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XLIX Things About American Pro Football


Mac the Knife

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I am doing a project for my site on the forgotten NFL teams that came and went in the early years and I must say the NFL in the 1920s was a joke. That move Leatherheads was not far off it was chaos.

And yet today, when any other league undergoes anything resembling similar turmoil, they're immediately dismissed as being unworthy of attention and incapable of developing into a full-fledged professional sports product.

That is because the level of sophistication of all of the major sports leagues has increased the public's expectations. The NFL was barely on the radar in the 20s, so it could get away with floundering around while it tried to establish itself.

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How do you split up the TV packages though? Or do you make up a whole new model?

Whole new model. You essentially have five packages: two Sunday slots with alternating 1pm and 1/4pm weeks, a Sunday night slot, a Monday night slot, and a Thursday night slot, in order of perceived value and revenue. So you bid each out, telling your broadcast partners that each week during the season, the network that bids highest for one of the two Sunday slots gets first choice among all games each week, the network that gets the other Sunday slot selects second, the Sunday night game picks third, and so forth. Initial choices are made just prior to the schedule's release.

One caveat with this though - you'd have to give at least the Sunday TV partners an ability to change out games, in case their pre-season choice of a Seattle-Green Bay matchup works out to be a meeting between 4-9 teams going into Week 14. The Sunday night game would get first priority with this I suspect, with the daytime games getting second and third opportunity to make a change.

But what about local games? That's part of what works so well with the current model. You know if your team is an NFC team and on the road, or at home against an NFC team, (and it's not a night game) you are watching FOX. Your plan works for big games, but what about not-so-big games (which can still get great local ratings if the right markets are involved)?

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How do you split up the TV packages though? Or do you make up a whole new model?

Whole new model. You essentially have five packages: two Sunday slots with alternating 1pm and 1/4pm weeks, a Sunday night slot, a Monday night slot, and a Thursday night slot, in order of perceived value and revenue. So you bid each out, telling your broadcast partners that each week during the season, the network that bids highest for one of the two Sunday slots gets first choice among all games each week, the network that gets the other Sunday slot selects second, the Sunday night game picks third, and so forth. Initial choices are made just prior to the schedule's release.

One caveat with this though - you'd have to give at least the Sunday TV partners an ability to change out games, in case their pre-season choice of a Seattle-Green Bay matchup works out to be a meeting between 4-9 teams going into Week 14. The Sunday night game would get first priority with this I suspect, with the daytime games getting second and third opportunity to make a change.

But what about local games? That's part of what works so well with the current model. You know if your team is an NFC team and on the road, or at home against an NFC team, (and it's not a night game) you are watching FOX. Your plan works for big games, but what about not-so-big games (which can still get great local ratings if the right markets are involved)?

That system ended this season. There was NE@BUF on Fox midseason in the early window and CAR@ATL in week 17 was on CBS
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  • 1 month later...

I came across something fascinating today which ties in with this thread so at the risk of blowback I'm resurrecting it rather than creating a new one.

I'm reading a biography of the NFL's first real president, Joe Carr. In it, I read that following the 1937 season, the City of Miami approached the NFL with an offer that would have had the Orange Bowl serve as a permanent home for the championship game starting in 1938. Carr rejected the idea though, as he felt each year's division winners should alternate and reward fans with an additional home game.

So the concept of a permanent neutral-site championship dates back not to 1966, but over a quarter century earlier.

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