David Rosenthal: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Nixon calls Pete Rossell personally, the president, the sitting president of the United States, and says, "Hey, we're in the playoffs this year. I think it would be a good idea for you to air playoff games." Not every game, but playoff games locally. Pete Rozelle, even in 1973, is pretty dug in on this issue that it's a bad thing and it's cannibalizing our most important thing, our gate revenue, if we do that. He says no to the sitting president. And so then Nixon goes to Congress and says, "Will you please draft legislation," which got known as the blackout ban. Because Rozelle denied the president, there is actually legislation that was passed in order to force the NFL's hand in broadcasting away games locally. This is one of the things that Rossell got super wrong. The right thing was as soon as possible, the NFL to get as much distribution as possible because the TV rights would become the most important revenue line, but also the thing that most fueled the flywheel. The more people watching the games is better for everything, for continued fandom. It's like how Disney wants you to consume the content so that you go to the parks and you buy the merch. It was one of his few strategic flaws, I think, was gating the content for too long. Yeah, and I don't know if this is directly related, but I think so much of the '70s and the '80s and the '90s were also about just like the continued growth trajectory of the incredible marriage of the NFL and television. And the money just keeps getting bigger and the stage keeps getting larger and the viewership goes up and all the things. Yeah, and this is probably worth saying that we aren't going to go blow by blow on the NFL timeline past 1970, the way we did during the Rossell era. There's a bunch of stuff to skip like the USFL and all the teams moving cities and Deflategate to focus really on the strategic moments that created the conditions of the NFL's business today.…

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