Ben Gilbert

We also decided to update the episode with everything that has changed about the league from streaming on YouTube and Netflix and Amazon and all those deals to our updated thinking on the international strategy for the NFL and, of course, how the influx of gambling being legalized has affected the league.

Yes.

We're going to put all of these updates in a special new section right at the end of the episode.

So listeners, it is time to throw it over to myself from 2023 and onto our remastered episode of the National Football League.

Football is America's favorite sport, by far.

In fact, football is more than three times as popular as the next highest sport, basketball.

The Super Bowl is watched by over 100 million viewers every year in approximately two-thirds of American households.

My favorite Super Bowl stat is that it's the weekend with the fewest weddings planned of the year.

It is the NFL's world, and Americans are just living in it.

Especially the TV networks, which have been reduced from pillars of our nation in their heyday to largely distribution channels for the NFL today, plus some other lesser programming sprinkled in.

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

But how did we get here?

How did this game become the most valuable media property in America?

The story is one of incredible cooperation, of belief in growing the pie over a century, and just like our benchmark episode, of communist capitalism at its finest.

The NFL owners have made bold long-term bets in choosing to divide their revenues equally in a way that no other sports league has.

Of course, the NFL hasn't been free of controversy.

From the horrible recent on-field collapse of Damar Hamlin to the epidemic of CTE among former football players, players are clearly putting their lives at risk.

And the modern fan's relationship with the sport is complicated.

I personally love watching football.

It has been finely tuned over the years to be maximally, maximally entertaining.