The NFL

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal open this remastered edition by explaining why they returned to an episode first released in January 2023, which Ben calls "an essential part of Acquired canon." Ben gives three reasons: the NFL has become "even more of a juggernaut," the show's audience has grown so much that many listeners never heard the original, and "the ultimate Acquired universe crossover happened between the NFL and Taylor Swift." David notes the original was recorded just before that crossover. He adds a further reason: in 2026 the hosts are hosting the Super Bowl's Innovation Summit at the Super Bowl in San Francisco.

The hosts say the remaster brings the episode up to current production standards and adds a new section at the end. That section covers streaming deals with YouTube, Netflix and Amazon, their updated thinking on the NFL's international strategy, how legalized gambling has affected the league, and what David calls "the wild story of how private equity has entered the league." The material below comes from the 2023 portion of the episode.

Ben frames the episode with figures on football's place in American life. He says football is "more than three times as popular as the next highest sport, basketball," and that the Super Bowl draws over 100 million viewers a year in about two-thirds of American households. He adds that it is the weekend with the fewest weddings planned all year. In his view, TV networks have gone from "pillars of our nation" to "largely distribution channels for the NFL." His sharpest data point:

Of the top 100 TV broadcasts aired last year, 82 of them were NFL games.

Ben gives two main reasons for the league's rise: cooperation over a century built on "belief in growing the pie," and owners who made "bold long-term bets in choosing to divide their revenues equally in a way that no other sports league has." He calls this "communist capitalism at its finest," a phrase from an earlier benchmark episode.

He also names the costs. He cites Damar Hamlin's on-field collapse and "the epidemic of CTE among former football players," and says players "are clearly putting their lives at risk." Ben says he loves watching a sport that has been tuned to be "maximally entertaining," but each time he tunes in he feels cognitive dissonance, and he believes many others do too. He makes clear the episode is about the business of football, not tactics. David credits Michael McCambridge's book America's Game, calling it the definitive history of the NFL and the source for much of the research. Ben adds the standard disclaimer that this is not investment advice.

David starts the history on November 6, 1869, at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. About 25 Princeton students came to play a similar-sized group from Rutgers. The game then was close to what is now called mob or "medieval football," long played in England. Each side tried to get a ball to a spot on the other side, with no rules, any number of players, and violence "up to and including maiming and killing people," which David says happened often. Ben points out this was four years after the Civil War ended.

David says American college students were copying English public schools (similar to American private schools), which were turning the game into a codified sport. The 1869 game had 25 players a side and a round ball that could not be carried or thrown. A goal came from kicking the ball through the opponent's goal, for one point. Ben compares it to soccer with 25 players a team. Over the next five to ten years, the game spread through the Ivy League and came to be seen as a "character building experience" central to college life.

It stayed very dangerous. David says 1905 saw 19 deaths in US college football, plus a serious injury at Harvard to Theodore Roosevelt Jr., the sitting president's son. Roosevelt then called the major colleges to a summit in New York City and threatened to outlaw the game unless they made it safer. Ben suggests Roosevelt saw the nation's "best and brightest" being cut down in their prime. David says it was a fine line: the violence was part of the rite of passage, and Roosevelt probably valued the game as training for future government and military leaders.

David says the summit led to the creation of the NCAA, formed to regulate the college game and make it safer, which surprised Ben. The new body created a neutral zone and banned wedge formations. Injuries were still common and there was little padding. Ben adds that this period predates even leather helmets. The rule change David calls defining was legalizing the forward pass, which split American football from soccer and from rugby (itself a set of soccer rules from the English public school Rugby).

Ben argues the forward pass changed the sport's character. Until then the game was purely violent. Passing added a "counterbalancing force" to that violence, a beauty he compares to ballet, with moments where "the world seems to move slowly." David adds the strategic layer: playbooks, defensive coverages and audibles that no casual fan can fully grasp. College football became hugely popular and, David says, was an even bigger part of American sports then than now.

Asked whether the forward pass led to the NFL, David says no. He stresses that football was a college institution, a dangerous, war-like rite of passage for elite young men that carried a "sacred element." Professional teams appeared in the early 1900s, but they were barnstorming teams with no league or organized schedule. They were seen as second-rate and even "dirty."

David says the elite's complaint was the money, not the game. Many saw professional football as immoral because it profaned the sport with money, even though it was the same game, often played by the same people as in college. Ben sums it up: it was supposed to be amateur. David says this view held through the 1910s and 1920s.

Baseball was the only professional sport that counted. David quotes McCambridge:

To say that baseball was the number one sport in America is to imply a hierarchy where none existed.

McCambridge goes on to describe baseball as "the unquestioned national pastime, the only game that mattered," which fans saw as being as natural as air and water. David notes this was the era of the Yankees, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Baseball was openly played for money, earning revenue from ticket sales. So the objection was not to professional sport in general but to football in particular, which was seen as special.

On August 20, 1920, the heads of several barnstorming teams met at the Jordan and Hupmobile auto showroom in Canton, Ohio. They formed the American Professional Football Conference, renamed the National Football League a few years later. David names George Halas as the driving force. Halas worked for the A.E. Staley starch company in Decatur, Illinois, where his main job was to organize, coach and star for the company team, the Staleys. Ben says the first team was literally named after its sponsor. David corrects that the company was not a sponsor: its employees were the team, and Halas recruited workers who happened to be good players.

David says the founders wanted to make pro football legitimate in the public's eyes, and he lays out their three-part plan:

No signing current college players, a strict line between the college and pro game, since college players otherwise played pro under assumed names. Play the game to a high ethical and rules-based standard. Ben explains this meant unifying the rule books and customs of teams from independent clubs, the Ohio league and the New York pro league, so fans knew what to expect. Make Jim Thorpe, leader of the Canton Bulldogs, president of the league. David suggests this is probably why the meeting took place in Canton.

Ben links the first rule to today's policy. He says that 103 years later, in 2023, players still cannot go to the NFL from high school, and that going one year early is the only concession made in a hundred years.

David calls Thorpe "the GOAT," and argues the gap between Thorpe and every other athlete of his time was wider than any such gap since. Ben adds that this does not mean he would win today's NFL combine, given what sports science knew then. Thorpe was Native American, of the Sac and Fox Nation. He played at the small Carlisle Indian Industrial School under Pop Warner, the namesake of today's youth leagues, and led it to a national championship over Ivy League powerhouses, Ohio State and others. He won gold in the pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 Olympics in Sweden, in what David says was his first decathlon. Ben recalls he was also an outfielder for the New York Giants, and David adds he played basketball as well.

David points out a "deep, deep irony": the league's first star and first president was a person of color, even though professional sports and the NFL would soon become entirely white. With 14 teams and Thorpe's credibility, the league quickly became the largest pro football league in America, with little competition. Ben adds that it was formed by consolidating smaller Midwestern leagues.

David calls the '20s and '30s "an uphill battle." Ben says only three of the roughly 15 franchises from 1920 survived: the Decatur Staleys (later the Chicago Bears, named after the Cubs because they played at Wrigley Field), the Racine Cardinals, and the Green Bay Packers. Others, such as the Columbus Panhandles, Akron Pros and Chicago Tigers, folded.

David gives two reasons. First, the stigma stuck. In a widely reported 1922 speech in New York, Michigan coach Fielding Yost said:

pro football robs the great American game of many of its greatest character building qualities. The ideals of generous service, loyalty, sacrifice and wholehearted devotion to a cause are all taken away.

David grants that Yost was biased as a college coach, but says his view was still the common one. Second, most teams were in small towns. With no TV or internet, their markets were small. They met local demand but could not make much money. Ben says every one of them either folded or moved to a bigger city, except the Packers. He calls the teams "massively loss-making," usually lasting two to five years, with about 15 more teams starting and failing between the Bears' founding and the New York Giants' around 1925. David says the teams that moved to big cities played "second fiddle" to baseball. Ben adds that most didn't move at all and simply closed.

David says the early league was more open on race than it later became. Thorpe was president for only a year before a professional administrator took over, and several Black players were in the league "and it was like not a big deal." The first champions, the Akron Pros, had a Black star player and head coach, Fritz Pollard, which Ben says he loves.

In the mid-1930s, David says, "supposedly" at the urging of George Preston Marshall (owner of the Boston Braves, which became the Boston Redskins and later moved to Washington, DC), the league copied Major League Baseball's policy and pushed Black players out. Reintegration came only after World War II, and for the Redskins not until 1961. Ben links the late integration to the team keeping its name so long. He argues that Marshall was racist and also expected to lose his large Southern fan base, in a region with few NFL teams, if he integrated. Ben calls it a horrible thing that an all-white team was a strategic advantage.

David says World War II changed both America and the NFL. Returning soldiers and the GI Bill created a new middle class that hadn't gone to elite colleges. They had jobs, spare income, radios and soon TVs, and they wanted entertainment. David argues they didn't share the old elite's attachment to college football. Ben says that, for the first time, owners had a real business opportunity. Until then, owning a team meant covering losses, whether personally, through partners, family or a company, and owners did it purely "for the love of the game."

David says the NFL probably would not have grabbed this opportunity "except their hand was forced." The league was in what David thinks were only eight cities. Ben lists the teams: the Cardinals, Bears, Packers, Giants, Lions, Redskins (by then in Washington), Eagles, Steelers and the Cleveland Rams, owned by the "forward-thinking" Dan Reeves. Wealthy business people across the country wanted teams, but the owners refused to expand. In 1944 those would-be owners founded their own league, the All-America Football Conference.

David describes the AAFC as having "pretty serious firepower." A leading Chicago sports journalist organized it. Its backers included actor Don Ameche in Los Angeles and wealthy businessmen in San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Miami. It also signed legendary Ohio State coach Paul Brown, back from the war, to coach a Cleveland team named after him, the Browns. Ben calls this the first real threat in the modern era of two popular pro teams in one city. David says the Rams were sure to lose that fight.

Reeves wanted to move the Rams to Los Angeles and make the NFL truly national. But moving a team required unanimous owner approval, and the owners said no. Ben sees their logic: after years of losses and just as a real business was emerging, they didn't want to fly teams to LA for road games. Then, just before the January 1946 annual meeting, Dan Topping defected to the AAFC. Topping owned the NFL's Brooklyn Dodgers and baseball's New York Yankees, and was the league's most prominent and wealthiest owner.

David says the owners treated this as an "existential threat." They removed the commissioner and chose one of their own, Philadelphia Eagles owner Bert Bell, to unite them. Their three-part response:

Meet the AAFC on its own ground by going national and moving to the West Coast and California. Put out a better product on the field than the AAFC. For the first time, promote the game at least as well as the AAFC did, winning fans' hearts and minds.

David says Reeves and the Rams covered the first and third points. Bell quickly got approval for the move to California. David argues it was the right call: when the 1946 season started, the new Browns drew 60,000 fans to their first home game, more than the Rams drew in the whole previous season.

Ben explains why Cleveland was so excited about Paul Brown. He had coached at Ohio State and a Navy team, and was known for getting teams into shape. He also expected players to know the mental side of the game as well as the physical side. Brown made players memorize the playbook and take written tests on plays, rules and strategy. Ben says Brown cut players who failed, "no matter how good they were."

Ben calls Brown the first to treat football as something that "could be a science," almost "the first money baller." He says Brown was among the first coaches to study game film, spot patterns in plays, and tally by hand what worked against each opponent and what didn't. David goes further:

Paul Brown was the first modern, not just football coach, but I think sports coach period in America.

The section opens with Ben's assessment of Paul Brown. He cautions that "every human is flawed" and that Brown should not be made out to be a messiah, but credits him as basically the first coach to start racially integrating his team, on the logic that having the best players is how you win. Ben adds a second innovation: Brown employed a year-round staff of assistant coaches, which Ben recalls as six people in addition to Brown, something no other team did.

David notes that the AAFC planned to be an integrated league from the start, and Ben calls that counter-positioning against the NFL. According to David, the NFL, and the Redskins especially, had little interest in integrating. The Rams' move to Los Angeles forced the question. The LA Coliseum was publicly owned and controlled, then as now, by the LA Coliseum Commission. When the Rams asked to play there, the commission said it would not let a segregated home team use the stadium.

The hosts present the Rams' response mainly as public relations. David says the team agreed right away and announced it would sign Kenny Washington, a pre-war hero in Los Angeles and a star for the UCLA football team. He credits part of this strategy to a young Rams intern, Pete Rozelle. Ben sets Rozelle aside for later, and he becomes central to the end of this section.

Ben then sums up the state of play. The NFL is an eight-team league, the Rams have moved from Cleveland to LA, and the new league (called the "AFC" in this part of the transcript, which is the AAFC) has started. David dates both the AAFC's start and the Rams' move to 1946. Ben's list of AAFC teams includes the Cleveland Browns, the New York Yankees and Brooklyn Dodgers football teams (David notes the latter had defected from the NFL), the Buffalo Bisons, the Miami Seahawks (unrelated to the Seattle Seahawks, the name was simply reused), the San Francisco 49ers, the Los Angeles Dons and the Chicago Rockets. That gave Los Angeles two teams, one in each league.

Ben's view is that the AAFC lasted only four years but changed the game a great deal. Competition pushed the NFL into moves that served its own interests but that it would not have made unprompted. He also calls it the first time the league learned a lasting lesson:

the football that people will watch is the most entertaining game.

David says this lesson was not obvious in advance: the most entertaining game is "the most competitive game on the field." Brown's success proves it from the other side. His Browns were "too good," winning all four AAFC championships and losing only four games in four years, and the league became boring. David describes fans of opposing teams asking why they would bother showing up for a foregone result. Ben, who grew up a modern Browns fan, jokes that he has never said such a thing about the Browns before.

There is a brief disagreement about continuity. David says the current Browns are not the old Browns. Ben counters that they are: the franchise and its records stayed in Cleveland, and the Baltimore Ravens are officially a new team founded in the '90s, even though they took the front office, team and ownership. David calls this "some serious rereading of history" by the NFL.

Ben's main point is that the NFL avoided a Browns-style dynasty by luck, not design. Nothing in its structure prevented it. Seeing the AAFC's example of boring football with one dominant team, the NFL had to make enough equality between teams to keep games competitive a core principle.

David explains why this mattered so much at the time. There was radio but almost no TV yet. In the first five years after World War II, the installed base of television was only starting to spread, so the business ran on ticket sales and in-person attendance. He doubts the AAFC's dominant-Browns model would ever work, but argues it would at least be survivable today, when fans can watch on TV. Back then teams had to put "butts in seats." He describes a feedback loop: a team that does not make money cannot afford quality play, which tips the competitive balance even further.

Ben frames competitiveness as capacity use. With, for example, eight teams in 40,000-seat stadiums, a league can sell 160,000 seats each weekend, and the goal is to fill every one by making every game worth attending. He adds that the gate stayed the main revenue source until 1977, the first year the NFL earned more from television than from ticket sales, about 30 years after the period under discussion. David says he had not realized it took that long.

That brings the hosts to Bert Bell, the newly appointed NFL commissioner, who turned the lesson into a mantra while organizing the owners against the AAFC. David notes it later became the title of a movie:

On any given Sunday, any team in the league should be able to beat any other team.

David says Bell got all the owners to agree that the league could only survive and prosper if no team became so dominant that it produced "a Cleveland Browns situation."

Ben asks what the NFL did structurally. David names two measures. The first was rebuilding the schedule, which had previously been close to random, into what he calls an important strategic lever. Using the previous season's results, Bell scheduled weaker teams against each other, and stronger teams against each other, for the first half of the season. The aim was for most teams to sit near a 50/50 record at midseason, creating drama about the eventual winner even when talent varied widely across the league.