The NFL (2026 Update)

“Finally, nineteen o five, there are nineteen fatalities in intercollegiate football in The US, and a serious injury at Harvard to one Theodore Roosevelt junior, son of sitting president Theodore Roosevelt. So this is a major event. After that happens, Teddy Roosevelt calls the summit of all the major colleges and universities in New York City and says he's gonna outlaw the game in The US unless they adopt major changes to make the game safer. This summit that Teddy Roosevelt calls, and then he basically tells all the presidents of the universities, like, hey. You guys gotta figure this out, or I'm gonna outlaw this. In response, they create the NCAA.”

“Pretty immediately, the courts strike down this deal. And there's about, I think, a one to two month period where it's all in limbo. And this is where the Kennedy relationships come in clutch for Roselle and the NFL. So both the president and Bobby Kennedy in congress and whip up enough support to pass through new congressional legislation to allow for national sports contracts on a league wide basis. The day after the bill is passed and signed by John f Kennedy, he literally hosts a party at the White House for the NFL, which is, like this tells you everything you need to know right there.”

“Davis gets the news that the gentleman's agreement has been broken, and the kicker has been signed. The kicker signing heard around the world while he happens to be literally in the middle of meeting with the bill's owner. Supposedly, Davis, he just sits there in his chair and he leans back and he smiles and he says, well, we just got our merger. And the Bills owner is like, what are you talking about? And Davis says, because now we're gonna go out and sign all of their players, and we will destroy them, and they will come begging to the table.”

“Bert Bell adopts this as his mantra that literally I mean, they made a movie with this title. On any given Sunday, any team in the league should be able to beat any other team. And he pushes this through with the owners and gets them all to agree to this of, like, hey. The only way we're gonna survive and prosper is if we agree that none of our teams can get so dominant that we end up with a Cleveland Browns situation. Bert and the NFL do two things. First, he completely overhauls the way the schedule works. He realizes that the schedule is actually an incredibly important strategic lever, and he looks at the results from last year's season and arranges the schedule such that the weaker teams from last year play the other weaker teams for the first half of the season.”

“Joe Namath. He was the first modern cultural celebrity athlete. He's also a heartthrob. There's, like, millions of teenage women in America, like, throwing themselves. He was the first professional athlete that appealed equally to men, women, and children. He comes and he's playing in New York, right, in the biggest market, the brightest lights right there with the TV industry, right there with the advertising industry. He knew exactly how to play it. He wore white cleats. Everybody else wore black high tops. Famously, he wore a mink coat on the sidelines.”

“Monday Night Football invented that was not a part of your typical football NFL broadcast before Monday night football, and it is astonishing. The overriding idea that we are going to cover a football game like show business. This is not a sport we're broadcasting. This is showbiz. We're gonna put cameras at field level. We're gonna put cameras on people's shoulder. We're gonna put cameras on the 20 yard lines. Instead of two commentators, we're gonna have a three man booth, and there's gonna be real action oriented commentary there. They went from the four cameras that typically would cover a Sunday broadcast to nine cameras and then eventually up to 17 cameras.”

“CTE is very real and caused by playing football and causes shorter lifespans and immense physical harm to players. The NFL settled a billion dollar lawsuit to pay out victims and families of CTE. The NFL started doing research into long term effects of concussions and other head trauma from playing football in the nineties, and then they sat on the data for a long time. And then when they did release it, they claimed that there was absolutely no provable link, no evidence at all that head injuries from playing football led to long term damage.”

“In the first year of the relationship, September '23 to September '24, the NFL added 4,000,000 female fans. The Chiefs were 3,400,000 of those. The biggest demographic or sub demographic of those 4,000,000 is women 35, which is a traditionally very weak demographic for the NFL. Clark Hunt, the owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, went on the Pat McAfee Show, and he said that before Taylor, the Chiefs' fan base was about fifty fifty, male, female. But post Taylor, the fan base at the Chiefs is 57% women, 43% men.”

“Upon any eventual sale or monetization of the ownership stake that private equity would have in an NFL franchise, a portion of the returns on that investment get skimmed off the top and go back to the NFL and then get distributed equally among all 32 NFL team ownership groups. This is wild. That's why there's an anointed set of four. It's not just there's only four PE firms we trust. It's there's four PE firms that we went and we did a deal with where if they buy into our league, we effectively get carry on their investment when they sell.”

“Forbes now estimates the Cowboys are worth $13,000,000,000. The Cowboys are the high watermark because the Cowboys have an exceptional amount of local revenue that they produce. The estimated twenty twenty four revenue of the cowboys was $1,200,000,000 while posting an operating income of 630,000,000. Sure, the Cowboys can spit off 630,000,000 in profit. The average team spits off a 127,000,000 in profit, and the least profitable team only generates 21,000,000 in profit. This league first mentality is gonna be really tested in the coming years with these enormously profitable teams at the top and these teams at the bottom.”