He's paid by the team owners.
The top-level NFL entity does not—its mission is not to like aggregate profits. Let's flash forward to today. Why is the NFL so freaking awesome? On average, 70% of all the revenue for each team comes centralized from the league. The bulk of that is the television deals. So the NFL uniquely, and this is what we're going to get into, centralizes and collectivizes the television. So when you watch football and you're watching it on Fox or you're watching Monday Night Football on ABC or whatever, YouTube TV, any streaming network, that's all 32 teams collectively is the NFL. Do those deals, right, and then share that money out to each team.
Yeah, it's not like they're striking their own TV rights with anybody.
And until recently, the NBA has now moved to the NFL model, like baseball, like the Yankees have their own broadcast network. All the other sports, it's all each team for themselves. And that's what the early NFL was too. And that's what the—you asked this at the perfect point in history because this 1960, the appointment of Pete Rozelle as commissioner is what changes everything. What they learned from the Browns is like, it actually freaking sucks for the product on the field when one team has more resources and gets this positive cycle and like wins everything.
I mean, it's almost a miracle this would have ever been agreed to because clearly there are people that were in huge markets that had teams that had they could have taken the lion's share of all TV revenue and they're going to have to presumably make a little less to give this bozo team some money. It's like actors negotiating together. It's like the Friends deal. Yes, we're going all together, which rarely works. And if you actually link arms and you actually hold arms, which almost never happens.
Exactly. Or at least for a long time it starts that way and then fracturing.
People start exactly. People start saying, well, the guy who does this is Pete Rozelle.
The Rams get run out of town of Cleveland by the Browns. They land here in LA. Pete Rozelle, he's a PR intern, origin intern, Compton College alumnist. Wow. Joins the Rams when they come to LA as an intern doing PR and media relations, which meant like newspaper relations at the time. And he's doing stuff like realizing newspapers aren't going to write stories about the teams because no one cares about his league. Baseball is still the dominant sport. And so he's hiring writers—well, he does it himself at first, and then he's like, I'm going to write the stories for you, going to give them to you.
Yeah, make—he can make them interesting, but also just do their work for them. Like so he like really he's trying to get it in the spotlight. He rises through the ranks here, the Rams, becomes GM of the Rams, and then ultimately at age 33 gets elected commissioner of the NFL, which also only happens because of a weird standstill where the existing commissioner died unexpectedly and there's these like factions of owners. Like this faction has their guy, this faction has their guy, they can't agree again.
And so this is like the beginning of our country.
Yes, totally, totally. Pete Rozelle is like the least disagreeable candidate. Everyone kind of looks at him, they're like, it's not really—100% the analogy is perfect. It's like the founding of America. You got all these states that have their own interests and then there's this like, you know, pressure from the outside from Great Britain and then like they got to band together and it's like, all right. And then even Washington, he was the only guy who wasn't outspoken. He said the least. I kind of trust him.
Yes, that's exactly what happened.
And he turns out to be exactly what the league needed at this point in time. A young person who saw the future, who got TV, who got entertainment, comes from LA. Yeah. He's able to make an argument to all these like old school owners of like the way that some are bookies, some are owners—like this is ragtag. We've seen what happens when one team gets too dominant. We need to put all sorts of checks and balances in place to ensure the best product on the field, which means competitive parity. And like so this, the phrase Any Given Sunday, you guys probably know this.
Heard it, but I don't know what it means.
This is the origin of Any Given Sunday. The team could win, any team could beat any other. The NFL's dream is for every team to go eight and eight.
And there's so many things they do to make this happen behind the scenes. So like again, it's amazing they got the dominant teams to go along with the strategy. It's like seems impossible. So just like last time, the NFL couldn't, without a competitive force, couldn't actually come to the conclusion that you're stuck on, Dax. There's another new upstart called the AFL, which spoiler alert becomes the AFC. It becomes a conference within the NFL when they eventually merge. Okay, they sign one collective TV deal as their way of coming on the scene with ABC, which again, they're in a very vulnerable situation where they probably only have any appeal if they're all one thing. So it's like they're probably doing it out of desperation originally and they need money to sign players.
ABC is the new upstart network. NBC and CBS, they're the legacy, like old—they came out of the radio era. ABC was a new television network and the AFL has eight teams. They secure a five-year, $8.5 million deal that is league-wide with the profits from the deal shared equally.
Okay, okay. And they do that deal with Roone Arledge at ABC. Does that name mean something?
So Roone Arledge built ABC Sports. Things like Wide World of Sports, if you guys remember that, that was him. He was Bob Iger's mentor. Bob Iger came up under Roone Arledge at ABC.
And then took over Cap Cities, the Disney merger.
So he's a visionary. No Roone Arledge, no Bob Iger. Wow, wild.
This was, this was his—so this was Roone Arledge's like, you know, big career-defining thing was signing this deal in like national football.
And NFL is already being televised on those other networks at this point?
Or on one-off local deals, right? So the owner is going to the local affiliate and saying, Detroit WKBD.
Exactly. So the Giants had like a great deal in New York. I think they're making a couple hundred thousand dollars a year in TV money. There was just theirs, the giant huge market.
Yeah, and so this is the bargaining chip that Rozelle needs to then go to the owners and say, look, if we don't do the same thing, they're going to smoke us. This is the right strategy because it will ensure that all of the teams are doing well so they can be the most competitive and the most entertaining and build—talk about real money from this like eight and a half million deal. Whatever this is, 1960, that seems like an unsellable proposition.
It's so impressive that they did it. It's just like the old adage we hear all the time, like the rising tide lifts all boats.
Like it's, it's real. It is.
But I imagine the delta between some of these franchises was like, I'm sure some teams were like 8X with the other team that they're being asked to share evenly with. The Green Bay Packers are still in the league, they're not making any money.
It's like Costco. It's making me feel Costco feelings. I want a shirt that says Costco feelings.
Exactly. We can make that happen.
It just seems interesting too that a guy that it seems like maybe was allowed to take on this position because he wasn't overtly charismatic and powerful somehow is secretly quite visionary.
And yeah, great. I think that's exactly it. He, he was—Pete Rozelle was like the king of soft power. Like you look up like soft power in the dictionary, it should have his photo there.
This is so much more interesting than I was expecting, to be honest. I thought it just would be like the money because I'm a greedy pig, but that's absolutely fascinating.
Yeah, but to your point, that is kind of the only way that these things get to exist in our world. Like nothing started as big money and most of the things that try to start in a big money way don't end up becoming successful. They don't build that grassroots, durable, passionate following and they don't follow like an organic path to building something great. Like look at the birth of your show. It's not like you launched on some big network that promoted the hell out of it. You made something that for that moment in time people really, really wanted and craved. And I think all these stories, the Costco, the Starbucks, the NFL, they always start sort of in obscurity with these passionate visionaries who are like trying to will the future into existence.
I think also, and big money is true too. I think that eight and a half million dollar deal that the AFL had done, they also, the Jets signed Joe Namath at this point in time. And like, and the Jets are the AFL. He was the first like athlete, celebrity, megastar football player. In the original episode you were like, I know him because he was on The Brady Bunch. I watched The Brady Bunch episode to prep for this show. But yeah, he like comes on and throws a football in the backyard, but he's like stylish and he's like photographed at clubs in New York City and he was killing it.
Well, because of TV, he's getting broadcast all across the country and like the country's falling in love with Joe Namath. And like so that's what's forcing the NFL.
Yes, Dax, you're told like the owners were kicking their feet all along, but they're like, well, eight and a half million dollars, it's a boatload of money and look at what the publicity that, you know, Broadway Joe is bringing to our rival league here.
Broadway Joe. Yeah, when you think all-American, that's who he is. I mean, this guy is like he was born to be on.
First celebrity athlete, that's why.
Well, football, football, football.
I think he—but still, I don't know, it might be out of my depth here, but I think it'd be like if Bob Dylan played football, would it be Joe?
I have to imagine throughout this story we're also getting some kind of transition in who's playing the game, whereas it was like people who went to elite colleges and learned this thing. I imagine it's getting more and more democratized as we're going along. And I imagine the racial makeup of these leagues is transitioning. Is that when all that happened?
Yeah, there's some dark stuff in the NFL history. They were segregated. Nobody except white people allowed for I think most of the 30s. Origin, interestingly, not in the beginning. In the beginning anybody could play. Okay. But then as you know, they got on TV, this was before TV, I think it was unfortunately, it's actually the Redskins, it was the Washington team. Okay. They had a big Southern fan base. Yeah. That kind of drove it. There was some racism at the highest levels of the Redskins and they were incentivized.
Shocked that the team named the Redskins.
It's on. And from like a monetary perspective, they were incentivized not to change because they, I think they were the southernmost NFL team and so they had this.
They had a black player, there would have been people protesting. Actually in that history, it was again the Rams and it was the LA Coliseum where the Rams played here in LA when they moved out here, desegregated, said we won't let any organization, because it's a public facility, ply their trade here, run business here if there are segregated teams that are visiting. So that's what.
Yeah, boy, it's interesting how many different forces can work on one thing. How dynamic that is. That oh, they're going to play in a publicly held facility and there is the leverage by which that could be proclaimed otherwise not. But yeah, to your point though about like, you know, blacks coming into the league, well, that's actually good for business too. You got Jim Brown and like you all.
Yeah, the makeup of the league is totally changing at this point. I mean, you name the list of famous players and it's like some of the most loved.
Yeah, well, sure, for a minute.
Well, for more than a minute.
I think mostly we know the quarterbacks and then outside of that we don't know many white players. But OJ wasn't black, he was OJ.
Did you watch the documentary? That was so good.
Okay, so AFL, how do they absorb them? Do you guys know Al Davis, owner, GM, and head coach of the Raiders for many years?
Oh, he's such a gangster.
I don't know if it still carries any weight, but like they were like the—if you were like a gangster, like, you know, F the law type attitude, like that was Al Davis.
Oh, that's interesting because I've always wondered what—because that carries to this day.
Yeah, if you want to bet on someone getting knifed in a parking lot, there's only one bet to make. It's a Raiders game. It's going to be obvious.
Totally. Well, maybe less so in Vegas now, but I do wonder where that started.
You know, so it starts with the original owner.
With the original owner. They were in the AFL and merger negotiation. It was clear that the AFL wasn't going away. They had this big TV deal. Then the NFL got their TV deals with CBS and NBC. And interestingly, the CBS deal, the NFL is granted an antitrust exemption. I think that JFK signed into law.
Because what you had is all these teams with their individual TV deals and then they get together, they collude and they say we're going to sign one TV deal. And if you're the TV networks, you're like, where's the competition?
Right. This is illegal. You can't do this to me.
