The NFL routinely dominates TV ratings. How did the league become the behemoth it is today?

It was a simple third-down play that helped build the world’s most powerful TV empire.

Under the lights at old Yankee Stadium in late December 1958, Baltimore Colts quarterback Johnny Unitas took the snap with 6:45 remaining in overtime and handed the football to fullback Alan “The Horse” Ameche, who plunged through the New York Giants defense for a 1-yard touchdown to seal the 23-17 victory.

More than 64,000 fans inside the stadium saw the first overtime championship game in NFL history, with hundreds storming the field, but more importantly, an estimated 45 million watched it live on NBC.

Billed as “the greatest game ever played” — despite actually being a relatively sloppy affair with seven turnovers — the 1958 NFL championship game was one of the critical moments in the league’s long march toward television dominance.

“That sort of captured everyone’s attention, that this could be a big television sport,” said Brian Rolapp, the NFL’s chief media and business officer.

Today, the NFL clobbers everything else on American television for viewership, and it’s not even close. The league has recovered from its 2020 pandemic downturn and a modest slippage after 2015 — the NFL’s peak year for live game viewership average at 18.1 million — to own TV on any day of the week it’s played.

The league opened its 2022 season with another wave of enormous viewership, with an average of 18.5 million people watching Week 1’s games. In Week 2, Amazon garnered a better-than-predicted 13 million viewers, per Nielsen, for the opening “Thursday Night Football” stream behind the ecommerce giant’s Prime Video paywall. Numbers like that are why the TV networks and tech giants are paying the NFL a combined $113 billion through 2033 for the right to broadcast and stream live games.

“The league’s done a great job evolving the game to be compatible with television,” said Patrick Crakes, a former Fox Sports executive turned media consultant. “Everything the league does is about television. They’re married. TV helped birth the NFL, and now the NFL sustains TV.”

Beyond the appeal of the game itself, how did the NFL become such a television behemoth?

It’s both a simple and complex story, but ultimately, it’s about the symbiotic relationship between the game and the medium. Here are a few of the important milestones and personalities that helped shape the NFL and television as we know them today.

TV development

The league was created and maturing at the right time in history.

The NFL, birthed in an Ohio automobile showroom in 1920, labored in college football’s shadow for its first few decades, relying on newspaper accounts and radio broadcasts to reach fans not at the ballpark. And while the NFL was finding its footing in big and small mostly Midwest markets during the Roaring Twenties and subsequent Great Depression, television was being born in various labs and classrooms around the world.

The first NFL game on television occurred when NBC — using two cameras — aired the Brooklyn Dodgers (a team that folded in 1945) beating the Philadelphia Eagles, 23-14, at Ebbets Field on Oct. 22, 1939. It aired only in New York and reached a reported 500 to 1,000 viewers, mostly via NBC’s experimental station W2XBS which today is WNBC.

World War II slowed television development and commercialization, but after the war, TV began its rapid growth. By 1948, an estimated 2 million TV sets were in American homes, more than a third of them in New York City. That grew to about 6 million in 1950 and 60 million by 1960.

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Today, there are more than 121 million U.S. TV households — most with more than one set or device — according to Nielsen, and 60 percent of U.S. homes have a connected or smart TV now.

The first NFL championship game on TV was the Eagles’ 7-0 win over the Chicago Cardinals at Philly’s Shibe Park on Dec. 19, 1948. It aired on ABC. A year earlier, a World Series game aired on TV for the first time. Baseball still reigned supreme, but the cracks were appearing, and the NFL would wrest the so-called national pastime away from Major League Baseball over the next couple of decades.

Color TV arrived in 1954, with an RCA set priced at $1,000 (or about $11,000 in today’s inflation-adjusted dollars). Black-and-white sets remained much cheaper, even if not cheap. Prices would fall as technology improved, competition and demand picked up, and options proliferated — all things that helped the NFL reach more households.

The first NFL game broadcast in color was on Thanksgiving Day in 1965 for a Baltimore Colts-Detroit Lions tie on CBS, and color TVs overtook black-and-white models by the early 1970s. The ensuing decades would bring the proliferation of cable and streaming, high-definition TVs, the internet and social media, and satellite TV — allowing fans to get out-of-market games via DirecTV.

The league also launched its own channel, the NFL Network, in 2003 to meet and grow fan demand for league content, and then added the RedZone whip-around highlight channel on Sundays.

TV also ushered in live game broadcast elements we’re so used to today that make it easier to watch and understand games: Instant replay, statistics, score bugs and tickers, down and distance and timeout bugs, slow motion, unique camera angles, mic’d players and coaches, drones, etc.

Rights deals

After many small-market teams came and went in the early years, the NFL was on relatively solid footing after World War II. Television contracts, though, were not yet in the seven-figure range with the major networks (including DuMont, which was a major NFL broadcaster until its rapid demise by the mid-1950s).

It was the American Football League, launched in 1960 by a consortium of wealthy businessmen, that one-upped the NFL by negotiating a league-wide television deal with ABC that split revenue among the league’s eight teams — something NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle recognized as a template the NFL needed to adopt, too.

The 1960 AFL deal with ABC paid it about $2.1 million a season.

“It really gave them a leg up to compete with the NFL,” said Jon Kendle, vice president of archives, education and football information at the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

At the time, the NFL’s 13 teams had negotiated their own television broadcast rights deals, mostly with CBS. Problem was, negotiating a single national TV deal for all the teams collectively ran afoul of federal antitrust laws.

Rozelle moved quickly to lobby Congress for an exemption, and within a couple of months, the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 was signed by President Kennedy.

“(NFL games on TV) were distributed all over, competing against each other,” Rolapp said. “Pete Rozelle really pushed all of the rights together and to share the money equally. That became a huge milestone.”

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The law became one of the most important moments in league and sports history because it set the stage for a typhoon of television network money.

“It guaranteed, at least at that level, an opportunity for competitive balance,” said Michael MacCambridge, author of the 2004 book “America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation.”

“It was absolutely crucial because what it means was as the TV money started growing in the ‘60s and ‘70s, there already was a framework that the Green Bay Packers could compete with the New York Giants,” MacCambridge said. “That became a crucial component of the growth that followed.”

Once the feds were mollified, the NFL was able to negotiate significantly larger TV deals, starting with $14 million a year from CBS in 1964, which increased to nearly $19 million a season two years later.

“(The antitrust exemption) combined with pooling of national revenue solidified the model of the growth of the NFL,” Rolapp said.

Sharing the millions and then billions equally undergirded a financial system intended to create parity so that small and large market teams could equally compete for talent — and it’s largely worked.

“It’s why you have the Bengals in the Super Bowl when you wouldn’t have thought that the year before,” Rolapp said.

After navigating another rival for eyeballs and TV money in the mid-1980s (the USFL), the NFL reached another milestone with the 1987 deals to put games on cable, starting with ESPN and Turner-owned TNT for Sunday night games. There’d been concern that not being on broadcast television, and putting games on pay TV, could jeopardize viewership and revenue. The fears were unfounded.

“That clearly not only worked, but it also led to the arrival of ESPN as a force,” Rolapp said, adding that it helped usher in the NFL being a round-the-clock, all-year topic for sports television and radio.

By the 1990s, NFL TV contract financials began to replace the M with Bs — billions of dollars instead of millions for multi-year deals. And now the deals pay a billion or more per season.

The media contract that helped usher in the modern age of NFL television domination came in 1993 when fledgling national network Fox, on the air only since 1986, swooped in to grab the NFC package from CBS for a then-record $1.6 billion deal. Fox concurrently engaged in sweeping deals to land dozens of local affiliate TV stations to give it national coverage in its NFL markets.

Having live games on multiple national networks, with hefty rights payments, has been the model that NFL has relied upon for decades: Get live games into as many households as possible.

“As the NFL evolved from 1960 to today, that model is a model we still follow,” Rolapp said. “We have followed that blueprint put in place since the early 1960s.”

It took the right mix of executives to make that plan work.

Personalities

While Bert Bell, the former Eagles and Steelers owner who was NFL commissioner from 1946-59, pioneered some of the foundational elements critical to the league today, it was his successor who ushered pro football firmly into the TV age.

“You start with Pete Rozelle. Bert Bell was not the visionary Pete Rozelle was,” said Jon Lewis, who has analyzed sports viewership since 2006 as founder of Sports Media Watch. “The NFL isn’t what it is today with Pete Rozelle. He understood the importance of media.”

Rozelle, who was commissioner from 1960-89, was a former public relations executive who took over the NFL’s top leadership role at age 33. His tenure would include navigating competition and eventual merger with the rival American Football League, which dramatically expanded the NFL’s footprint nationally and created the Super Bowl.

He also is credited with the creation of “Monday Night Football” — more on that later.

And, obviously, Rozelle gets much credit for the aforementioned TV rights ecosystem that still powers major-league sports today.

“Pete Rozelle created a formula that you’d have to be really, really bad to screw up,” Lewis said. “The NFL has been fortunate to have visionary thinkers who have contributed to the league, to where it can withstand incompetence. The foundation that was built all those years ago is as good as any league.”

Rozelle had NFL staffers and team owners that supported his efforts, and network executives who were equally imaginative and willing to take risks, particularly at ABC with Roone Arledge.

“Roone Arledge was a visionary who wanted to create something overlooked — sports as spectacle on TV,” Lewis said. “It’s taken for granted now that NFL games are an event. When (MNF) was on ABC, it was like NBA Finals or World Series on network TV. When the networks are clearing out prime-time space on a weeknight, that meant something then. It still does. It’s part of the nightly routine.”

Another figure — one not especially beloved today in Cleveland — that was instrumental in the NFL’s TV growth was Browns owner Art Modell, a television and advertising executive who helped the league strike its lucrative broadcast deals and various innovations.

“He had an insight into that business,” Kendle said. “It was a no-brainer putting him as head of the league’s broadcasting committee.”

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Crakes credits Fox founder Rupert Murdoch — certainly a polarizing figure in other respects — and his top sports lieutenant, David Hill, for recognizing NFL games were undervalued and convincing the NFL to give the network a shot.

“(Murdoch) explained it to the league, and the league got it,” Crakes said. “It was a validation of the incremental growth of content generation, which now occurs at lightspeed. The league took a risk because they were moving from an established broadcast partner to a new broadcast partner.”

Fox agreed to pay the NFL $1.5 billion for a four-year deal starting in 1994.

“Fox didn’t reinvent the NFL as much as unlocked its potential,” Crakes said. “Everyone drafted off of (the Fox deal).”

Another TV development that helped the NFL continue its upward trajectory was Fox hiring popular former Oakland Raiders coach John Madden in 1994 to be its lead color commentator for games. His avuncular nature and expressions — made even more famous by the video game franchise that bears his name — lent itself to helping casual fans better understand football.

Madden, who died in 2021 after a broadcast career that saw him on all four major networks, made the game’s X’s and O’s relatable to viewers.

“It was a way for the game to be taught to the American public in a way that it hadn’t before,” Kendle said. “It helped a generation of fans understand the game in a way their parents didn’t.”

‘Monday Night Football’

While the 1958 title game gets a lot of credit for helping the NFL become a television product, the creation of a national marquee weeknight game took that idea to the next level.

With backing from Arledge, ABC launched “Monday Night Football” and it debuted on Sept. 21, 1970, with the Cleveland Browns beating Joe Namath and the New York Jets in a thriller before a national audience. It was the first national game after the AFL-NFL merger was completed.

Rozelle had tried pitching the concept of a prime-time national weekday game, but the networks were not interested — which sounds bonkers knowing what we know today — until ABC agreed to a deal. Broadcasters didn’t believe they could make as much money with pro football as they could with traditional programming on Monday night — a bloc devoted to movies and to shows such as “The Carol Burnett Show” and “Mayberry R.F.D.”

Launched in 1970, “Monday Night Football” took the NFL into prime-time weeknights, a space usually reserved for non-sports programming. (Bill Streicher / USA Today)

“It was crazy at the time because prime time was so lucrative,” Rolapp said.

The Monday night game offered the newly expanded NFL — now at 26 teams — a showcase for its product, further growing its audience. And the showcase proved to be the right mix of drama, action, and storytelling.

“What Roone Arledge and ‘Monday Night Football’ did was tap into the larger dramatic narrative,” MacCambridge said. “Arledge recognized sports as entertainment and not just a final score.”

NFL Films

It’s storytelling that’s a secret ingredient of NFL broadcast success, and nothing personifies that more than NFL Films.

Created independently by Ed Sabol in 1962, the company quickly landed deals to film early NFL title games and then to create highlight films for all teams. The league bought the company in 1965.

The slickly packaged and operatic music used by NFL Films, with dramatic narration, made for a powerful public relations — propaganda, some say — unit for the league. The productions gave pro football a sheen of mystique and even artistry in the public imagination, along with humor from blooper videos.

NFL Films also provided the early highlight clips for use in newscasts and at halftime of national games — something fans hadn’t experienced before. Howard Cosell narrating NFL Films highlights during “Monday Night Football” set the stage for what we see almost around the clock with NFL coverage today.

“That was a very novel idea back then,” Rolapp said. “It was the way people learned about games outside of the games they watched in their market.”

The violent poetry on film would come to define the image of the NFL in the minds of many fans — and TV viewers.

“It’s hard to overestimate the value of NFL Films,” MacCambridge said. “Rozelle recognized NFL Films wasn’t going to make money but there was an ineffable benefit in increasing the prestige and profile of the league.”

It broadened the base of pro football’s audience, he added.

“It was the first chance in the week for fans, and the teams themselves, to see what other teams were doing,” MacCambridge said.

The artful storytelling — sometimes a little cringy by today’s standards, especially with what we now know about brain injuries — led to Ed Sabol and son Steve Sabol being inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame as contributors.

“Even if you weren’t a fan of the NFL, it’s a story, a human story and it can suck even a non-fan in,” Crakes said, “the unifying human principles of effort and risk and defeat and comeback and victory, sometimes victory even when you don’t win.”

The game itself

Football has a major leg up over other sports on TV because of the number of games played each season. Today, each team plays a 17-game season.

“One game in football carries the same competitive weight as nine or 10 baseball games,” MacCambridge said. “The NFL was sage in using that scarcity as strength.”

In MLB, it’s 162 games and the NBA and NHL play 82 per team.

“Scarcity creates value,” Crakes said. “There are only so many games. Every game matters.”

NFL games are on national TV networks (and Amazon Prime) while most live games in the other sports rely on regional sports networks to get most of their games in front of viewers.

“The NFL is a very national game. Most of the action is right there in a Sunday window,” Crakes said. “That creates urgency and excitement. People turn it on and leave it on.”

That means the TV networks and streamers can charge more for advertising airtime during games, which in turn increases the value of the NFL — hence, the $113 billion in fresh media deals.

“Given the NFL’s more scarce inventory in relation to the other sports, they have the ability to keep interest over the course of the regular season and charge a high premium for ads,” said Scott Robson, a senior research analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence. “It’s kind of shocking to see how much the NFL has surpassed all other programming on TV.”

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Football is television-friendly and has been adopted over the years to become even more so. The action is horizontal on the screen, and it’s paced so that a few seconds of action are spaced between breaks that allow for more commercials than other sports. Timeouts match up with commercial airtime.

“The way it’s organized on-screen, it’s perfect for television,” Crakes said.

And while it may be uncomfortable to think about, violence is at the core of the game as much as athletic artistry, star players, and hometown loyalty.

“I would argue that it is the most unique American sport, the NFL,” said Jane McManus, executive director of Seton Hall’s Center for Sports Media. “It catches the zeitgeist of the hypermasculinity in the American culture right now. It is America in a three-hour broadcast package. It is this overwrought, capitalistic, beautiful, aggressive version of America in a sense. We glorify in that consumption.”

MacCambridge also credits the NFL expansion to a 16-game schedule in 1978 as a key decision for TV domination. Why? Because it was the advent of slotted scheduling, an idea championed by Rozelle’s longtime aide, Jim Kensil.

What it means is that if a team finished first last year, it would play other top finishers from that season. And bad teams played other clubs that struggled the season prior.

“It helped create balance,” MacCambridge said. “In the process, it also created more marquee match-ups for television.”

Viewership

So exactly how powerful is the NFL as a television property?

Last year, 48 of the top 50 U.S. programs by audience were NFL games. The NFL’s 2022 opening week resulted in several breathless network viewership announcements, such as ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” audience of nearly 20 million being its best since 2009.

NFL regular-season games last season averaged 17.1 million viewers, marking continued recovery after the drop-off from 2015’s record high.

It’s the prime-time spectacle games on Sunday, Monday, and Thursday nights, along with special holiday broadcasts on Thanksgiving and now Christmas, that produce even gaudier numbers. A Las Vegas Raiders-Dallas Cowboys game on Thanksgiving last year topped 40 million viewers. The Super Bowl has become a national spectacle — and showcase for TV commercials — that draws 100 million-plus casual and non-fans.

NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” averaged 19.3 million viewers last season, and nothing outside of football approached that on American TV. Only two non-sports programs last season averaged more than 10 million viewers: “NCIS” averaged 10.9 million and “FBI” averaged 10.3 million.

Looking back 40 years, the best TV viewership average in 1982 was 21.2 million for “60 Minutes” and 20.4 million for “Dallas” on CBS. “Monday Night Football” on ABC averaged 16.7 million — sandwiched between “The A-Team” and “The Jeffersons.”

A decade later, “60 Minutes” was still atop its perch at 20.3 million with “Roseanne” second at 19.2 million on ABC. By 2012, “American Idol” on Fox averaged 18 million viewers to lead TV audiences.

Nothing on TV draws like that anymore except the NFL.

Part of that is because Americans watch less TV overall and continue to drop cable. Tens of millions fewer U.S. households have cable compared to a few years ago, and while streaming is on the rise, it’s not replaced those eyeballs. Yet even amid all that, particularly the proliferation of channels and entertainment options in recent years that has reduced overall TV viewership, the NFL has managed to grow or at least stay flat.

The NFL has had relative labor peace, particularly compared to other major leagues, and its much-too-late deal to allow player free agency in 1993 contributed to the game’s growth and fan affinity for it. Teams could more easily sign big stars, and having elite talent draws TV viewers.

The NFL also remains popular despite bad news, scandals and other negatives.

“The NFL is beyond the point where it has to really worry about what people think about it,” Lewis said of the league’s Teflon status when it comes to brain injuries, domestic and sexual violence, social justice concerns, and other problems that don’t result in viewership declines. “I can’t see any controversy, even concussions, making a meaningful dent in this league’s popularity in the immediate future.

“That’s not necessarily a great thing,” Lewis added. “It’s not a moral good.”

Domestic and sexual violence cases — such as the DeShaun Watson situation in Cleveland — don’t seem to damage the NFL’s popularity, even among women, who make up nearly half the league’s fanbase.

“Nothing on TV averages more women viewers than the NFL,” Lewis said. “What other league appeals to so many different groups?”

The future

Can the league maintain its TV superiority?

“The NFL is more popular and relevant now than it’s ever been compared to everything else on TV. It doesn’t seem like that’s going to change any time soon,” Lewis said.

MacCambridge echoed that.

“I think they can. I think as long as there is fantasy football and gambling and sports bars, I think they can,” he said.

Like other sports, the NFL’s television dominance is partially fueled by games outside the game — video games, fantasy sports, and gambling. The Next Gen stats are aimed, at least in part, at those TV viewers and fans.

“The wild card is sports betting. I think that heightened real-time interest in live sporting events,” McManus said. Gambling and fantasy football can keep the NFL insulated from future downturns, she said.

Industry data backs that up: The American Gaming Association estimates a record 46.6 million Americans will bet on NFL games this season, and the Fantasy Sports & Gaming Association estimates about 20 percent of U.S. adults play fantasy sports.

The NFL also has leaned into marketing toward children with special Nickelodeon simulcasts and other content and goods.

The league’s growth strategy includes things such as more international games, pumping out social media content, a growing sea of licensed retail merchandise and apparel, video games, collectibles, and making the league’s offseason calendar — the draft, free agency, mini-camps, etc. — into must-see round-the-clock news.

All of that helps TV viewership, the thinking goes. And it’ll support streaming as the NFL explores that method of delivering live games to a younger fanbase.

It’s not abandoning traditional TV anytime soon, although if the Amazon deal on Thursdays proves successful, expect the successor to DirecTV’s out-of-market deal to have a streaming element.

“Linear TV is still very important. It’s not going to zero,” Rolapp said. “At the same time, you need to be on the platforms where people are spending their time.”

(Top photo: Scott Winters / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)