No. of Recommendations: 0
IMO, the NFL is a macro-economic force in the US economy. Thus, the cause of the creation of the NFL draft would, IMO, be one significant factor in the NFL and the economy. Looking at the NFL's own claim as to how the NFL draft was started, they totally omit Koska and his negotiating tactic. Because, by definition, admitting the NFL did it to eliminate negotiating with players would essentially be a criminal activity.
Stan Koska was a football player for the U of MN in 1931. Graduated in 1934. No NFL draft then. All the NFL teams wanted him because he was so good. As no NFL draft then, each team made offers. Koska played one team against each other--and finally accepted a $5k annual salary with $500 signing bonus. Many players made $50/game, so HUGE money envy on every team. The next year, the NFL owners created the NFL draft--specifically to avoid the problems with their college/HS players when a star player could again do what Koska did.
No. of Recommendations: 0
If you have not seen the Ken Burns documentary on baseball you should. It is well done and covers a lot of baseball owners, setting up leagues and their rather heavy handed approach with players and competing leagues. A couple of times competing leagues were set up to treat players better only to get shut down. One of the reasons the BlackSox scandal happened in 1919 World Series where some of the WhiteSox players took money from a gambler to throw the series was hatred of the owner and wanting to cash in with a big payday.
I think it is now apparent there is way too much money in all sports where owners and players are racking up huge sums of money, even in college, and advertisers seem to continually pony up the money as well as fans. I went to a baseball game and someone with us wanted to look in the team store and it was packed and people spending tons of money on jerseys. They had kids (under 10) shirts going for as much as $129. Not sure how people justify that expense but they do.
Apparently advertisers have bottomless pools of money.
No. of Recommendations: 4
You can say what you want about the NFL, but the owners lead by Pete Rozell realized that competition would be the thing that would make them all filthy rich, so they instituted revenue sharing with only minor exceptions. Later, a strict salary cap was introduced. The result is "on any given Sunday" your team has a chance at winning. Teams have essentially the same resources, so creating dynasties is extremely difficult. The tiny market Green Bay Packers can compete with the LA Rams.
Contrast with the NBA and MLB who only have weak salary caps and revenue sharing. In MLB especially, some franchises are essentially frozen out of fielding competitive teams. When the NFL salary cap was created in 1994, all three leagues had roughly the same revenues. Today, the NFL is by far the largest, almost the size of the NBA and MLB combined.
No. of Recommendations: 7
Apparently advertisers have bottomless pools of money.
Having had the broadcast rights for a variety of teams (Bulls, White Sox, Pirates, Patriots, Penn State, Notre Dame, and others) I will say it isn’t just “advertising.”
Typically when you buy an advertising package, at least one big enough, you get a slug of tickets which you can use to enjoy yourself, treat associates, create contests for customers, or whatever. When we had the Bulls, for instance, we got 400 seats to every game. 200 were “good”, and of those about 50 were “excellent”, and of those about 10 were “unbelievable” (like 2nd row, center court). Another 200 were upper balcony, end zone, but hey, it was the Bulls and most people never got inside the arena at all.
For the 200 end zone we would have 2 employee nights for our own people, and then would slap them off 50 or 100 at a time (to9 a single game) to car dealers, soda distributors, banks, etc who bought a big enough ad package. They would also get 2, sometimes 4 of the “excellent” seats to every game. We kept the “unbelievable” seats for ourselves, with which we could entertain potential or current clients. Once the luxury suites became available we had 16 more tickets (yes, we paid full retail for them), and worked the same kind of thing: you could get “the entire suite” for a night, or you might get 4 seats in it for 4 different games, or whatever.
On a pure “advertising” basis there was no justification for buying our ads, I could show you 20 ways to reach more people more often with a regular ad schedule. But add in tickets to see Michael Jordan and those car dealers were salivating and practically pushed the money across the table.
(*It wasn’t just “tickets”. We could also get some “backstage passes”, player appearances, etc. - and yes we had to pay extra for them - but that cost was just priced in, and the merchant just wrote it all off to “advertising.”) We did the same with SuperBowl excursions, even though we didn’t have the rights to the Super Bowl, but we sent you ojn an all expense paid vacation to Hawaii and then back to New Orleans (or wherever) for the big game for 5 days, all expenses paid (*except booze) if you bought a package in 1st quarter, which was notoriously slow, ad-wise. Lots of people were happy to puke away their ad budgets on this sort of grift, and we were only too happy to help.)
Of course the television stations also had rights and the same deals, only bigger), and the team itself (which sold advertising in the stadium) also engaged in this practice, so it’s not as though we were the only source. But priced right (well below television, for instance) we made a pretty handsome living off of it.
(If I didn’t make it clear, *nothing* was free. In addition to the rights fee, we had to pay for the seats, the suite, the player appearances, the jerseys, etc. all at retail. The difference was that we could get them whereas Johnny Car Dealer on the street could not on his own.)
No. of Recommendations: 3
"The tiny market Green Bay Packers can compete with the LA Rams."
I haven't been to a game there, but I have been to Lambeau Field. It blew me away.
It is literally just a stadium in a neighborhood ( this was back in the 80s ).
While it is a big stadium, it reminded me of how as a kid growing up, every neighborhood
in my town had a school, and a football field, and the fields were hopping on
Friday nights and Saturday afternoons. My old hometown is most definitely not
like that anymore.
Without revenue sharing, there is no way that the GB franchise would not have been
wooed away by some large metro area hungry for an NFL team. I am not a Packer fan
( long suffering Lion's fan who would pull for the Packers as soon as Lion's were
eliminated from playoff possibility, lol ) but luv how they are able to have an
NFL team in such a small market. In MLB, the small market teams are basically
a feeder program for the Dodgers and Yankees and Mets. Not the case in the NFL.
