Former NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle’s genius will be validated once again this weekend, when teams from tiny Green Bay, shrimpy Buffalo and the modest cities of Kansas City and Baltimore appear in the second round of the NFL’s massively popular Super Bowl tournament.
Rozelle, who died in Rancho Santa Fe in 1996, had small-market clubs in mind in the 1960s and 1970s when he coaxed owners of NFL teams in big media markets to agree to the almost unthinkable:
Share all TV money on equal terms with the clubs in relatively puny markets.
A football collective for club owners. That’s what Rozelle had in mind.
“He said that, for the strength of the league, they had to share the money equally or the league would go to hell,” Jim Kensil, a former Associated Press sportswriter, told the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame.
Advocating for “league-think,” Rozelle fostered economic cooperation that led to better football competition.
He argued presciently that if the league auctioned off its telecasts as a single entity, the NFL pie would grow just fine.
He wanted fans in every market to believe their team would get a fair shake.
The NFL wasn’t so cuddly in how it funded the venues in which its teams played, as San Diegans discovered. NFL sharps perfected the art of shaking down cities and states for stadium subsidies, pitting municipalities against one another. If keepers of the public purse didn’t meet the NFL’s price, the league facilitated a club’s relocation to another city.
But, for the teams in small markets similar to San Diego and even much smaller, the NFL’s various economic rules — not just massive revenue sharing but also a hard salary cap, a salary floor and the franchise tag — have provided better opportunities for on-field success than their counterparts in Major League Baseball have received the past three decades.
Notice that when the NFL’s four divisional-round games kick off this weekend, clubs from Baltimore (29th in Nielsen’s…
