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NFL Football: A History of America's New National Pastime
This wide-ranging history synthesizes scholarship and media sources to give the reader an inside view of the television contracts, labor issues, and other off-the-field forces that shaped the National Football League. Historian Richard Crepeau shows how Commissioner Pete Rozelle's steady leadership guided the league's explosive growth during the era of Monday Night Football and the Super Bowl's transformation into a mid-winter spectacle. Crepeau also delves into the league's masterful exploitation of media from radio to the internet, its ability to get taxpayers to subsidize team stadiums, and its success in delivering an outlet for experiencing vicarious violence to a public uneasy over the changing rules of masculinity.
Probing and learned, NFL Football tells an epic American success story peopled by larger-than-life figures and driven by ambition, money, sweat, and dizzying social and technological changes.
Probing and learned, NFL Football tells an epic American success story peopled by larger-than-life figures and driven by ambition, money, sweat, and dizzying social and technological changes.
272 pages, Paperback
First published July 21, 2014
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November 30, 2016
The National Football League is by far the richest sports league in the world, and the most popular sport in the United States. While it has a following amongst non-Americans, and the NFL would like to establish a presence abroad, most of the revenue generated by the NFL is by Americans, symbolizing the pure economic might of the United States. Richard C. Crepeau, a professor of history at University of South Florida, writes a synthesized history of the NFL from its inception as a poor cousin to college football in the 1920s, in the shadow of professional baseball, and played in small industrial towns of the Midwest, to the present day as the sports entertainment behemoth it is today. He seeks to answer how it became the “new pastime”, and interrogates some of the scholarship on the NFL and what it says about American history and American cultural norms. He explicitly notes that this book is a synthesized history of existing literature, and his noting style is somewhat unorthodox, which he argues is a downfall of synthesis style. As an aside, for the purpose of this paper, when I refer to “football”, it refers to American gridiron rules football, as opposed to Canadian gridiron rules football, or association rules football, rugby rules football, Australian rules football, or Gaelic football, or any other global sport that may refer to itself as football.
The book is divided into three parts. The first looks at the “formative years” of the NFL, when it took shape in the 1880s-90s in eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania, and quickly caught on as a sport of college teams. Elite middle and upper class college policy makers sought to define football early on as a sport of amateurism where young college men would prove their masculinity on the playing field. Several rule changes in 1905, after the death of 11 men in a season, pushed the game to the recognizable state it is today, by legalizing the forward pass and substitutions. As football became the game of elite colleges and southern universities, the professional game lagged behind as a specialized sport in small industrial towns, where companies would pay men to play games for entertainment of workers, who worked in tough menial jobs that did not require the proving of masculinity, but instead the only thing that mattered to working class men was fielding the best teams in order to witness victories, Crepeau argues.
In the years following World War One, professional football had gained enough of a falling to establish a professional football league in 1921, with four teams in Ohio. Games were played on Sundays, as college football was traditionally a Saturday game, and baseball was played the rest of the week and often forbidden from Sunday play by law. The NFL quickly came to encompass all professional teams, which meant that it was extremely unstable, and championships were awarded in offseason league meetings by strength of schedule. Crepeau points out that nearly 40 teams passed through the league by the end of the 1920s, when the Great Depression culled many of the weaker teams. The 1930s also saw the onset of segregation in the NFL, as black players had openly played in professional football teams prior, with the demanding of segregation by Boston Redskins owner George Marshall. Marshall would also be the last team to desegregate, when in 1961, he said that the Washington Redskins would sign a black player when “Harlem Globetrotters sign white players.” By 1933, NFL became stabilized, where teams of big cities with owners with deep pockets survived, though interestingly enough, the small town fan-owned Green Bay Packers dominated the era as a matter of civic pride. During World War Two, a number of teams merged for the war because of manpower shortages, but the NFL emerged from the war intact.
In the immediate aftermath of World War Two, the NFL began to build itself out of its reputation as a lesser version of football compared to the college game and even began to challenge professional baseball by the end of the 1950s. It did so in a few ways, Crepeau argues. The NFL was an early adopter television, which it seemed well suited to as a game of quick controlled violence. When NFL games began to be televised in the early 1950s, attendance at games actually rapidly increased as opposed to people staying home as originally feared. The televising of the 1958 NFL Championship between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants was widely viewed and is often touted as the game that pushed the NFL into challenging MLB for supremacy (I would argue that the recent moves by MLB teams, particularly the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants, had opened huge swatches of dissatisfied sports fans who switched allegiances). Second, the sport was a perfect metaphor for embrace of “controlled savagery” masculinity of Americanism during the rising Cold War. Third, the NFL faced two major challenges by rival leagues. The first was by the All-American Football Conference, in the late 1940s, which it soundly defeated and absorbed four of its better teams, and the second, and more importantly, was the American Football League (AFL) in 1960-66. Here, wealthy businessmen who had been shut out of the NFL started their own league and successfully challenged the NFL by putting teams in ignored markets and recruiting players from historically black colleges. The NFL and AFL agreed to a merger in 1966, in which all AFL teams were welcomed into the NFL. By the end of the 1960s, with the advent of the Superbowl, the larger than life championship game of the NFL, the NFL had surpassed MLB as the favorite sport of Americans.
Crepeau argues that the commissionership of Pete Rozelle from 1960-89 cemented the dominance of the NFL in American cultural life, as everything before Rozelle simply “set the stage, and everything after Rozelle rearranged the scene.” Rozelle pushed the medium of television as a natural marriage of sports, building television timeouts into the game, building the cultural event of the Superbowl, and the weekly phenomenon of Monday Night Football. Rozelle played NBC, ABC, and CBS off each other to get the most lucrative deals, which all teams revenue shared, only strengthening the league. He largely crushed labor unrest, warding off attempted repeated strikes. His reign as commissioner also saw the feuding with Al Davis, the owner of the Oakland Raiders, as Davis sought the freedom to move to Los Angeles. Davis eventually won this battle in court, which set off a round of moves by owners, most infamously by the Baltimore Colts and Cleveland Browns. Rozelle also saw the defeat of an upstart league in the USFL, when the USFL led by New Jersey Generals owner Donald Trump directly moved the spring league to the fall and sued the NFL, winning the case but being awarded $1.
Crepeau concludes by looking at the NFL since Rozelle, with chapters on Commissioners Tagliabue and Goodell. He explores the long labor peace after the lawsuit which won free agency in 1993 and the incredible growth and dominance of the NFL over all other leagues in the US, and its continued growth over the years. He concludes with potential trouble over concussion research and findings, as well as discontent under Goodell’s increasing authoritarian measures. At times, I wish he had looked externally to the rise of the NFL as also exploiting an opening by the failure of baseball to embrace television as well as a metaphor for American authoritarian impulses, but Crepeau tends to look internally at the NFL as opposed to its place within the larger country, not to mention the planet. What does it mean when the Superbowl is amongst the most watched television in the world on a yearly basis, though outside of the United States, there is hardly a following? Is that simply a projection of the United States’ cultural and material power? What about the historical parallels in the rise of the NFL with the rise of MLB? What does it mean when a game of authoritarian militarism becomes the most popular game in the United States? Will football go the way of boxing as more comes out about the effect of concussions on the brain? Overall, a strong historical work and valuable piece of history, as well as a good cultural look at American business entertainment history, which is essential to understanding how Americans see themselves.
The book is divided into three parts. The first looks at the “formative years” of the NFL, when it took shape in the 1880s-90s in eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania, and quickly caught on as a sport of college teams. Elite middle and upper class college policy makers sought to define football early on as a sport of amateurism where young college men would prove their masculinity on the playing field. Several rule changes in 1905, after the death of 11 men in a season, pushed the game to the recognizable state it is today, by legalizing the forward pass and substitutions. As football became the game of elite colleges and southern universities, the professional game lagged behind as a specialized sport in small industrial towns, where companies would pay men to play games for entertainment of workers, who worked in tough menial jobs that did not require the proving of masculinity, but instead the only thing that mattered to working class men was fielding the best teams in order to witness victories, Crepeau argues.
In the years following World War One, professional football had gained enough of a falling to establish a professional football league in 1921, with four teams in Ohio. Games were played on Sundays, as college football was traditionally a Saturday game, and baseball was played the rest of the week and often forbidden from Sunday play by law. The NFL quickly came to encompass all professional teams, which meant that it was extremely unstable, and championships were awarded in offseason league meetings by strength of schedule. Crepeau points out that nearly 40 teams passed through the league by the end of the 1920s, when the Great Depression culled many of the weaker teams. The 1930s also saw the onset of segregation in the NFL, as black players had openly played in professional football teams prior, with the demanding of segregation by Boston Redskins owner George Marshall. Marshall would also be the last team to desegregate, when in 1961, he said that the Washington Redskins would sign a black player when “Harlem Globetrotters sign white players.” By 1933, NFL became stabilized, where teams of big cities with owners with deep pockets survived, though interestingly enough, the small town fan-owned Green Bay Packers dominated the era as a matter of civic pride. During World War Two, a number of teams merged for the war because of manpower shortages, but the NFL emerged from the war intact.
In the immediate aftermath of World War Two, the NFL began to build itself out of its reputation as a lesser version of football compared to the college game and even began to challenge professional baseball by the end of the 1950s. It did so in a few ways, Crepeau argues. The NFL was an early adopter television, which it seemed well suited to as a game of quick controlled violence. When NFL games began to be televised in the early 1950s, attendance at games actually rapidly increased as opposed to people staying home as originally feared. The televising of the 1958 NFL Championship between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants was widely viewed and is often touted as the game that pushed the NFL into challenging MLB for supremacy (I would argue that the recent moves by MLB teams, particularly the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants, had opened huge swatches of dissatisfied sports fans who switched allegiances). Second, the sport was a perfect metaphor for embrace of “controlled savagery” masculinity of Americanism during the rising Cold War. Third, the NFL faced two major challenges by rival leagues. The first was by the All-American Football Conference, in the late 1940s, which it soundly defeated and absorbed four of its better teams, and the second, and more importantly, was the American Football League (AFL) in 1960-66. Here, wealthy businessmen who had been shut out of the NFL started their own league and successfully challenged the NFL by putting teams in ignored markets and recruiting players from historically black colleges. The NFL and AFL agreed to a merger in 1966, in which all AFL teams were welcomed into the NFL. By the end of the 1960s, with the advent of the Superbowl, the larger than life championship game of the NFL, the NFL had surpassed MLB as the favorite sport of Americans.
Crepeau argues that the commissionership of Pete Rozelle from 1960-89 cemented the dominance of the NFL in American cultural life, as everything before Rozelle simply “set the stage, and everything after Rozelle rearranged the scene.” Rozelle pushed the medium of television as a natural marriage of sports, building television timeouts into the game, building the cultural event of the Superbowl, and the weekly phenomenon of Monday Night Football. Rozelle played NBC, ABC, and CBS off each other to get the most lucrative deals, which all teams revenue shared, only strengthening the league. He largely crushed labor unrest, warding off attempted repeated strikes. His reign as commissioner also saw the feuding with Al Davis, the owner of the Oakland Raiders, as Davis sought the freedom to move to Los Angeles. Davis eventually won this battle in court, which set off a round of moves by owners, most infamously by the Baltimore Colts and Cleveland Browns. Rozelle also saw the defeat of an upstart league in the USFL, when the USFL led by New Jersey Generals owner Donald Trump directly moved the spring league to the fall and sued the NFL, winning the case but being awarded $1.
Crepeau concludes by looking at the NFL since Rozelle, with chapters on Commissioners Tagliabue and Goodell. He explores the long labor peace after the lawsuit which won free agency in 1993 and the incredible growth and dominance of the NFL over all other leagues in the US, and its continued growth over the years. He concludes with potential trouble over concussion research and findings, as well as discontent under Goodell’s increasing authoritarian measures. At times, I wish he had looked externally to the rise of the NFL as also exploiting an opening by the failure of baseball to embrace television as well as a metaphor for American authoritarian impulses, but Crepeau tends to look internally at the NFL as opposed to its place within the larger country, not to mention the planet. What does it mean when the Superbowl is amongst the most watched television in the world on a yearly basis, though outside of the United States, there is hardly a following? Is that simply a projection of the United States’ cultural and material power? What about the historical parallels in the rise of the NFL with the rise of MLB? What does it mean when a game of authoritarian militarism becomes the most popular game in the United States? Will football go the way of boxing as more comes out about the effect of concussions on the brain? Overall, a strong historical work and valuable piece of history, as well as a good cultural look at American business entertainment history, which is essential to understanding how Americans see themselves.
August 19, 2021
I'm English and live in England, and whilst I like watching American Football and have been to the odd game in London, it's not exactly a passion of mine. I therefore never would have bought this book, but having been given it as a present I picked it up expecting to read half a dozen pages before consigning it to the bookshelf. Wrong.
What gripped me about the book is that it isn't about what happened on the pitch, the emotion of which can never be adequately conveyed in writing, but what happened off it. Essentially the book is the story of the creation of a brand, and therefore overwhelmingly a story of entrepreneurialism and business rather than one of sports. In the entire book there are probably no more than a dozen references to great games, drives or passes, and when there are it is purely in the context of what they did to create publicity and boost the brand.
The book tells the story of how a minor, professional league emerged to challenge and overtake the overwhelmingly more popular amateur college game, before consolidating its power and wealth through TV deals and eventually becoming so large that the TV companies ended up reliant on the sport, rather than the other way round.
The beauty of the book is that the story of the NFL is simply so American, with its growth driven by people of extraordinary dynamism, vision and ego. It is a story of alliances, conflicts, disputes, challenges to power & authority and, inevitably, frequent litigation. There is actually far more in the book about disputes than there is about sport: disputes between owners and players about money, disputes between owners and the NFL about money, disputes between owners, municipalities and the NFL about relocation of franchises, and disputes with emerging rival leagues (with the resolution of the dispute with the AFL in particular taking the NFL to another level).
In many ways the development of the NFL, and therefore the progress of the book, reflect larger changes in American society. Racial discrimination is accordingly a significant and continual theme throughout the book, with the concussion problem and cover-up emerging as a theme as the book progresses, together with the developing association with militarism and patriotism since 9/11. Two of those themes - racism and patriotism - come together with the story of Colin Kaepernick, Donald Trump and 'taking the knee'.
Best of all, the book is very well-written. It is easy to read - a deceptively difficult thing for a writer to achieve - absorbing, entertaining and well-edited, with amusing and enlightening quotes throughout and excellent thumbnail descriptions of interesting characters. Whilst I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's good enough that even people with no interest in American Football would enjoy it, I would certainly go so far as to recommend it to anyone with even a passing or casual interest in the sport, particularly if they combine it with an interest in business. It's basically a very good book, the quality of which transcends its subject matter.
What gripped me about the book is that it isn't about what happened on the pitch, the emotion of which can never be adequately conveyed in writing, but what happened off it. Essentially the book is the story of the creation of a brand, and therefore overwhelmingly a story of entrepreneurialism and business rather than one of sports. In the entire book there are probably no more than a dozen references to great games, drives or passes, and when there are it is purely in the context of what they did to create publicity and boost the brand.
The book tells the story of how a minor, professional league emerged to challenge and overtake the overwhelmingly more popular amateur college game, before consolidating its power and wealth through TV deals and eventually becoming so large that the TV companies ended up reliant on the sport, rather than the other way round.
The beauty of the book is that the story of the NFL is simply so American, with its growth driven by people of extraordinary dynamism, vision and ego. It is a story of alliances, conflicts, disputes, challenges to power & authority and, inevitably, frequent litigation. There is actually far more in the book about disputes than there is about sport: disputes between owners and players about money, disputes between owners and the NFL about money, disputes between owners, municipalities and the NFL about relocation of franchises, and disputes with emerging rival leagues (with the resolution of the dispute with the AFL in particular taking the NFL to another level).
In many ways the development of the NFL, and therefore the progress of the book, reflect larger changes in American society. Racial discrimination is accordingly a significant and continual theme throughout the book, with the concussion problem and cover-up emerging as a theme as the book progresses, together with the developing association with militarism and patriotism since 9/11. Two of those themes - racism and patriotism - come together with the story of Colin Kaepernick, Donald Trump and 'taking the knee'.
Best of all, the book is very well-written. It is easy to read - a deceptively difficult thing for a writer to achieve - absorbing, entertaining and well-edited, with amusing and enlightening quotes throughout and excellent thumbnail descriptions of interesting characters. Whilst I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's good enough that even people with no interest in American Football would enjoy it, I would certainly go so far as to recommend it to anyone with even a passing or casual interest in the sport, particularly if they combine it with an interest in business. It's basically a very good book, the quality of which transcends its subject matter.
August 20, 2014
This is a good book about the over view or the new history of the NFL. He really does not spend too much time on any one era and I get that. He starts off with the beginning and with Joe Carr, who was the first commissioner of pro football. He was also an owner, and really more than what was given in this book. He was the one that wanted rules and reefs, came up with fines on teams and players and also owners. He did a lot and the only part or the book I really did not agree with was that he made him out like he always went to George Halas to make a decision and that was not the case. He was a very strong man and he made the tough decisions and he made the league and knew that the league needed to move into larger cities, New York, was really the place that he wanted to move the league to a get a team to find a strong owner group. Which he did. Anyway, the rest of the book takes you through 50s, the 60s and the AFL, which really could be a book all by itself, which also includes the beginning feud with Al Davis and Roselle. Then the 70s with the beginning of the rule changes to open up the scoring. He also has a chapter on how big the Super Bowl has gotten and another one on just the NFL in general with the NFL network and the NFL in general. He does speak of some of the people like Lombardi and how the Packers have made it. I also liked the chapter about Paul Brown, people either forget all he did or just don’t know, but a lot of what he started doing in the 50s with the Browns are still being done today in the NFL just in a bigger scale. Overall this is a good book, I will say I am not the average fan, I have been reading and following the NFL since I was a kid since the 60s, reading everything I could get my hands on, and I will say this is a pretty through book especially showing the growth of the league itself. A good read. I got this book from net galley.
December 27, 2017
Well researched, just as one would expect from an academic press. Well written, so just about anyone could read it.
This book is mostly a football of the league, so expect a lot of material about organizational structure, contracts, revenue streams, and television deals. Look elsewhere for a book about significant players or any given era. There's some neat material on legends like Red Grange and Bronko Nagurski, as well as the Namath/Unitas contrast, would be great so read a book with more of that kind of material.
Really strong on 1920s-1960s. Chapter on the Super Bowl is really biased, it's pretty clear the author isn't a fan of spectacle in the magnitude. In a way, I agree with him - but America is awesome because we have pyrotechnics and dancing sharks while other countries can't even build a reliable electric grid (although we're going that way).
This book is mostly a football of the league, so expect a lot of material about organizational structure, contracts, revenue streams, and television deals. Look elsewhere for a book about significant players or any given era. There's some neat material on legends like Red Grange and Bronko Nagurski, as well as the Namath/Unitas contrast, would be great so read a book with more of that kind of material.
Really strong on 1920s-1960s. Chapter on the Super Bowl is really biased, it's pretty clear the author isn't a fan of spectacle in the magnitude. In a way, I agree with him - but America is awesome because we have pyrotechnics and dancing sharks while other countries can't even build a reliable electric grid (although we're going that way).
September 19, 2019
It really is a history of the NFL as an organisation rather than the history of the sport. The early parts are really quite interesting, but the coverage of more recent years is more superficial and less insightful. As a Briton with an interest in, but no great knowledge of the sport, I found a number of the points required an additional understanding.
It’s functionally written and a little repetitive. An interesting but in many ways a very old fashioned book.
It’s functionally written and a little repetitive. An interesting but in many ways a very old fashioned book.
September 8, 2014
This book was not about the game, but instead about the business and media aspects of the popularity of professional football and the NFL. It was an excellent book as it was well researched and well written. My full review can be found here:
http://sportsbookguy.blogspot.com/201...
http://sportsbookguy.blogspot.com/201...
November 2, 2021
A bit dry at times and much more focused on the business end of it. Some fascinating history. It never really compete with baseball, its actual competition was college football, which was interesting.
The worst part was the author would go from topic to topic and then cover that area over a 10 to 30 year span. So your head would spin occasionally.
The worst part was the author would go from topic to topic and then cover that area over a 10 to 30 year span. So your head would spin occasionally.
January 18, 2015
Good lecture if you are a hardcore fan and want to know all the bussiness related situations of the league development
October 19, 2016
This was a great look at the history of the NFL. Found it interesting and it would be a great book for any reader (football lover or not).
January 18, 2018
A breezy, fascinating look at a "sports" league that has been an accurate reflection of the US over the past century or so.
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