Storming the Field: How Television Brought About the Super Bowl
For the fiftieth time, the best in pro football will soon take the field. The world will stop for a few hours to watch the Denver Broncos and the Carolina Panthers play each other, the TV network airing the game will be guaranteed a win for the February sweeps in the aggregate numbers, advertisers will have paid billions to participate in the spectacle, and the crowd in the stands will have moved heaven and hell to have made their way there.
How this game became The Game is the result of a long contest, longer and more intense than the season-long run-ups that any team coming to the championship can match. It involved bold, daring business decisions and outsized personalities who tapped into cultural sentiments flowing through the United States in the 1950s and 1960s.
And much like the average party surrounding the game, everything revolved around watching television.
American football proved to be a natural for television coverage. With time stoppages resulting in breaks in the action between periods, during changes of possession, and the occasional player injury, there were plenty of opportunities for a broadcaster to insert commercials during the course of coverage. While the first pro football game broadcast on October 22, 1939, was not an advertising bonanza for the two NBC stations that carried it, the opportunities soon became apparent as coverage expanded following the end of World War II and the explosion in television ownership soon after.
In 1958, the National Football League was less than half its current size, played a somewhat different game that modern viewers might not recognize, and was not as flush with cash as today’s organization is and hopes to be by 2020. More importantly, coverage of a team on television during the regular season was negotiated by each individual team with local television stations, which tended to favor big market teams like the Chicago Bears and New York Giants, but left smaller teams like the Green Bay Packers and the San Francisco 49ers bereft.
National coverage was negotiated for the playoffs, however, between the league and a network partner. The NFL’s first serious broadcast partner, the DuMont Network, paid the league $75,000 for rights to cover the 1951 Championship Game; when the network folded, NBC acquired these rights in 1955 for $100,000 per game.
NBC’s commitment to the championships paid off with the 1958 Championship, referred to after that as “the Greatest Game Ever Played.” Hosted at Yankee Stadium by the New York Giants (who had on their team halfback Frank Gifford and kicker Pat Summerall, who would go on to become football television coverage pioneers in the decades following), the victory by the Baltimore Colts in sudden death overtime, 23 to 17, raised the profile of the sport to new heights as the highlights were relished by fans. In addition to the feats on the field, the fact that the game drew a television audience of 45 million viewers nationally added to the mystique and importance of the contest.
[Click here to see clips from the 1958 NFL playoffs!]
An interesting sidebar: This game was also the first to draw unfavorable attention to the NFL’s TV blackout rules then, which prohibited broadcasts of home team games within 75 miles of the venue without exception, which forced fans of the Giants wanting to see the game on television to leave the area in order to catch the playoffs. This rule would be in effect until 1973, right through the first six Super Bowls, preventing host cities from catching the game on the air.
After that championship game, pro football became a hot commodity. CBS saw the potential in the sport and attempted to draw together the various regional deals into one national package; however, because football didn’t enjoy the same exemption from anti-trust laws as baseball, as decided in 1957 in Radovich v. National Football League, a deal wasn’t possible in the years following the “Greatest Game.” During the period, CBS would enter into carriage deals with individual teams, managing each entity separately with negotiations with individual team owners rather than the league.
As the network brokered these deals, a new group of potential owners wanting pieces of the game, who found themselves rebuffed by the league and resisted by existing owners, took matters into their own hands. Lamar Hunt, flush with cash from Texas oil drilling but unable at any price to purchase and move the Chicago Cardinals with the NFL’s blessing, reached out to other owner concerns who also didn’t get their way, and with them formed the most successful competitor the NFL faced, the American Football League, in 1959.
Right out of the gate, the AFL proved as nimble in business as their play calling was in average games. Not only did the new league raid most of the potential college draft before the NFL could come calling, they put together from the start a collective TV deal with ABC in 1960.
Coverage of the games from the upstart, young-skewing league by the upstart, young-skewing network was in tune with the times, as America embraced new thinking and approaches in tune with the spirit of the “New Frontier” taking hold. In addition to seeing new talent that would otherwise have gone to the NFL, including more minority players being rotated onto the roster faster than the older league was including them on the field, viewers of AFL games got more angles covering the action, thanks to cameras that traveled up and down the sidelines following the action instead of just the traditional fixed position camera, and could figure out who personally had the ball thanks to putting names on the jerseys, an innovation the NFL had not yet adapted. Also a major innovation not yet adapted by the older league was a television package revenue sharing plan; all 10 teams in the AFL split the $2 million per year ABC paid for broadcast rights equally, which allowed the league to stay in business during its formative years.
This was not lost on the NFL’s new commissioner, Pete Rozelle, who came into office soon after the AFL’s founding, prompted by his predecessor Bert Bell’s sudden heart attack. Rozelle was the right man at the right time: Having been a publicist for the Los Angeles Rams for a stint before becoming a public relations flack for most of the 1950s, he understood the future of the league depended on building its profile, and that the best way to do that was with television.
To that end, between fending off the AFL’s efforts to snap up as much college talent as possible, Rozelle lobbied hard for legislation to address his broadcast limitations. The result, the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, vacated Radovich and enabled the NFL to negotiate for the same kind of package the AFL could. And the deals came quickly; for the 1962 and 1963 seasons, CBS paid the league $4.7 million per season, which was shared among all teams the way ABC’s package was shared in the AFL.
It was for games starting in 1964, however, that the real money came to the table. The sport had become so popular that when both leagues’ broadcast contracts came up for renewal, the bidding was frenzied. The figures were staggering at the time; when the last bids were unsealed, NBC took the rights for the AFL from ABC for $8.5 million per year for five years, while CBS retained the NFL by paying the league $16 million per year for two years. And things had the potential to have been even wilder; William Johnson’s account in Sports Illustrated from 1970 of football’s expansion on the dial mentions that the NFL had looked into forming their own network back in 1965, nearly 40 years before there was an actual NFL Network, to use as a threat to get a better deal from CBS.
These rates crept higher out of necessity as teams from both leagues engaged in more cutthroat competition. 1965 opened with the New York Jets offering Joe Namath a three-year, $427,000 contract, a record at the time for any football player. Within a year, the new commissioner of the AFL, the Oakland Raiders’ general manager Al Davis, lived up to his team’s name and started to encourage AFL teams to offer large bounties to current NFL players to switch leagues, which the NFL responded to in kind with their own raiding of AFL rosters. With so much television money filling each team’s coffers through revenue sharing, there was a danger that the bidding for talent would cripple both leagues.
The only sane response to the situation was mutually assured accommodation. On June 8th, 1966, the AFL and NFL agreed to merge by 1970. The AFL would become the American Football Conference (the AFC), and the old NFL teams would be known as the National Football Conference (NFC) while the NFL name applied to the combined league. Both leagues maintained separate schedules for the rest of the decade; however, a new game would be added to the schedule each season, to be played after both leagues held their championship games, starting with that first season under the merger deal.
That game became the first Super Bowl.
Held on January 15, 1967, the match was officially titled “the AFL-NFL World Championship Game;” the title we know the game by would not officially be adopted until the third encounter, the game Namath “guaranteed.” The game was played at a neutral site, Los Angeles (where Rozelle’s former employer, the Rams, played), and was the only Super Bowl that was not a sellout, with 30,000 empty seats thanks to potential fans balking at having to pay an exorbitant $12 for a ticket.
[See clips from the first Super Bowl here!]
Who did show up for the game was Vince Lombardi, the offensive coordinator for the 1958 New York Giants that played in the “Greatest Game Ever Played.” This time, he was head coach for the NFL’s Green Bay Packers, who led his team to a 35 to 10 victory over the AFL’s Kansas City Chiefs, the team Lamar Hunt founded his upstart league with. Also in attendance from that 1958 team were Gifford and Summerall, this time with CBS Sports as analyst and sideline reporter respectively.
Because of pre-existing television commitments, the first game was covered by both CBS and NBC. This led to a fiercer rivalry than the play on the field, as CBS and NBC sparred with each other while trying to cover the game. At one point, both networks were so competitive with each other that they set up fences between their production trucks to keep each network’s personnel from talking to each other. In spite of their tussles, the combined audience was estimated to be 51 million viewers, even with the NFL insisting on their blackout policies being applied to the neutral Los Angeles market that hosted the game.
The first such game would go on to leave a lasting legacy. In return for having turned two competing sports leagues into a major business powerhouse, pro football would return the favor to television with an event that every year is considered a virtual national holiday. Professional football wanted to get bigger, and television wanted compelling content that everyone wanted to watch; both marched down the field and scored touchdowns, each cheering each other on as they built each other up.
