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.
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? 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 Hermes 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 is 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 a spectrum between a functional object and art, and Hermes 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 Hermes as much as you are the product.
Yes. Well, I'll tell you, I think it was your Hermes 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 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 Hermes.
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, 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.
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, 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.
Okay, so you graduate with a computer science degree and then you end up moving to Silicon Valley. Is it Seattle?
Okay, sorry. 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 also 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 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 capitals 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. What's his name? Thomas Friedman? No, is that... 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... 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 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.
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.
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 side, 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...
We did actually, yeah. David did it three, four years ago.
Wow. Oh my goodness. And Ben, you last year?
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 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 savings.
Accident. 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, 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 NFL.
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, we have trust. 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 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 other 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.
Exactly. Yeah. So award shows are not making it.
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.
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's 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, 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, 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's 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.
Can I real... 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 imitating 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... little brother... 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.
Ohio, 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... APFC, I messed that up... than NFL, it was not like an organized league. It was like people would start their own team, field the 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 times. Nice.
We're like flashing forward a little bit to the Decatur Staleys, 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.
Meat packaging, 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, okay, great. 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. The Steagles. 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 Hells Angels. You also have a lot of young men who are now bored out of their 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 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 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.
Yeah, yeah, very much 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, 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, in the... TV's not a thing yet. TV's 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 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...
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 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.
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, you know, YouTube TV, any streaming network, that's all the, 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 the are striking their own TV rights with anybody. And until recently, with 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, that's what the, you asked this, 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, or for 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 alumnus. Wow. Joins the Rams when they come to LA as an intern doing PR and media relations, which meant like newspaper relations at the, 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, he's like, I'm going to write the stories for you, going to give them to you, make them interesting. 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, what a blessing, factions of owners, like this faction has their guy, this faction has their guy, they can't agree again. Yeah, 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 know 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-eight. Yes, right. 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. Yes, 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. Yeah, so they go to 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. Interesting. And then took over Cap Cities, the Disney merger. Have like, so he's a visionary. No Roone Arledge, no Bob Iger. Wow, wild. This was, this was his, but so this was Roone Arledge's like, 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 to share evenly with. The Green Bay Packers are still in the league. They're not making any money, right? Exactly. 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, the king of soft power. Like you look up like soft power in the dictionary, it should have his, his photo there. This is so much more interesting than I was expecting, to be honest. I thought it just would like the money because I'm a greedy pig, but, um, 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, 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 it and craved it. And I think all these stories, the, 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, uh, they also, the Jets signed, um, 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's, 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 where 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, yeah, you know, Broadway Joe is bringing to our rival league here. Broadway Joe. Yeah, when you think all-American, that's, that's who he is. I mean, this guy is like, he was born to be on a 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 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, is transitioning. Is that when, is all that happening?
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. Uh, but then, as you know, they got on TV. This was before TV. Um, I think it was unfor... it's actually the Redskins. It was the Washington team. Okay. They had a big Southern fan base. Yeah. That kind of drove, uh, it was in the... there was some racism at the highest levels of the Redskins, and they were incentivized... shocked that the team named the... red... it's, it's on... and from like a monetary perspective, they were incentivizing not to change because they, I think they were the southernmost NFL team, and so they had this... yeah, yeah, 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, uh, we won't let any organization, because it's a public facility, uh, part, you know, 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 chair.
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. That's right. Did you watch the document? That was so good.
Okay, so, uh, AFL, how do they absorb them? Do you guys know Al Davis, owner, GM, and head coach of the Raiders for many years? No. Um, oh, he's such a gangster. I don't know if it still carries any weight, but like they were like the, like if you were like, 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. Okay, it's going to be obvious. Totally. Well, maybe less so in Vegas now, but, 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, uh, the NFL is granted an antitrust exemption, I think that JFK signed into law. Oh, why? 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. But JFK deemed it in the good of the nation to have this. This also, back to Rozelle and soft power, he cultivated the Kennedy relationship, the whole Kennedy family. Like he put a lot of effort having the NFL sort of in communities, being broadcast on TV, being a rallying force for cities, loved that. And so they, they passed an exemption that, so there's an exemption to antitrust for the NFL from 1961 in order to sign the 19, the, um, 1961 CBS TV deal.
And I'd imagine that has some collateral impact too, because, and I'm confused, I don't know which leagues do this, but I think most people just knowing you don't get to pick where you go is already an interesting thing contractually, right? If you're a player that gets drafted. Oh, the draft. Yeah, that's an interesting, that's got to in any other context there must be, right? You don't leave college with your computer degree and you don't decide what company.
You know what it is? I think it's part of the collective bargaining with the Players Association. They opt into that system by joining. It's essentially a unionized trade.
Okay, it's still interesting contractually. Interesting, the trade is, it's a good enough deal for us to get some stuff in return that, yeah, we're open to being relocated and it's not really up to us.
Back to the Paul Brown era and like, it sucks when one team wins everything. There are two things that the NFL did in response. One was the draft. So still to this day, if you have the worst record in the league, you're getting the first draft pick. That reverse order, that was, and it's because of that to keep a competition, to keep the competition going. The other thing they do that still exists this day that like very, very few people know is they gin the schedule. Used to be explicit, now implicit goal is that every, every team should be 500 at the midway point in the season. So the first half of the schedule, bad teams play bad teams and good teams play good teams.
Oh, so that's, that's, oh, so the Lions are going to have a really tough first half of the year schedule. I didn't know that part. Yeah, yeah, most audience has no idea. Yeah, I thought it was some kind of a random or even perhaps a travel schedule. No, yeah, that's not the same with college. No, exactly. That's exactly where I was going to go with this. It's fascinating watching this whole like playoff system and transfer portal and all these sort of NFL-like things that they're putting into place because this is not a goal of collegiate football at all.
Teams that out, teams your conference for you, seriously. And then historically have the big bowl game where you're put on a national stage against another good team. But if you're a fan of a good team like Ohio State, you sort of expect them to go undefeated or near undefeated every year. It's like the Browns of old. Wow. Yes, yes. You're right. And it is near impossible for an NFL team to get a perfect season. It just, yeah, it's happened once. Just Brady. Did Brady have a perfect season? Uh, the, the, um, Dan Marino had a perfect season with, he, my Tor. So if you shouldn't even bring him up because I will not be able to get off of him. You got him on the show? I have. Yeah, yeah. When you're rooting for Tom Brady, you don't give a [__] how far you're down. It doesn't mean anything. You go to that fourth quarter like down three touchdowns and you're not even worried. Patriots almost did it but lost the Super Bowl. There you go. It is Tom can't have a perfect season. Yeah, God, it's heartbreaking. That's so poetic that they went undefeated in the regular season, they lost in the Super Bowl. Yes, yes. See, the NFL storylines, they're so good. Wrestling and not scripting. Well, they kind of are scripting it in a way with the NFL. And like you're saying, they're planning, they're planning it and that outcome. Yeah, they are levers in place and they're pulling all the ones they can. And then after the season, I don't know if it's every year, every other year, there's something called a competition committee that is a set of owners that gets together to try and say, okay, what loopholes did people find? How can we make it even more competitive and tweak, tweak, tweak every year? Yeah, wow. Like Formula One that way, just endless. Just a business. I mean, that's like, we forget because we just think of it as sport, but it's a real business. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.
I'm really mad. I just learned this term in Bill Gates's new book, which is, it's a Japanese manufacturing principle. It's what Toyota probably implies, which is like, every year we must improve our manufacturing process and we must improve. Yes. Oh God, you just earned your paycheck. Yes, good job. Wait, what's it called? Kaizen. Kaizen. Kaizen. Kaizen. And the other half of that is reduce, standardize, do a little more. Okay, you guys are doing just fine. You got to know your business. I think, I think you're not in an optimization business. We're trying to ride that line between jazz and classical. You know, you don't know how much you're supposed to improv and be loose and how much you're supposed to be classical. Yeah, tell us about it. I know you guys are very classical. You guys are like, you're an orchestra.
We've gotten more so over time. I think when we started, because we had nothing more jazz.
And what have you gained and what have you lost from that trans or from that evolution? We write more often, but we have less fun. Yeah, well, we have fun in different ways. We get to go to Taiwan. We get crazy life experiences, an arena show in the Chase Center, like, you know, yeah, but well, it's that thing we talk about it all the time. Once you have something to lose, yeah, things get harder. They get scarier. They get more stressful. There's a little bit less fun. There's more rigidity. It's, it's tricky. It's tricky.
Honestly, this is a breath of fresh air. Like if this were an Acquired episode, yeah, we would have a, you know, 100-page script in front of us. We'd be retaking everything for fear of getting anything wrong.
Well, the person I have felt most guilty interviewing, which we've now done four times, five times, is Malcolm Gladwell. Yeah, which, you know, Revisionist History is the most perfectly produced product in the marketplace. And the amount of effort that's put into it, you know, we finish an episode and we're friendly and I'm like, does that not annoy the [__] out of you? Like we just created two hours of content. It's almost minute for minute real time content. That's it. There's, there's no more work to be done. That's not like it just, you know, I had to say like, you have no idea what I, it's not like Revisionist History, but we actually put at the top of the script right before we start now, have fun because you need a reminder of just because the stakes are higher and just because all these people are going to listen, like the reason people like it is we're having fun. We're doing the thing we love.
We have the same resolution. I have the same resolution, which is like, yes, getting mired in these very complicated deals with humongous companies, I had to get to the point I was like, remember you love talking to people.
And somehow you guys have figured out how to get the most interesting people in the world to swing by your house and talk [__]. Stop thinking about anything else. I didn't realize this was your house, by the way. I kind of walked up and I was like, I'm pretty sure we're just at Dax's house. Indeed. You are. By the way, you asked us about our careers earlier. Do you guys consider this your career now?
Yeah, 100%. Yeah, especially we do 152 episodes a year now. Wow. We have three episodes a week and we had five episodes a week up until September. So it's, it's more than a full-time.
Yeah, even when I look at C once in a while, like in general, don't want to act, but if again, like if Tarantino for his 10th movie calls me, I'm going to figure it out. But it does, how do we do it at this point? Uh, very hard. It would be very hard. I don't know anything else that could speak to the power of podcasting and the rise over the last 10 years of like, clearly you've made the decision that this is a better trade for you to do this than I'll admit this out loud. I was, I remember Joe Rogan stating that years ago, like he's done with acting and hosting and he wants to, and, and I was like, I don't buy it. I don't think you're having the opportunities you want. I think this is [__]. And I was completely wrong. He definitely was just in the position we are now in much earlier. And yeah, it's much more fun to me than acting or anything else.
So now the NFL absorbs the AFL, which is, uh, fast forwarding for time, but due to basically Al Davis being a gangster, he's like a mafia boss. He directs all the AFL teams to go sign all the NFL teams' quarterbacks as like a, just like as a bargaining chip, like just go pay, uh, because there's no, there was no free agency in either league, but not between the leagues. They could fight as much as they want. They had a gentleman's agreement that they wouldn't poach and they had just signed a new big TV deal. So AFL got NBC to pay them 37.5 million over five years and they're like, guess what we're going to do with the cash? And go steal all the quarterbacks.
This is the Ted Turner McMahon war section of the story now.
Yep. And basically as soon as he does that, it's all out, all over. And then they merge. The NFL is like, okay, well, fine, fine. We'll let you in the league. Let's, we can't outperform twice and still remain the NFL. Exactly. Yes. So here's the terms of the merger, which is so fascinating. The NFL absorbs all the AFL teams. They're also going to add additional franchises. So they're trying to cement monopoly. They're basically saying, how do we make sure we cover all the biggest markets?
Cut off a future uprising. Yeah, yeah. Make sure this doesn't happen again.
We're going to pull the TV deals. So there's now one national TV deal. We're going to do a common draft between both of us. I think there was contracts in place, maybe TV contracts through 1970. So even though they're doing this in '66, there's like a phased plan over the next year to sort of truly merge as one. Pete Rozelle maintains the commissionership. The AFL, get this, at first the AFL was supposed to pay a ton of money, 50 million per team, but that was where negotiations started before Al Davis quarterback totally changed the leverage position. It was, yeah, you can all join our league, just pay us 50 million per team as a franchise fee and you can, you know, join the NFL. The actual thing where they end up doing the deal is 1 million spread over 20 years.
Not per team. Total. Total. Oh, a 900 grand a year for however many teams.
And what actually ends up happening is I think all of it or at least half of it goes to the New York Giants because they're the most harmed from Joe Namath and the Jets joining in the same city. Okay. Oh, interesting. So they didn't do that evenly. They didn't dist... basically Al Davis is a gangster. Wow. So this is where anyone with less than a 50,000 foot, uh, seat stadium needs to upgrade. They're like, this is the big times now. We're signing these huge TV deals. Once this is in place after the merger, two things happen. One is the Super Bowl, which we can get to in a sec. Uh, the other one that arguably the more important one is Monday Night Football. That starts in '68, right around there. One of the other just incredible inventions to the NFL was they invent more football.
Right, right. Prior to that, are they only playing on Friday and Sunday?
Only on Sundays, which is a bad spot. When they originally conceived of this, it was no one watches TV on Sundays, so can we get airtime cheap?
Real estate. Yeah. Interesting. Oh, wow. So Monday Night Football is the first time there's only one game happening at a time. So there's one nationally televised game. Before it was like, oh, there would be like a game of the week that maybe more markets would see than others, but like no game was, because they're all happening at the same time, was ever going to cross and you would likely see your team, OB, your team. Yeah. And if your team was having a bad year, then like, you know, Monday Night Football.
They do the deal with Roone Arledge and ABC to create Monday Night Football, and that basically invents the modern football telecast. $8.5 million per year that ABC pays the league for one game. So $500,000 per game, which today seems like tiny, but it's very large relative to the other TV contracts. They're basically saying, because it's one game, because it's prime time, this is a really expensive slot. Oh, and by the way, when you pay us a lot of money for the rights to broadcast this, we're going to make it a spectacle. We're going to make this so interesting to watch. Football before this on TV had been referred to as football in a cathedral because it was one camera at the 50-yard line, up top of the 50-yard line, just panning back and forth, no field mics. Wow. And commentators that would just chime in every once in a while. Oh, that one hurts. Yes. Experts. And so this is the list of things that are produced at Monday Night Football. They start with nine and then eventually go all the way up to 17 cameras, including handheld sideline cameras.
I'm going to interject a couple movie stuff. So a couple of technical innovations that helped it greatly is the Superfly cam, which is invented by John Brown, the DP of Without a Paddle's father, who had also invented the Steadicam. So the Steadicam allows them to run along the side and keep your vision nice and stable. And then the Superfly cam is a four-point system that'll allow it to go anywhere in the... Yeah, yeah. So those are huge tech innovations that help.
Yeah. The three-person booth. So you've got three commentators instead of two. The booth guys have personality. This is when Howard Cosell becomes a personality, and you're not just watching a game where they're saying things about the game. You kind of, Howard Cosell becomes a character in the arc in a lot of ways.
It's the precursor to podcast. It's like, oh, Monday night with my friends, Howard, and, you know, the dudes in the booth. In time, you're going to talk for two and a half hours without a... They got to be interesting improv geniuses, really. Yeah. They've got theme music. They've got Hank Williams. You know how it always look like, uh, are you ready for some football? Remember that before you got Canelo? Yeah, yeah. H, you know how when you're watching football, it's the best. Yeah. That was a good one. Whenever you're watching football, it kind of looks like somehow the camera is at or near the line of scrimmage. Well, when it was at the 50, whenever you'd be starting, you know, in the red zone, it's really this oblique angle to be watching the play. So they put two more cameras on the 25-yard line. So now you're always looking, you know, at or near the line of scrimmage, head on. They've got parabolic microphones. There's 40 engineers, 20 production people, split screen interviews. They are for the first time showing cheerleaders on television. So there's now some sex appeal to it. They've got green screens and the big, big thing, the biggest thing, yeah, replays. Oh, for sure. Okay, so think this through. You got now got this Monday night game for the first time before everything else was happening real time on Sunday. All the other games, yeah. You don't have the technology to show something from another game. Yeah. You in 1967, what do you do during halftime of Monday night? All the other games are done, right? You can't update what's going on real time with the other games. You got to fill half an hour in halftime.
You show highlights from Sunday.
Sunday. Great. And build anticipation next.
Yeah, this leads to ESPN and SportsCenter. There's no SportsCenter. If you were in a market that didn't show these other games, there was no way you read about it in the newspaper. But like that, what a powerful aspect to build interest in the whole league. Totally. The crazy, crazy thing that is hard to wrap your mind around today because everything is shot in 4K real time. Most games were shot in poor quality and never recorded, or it was in film, 16mm that needs to go get printed. NFL Films. Yeah, so they start NFL Films. There's a whole long backstory that we're skipping, but they've got these people shooting, I assume, 16mm on the sidelines Sunday at every game in parallel to the broadcast. This is not the broadcast. Yes. They send teams out to all the games for the Monday night halftime show. So then they've got a 24-hour turnaround to make a 20-minute, to a central editing facility, put a highlight package together, get that back out to wherever the Monday night game is happening. Yeah. Those people all got to work at 8:00 p.m. on Sunday night and they did not leave till Saturday or Monday. Howard Cosell is like essentially the first SportsCenter anchor. He's narrating the highlight reel, but the highlight reel is like sliding into the tape deck as it's happening. He's never seen it before, so he's improving. I mean, really, like the invention of SportsCenter.
So it sounds like they were smart and invested virtually every dollar they received from this television contract into the product.
I think so. The original Monday Night Football was so expensive. The owners were also like pretty greedy. Like they just, a lot of money. We're talking late 60s, early 70s.
I'm just thinking 500 grand per game.
No, that's just Monday night. That's Monday night. So the show that they're going to put on now with all the extra cameras and all the bells and whistles, I mean, this is now becoming a bit more expensive to produce. 500 grand per game in media rights deals. The NFL says, oh, ABC, you're the production, you're producing it, not pay for this.
Oh, they just want... ABC is investing way more than 8 million in this.
So this is why the NFL collectively, team ownership in aggregate, is one of the best businesses ever. They sell the rights, but then they don't have to incur any of the cost of doing the deals with advertisers to line up the commercial, to produce it of the network. So the best, the pinnacle of this is, and then they get them to compete and make the product better because now Fox has got to have the blue line on the field, John Madden, and like Fox is paying John Madden, not the NFL. [__] That is incredible. You get your customers to make your product better for you. Fast forward a couple decades. What do you think NFL Sunday Ticket is? I'll give you the whole R packages right now. So we may as well flash all the way forward to like how much money, because now I know this is what, so Disney, ABC, ESPN's package right now is 2.7 billion just for Monday.
Year? Just for Monday Night Football? Oh my God. So that's what, 16 games because there's no Monday night the last week of the season, 17 then, or two anyway, whatever. It's either 16 or 17 games.
So 2.7 billion has the NC. That's before the cost to produce it. That's just the right. And then they're paying, and then they're producing money. I did the math on, I'll go through all the deals, but across all of them, it averages out to, uh, it costs the networks 45 to 50 million per game to have the rights to that game.
Okay, that's net after they've sold advertising and whatnot, right? To be able to bring your production crew there, you also invest in the production crew. God, are they recouping? I mean, they have to be. They wouldn't be doing these deals. Are they recouping?
So that's here. Well, this is through them all. So then there's an NFC package and an AFC package, and of course you should sell those to different networks. So the NFC Sunday games go to Fox for 2.2 billion. The AFC Sunday games go to CBS for 2.1 billion.
This is crazy. Disney is paying more just for Monday nights than Fox and CBS are paying for all the slate of Sunday games, right?
You'd rather be Disney because you'd rather only have the cost of producing one game, having to send camera crews to all these different, anyway, all over the country. Then NBC, they, for NBC, they're like, how else can we slice and dice these rights? Because there's another bidder, so we may as well let them buy something from us too. They invent Sunday Night Football, $2 billion a year. So we're at 10 billion right now.
