Ben Gilbert

That's an incredible leverage shift over the course of the negotiations.

And it happened in like a couple of months.

Yeah.

There are some other interesting deal points, too.

One of them is that the $18 million actually didn't go to all the NFL teams themselves.

They went to the Giants and the 49ers because those were the two teams most affected by now having another NFL team in their city.

Interesting.

That makes a lot of sense.

Because the existence of this merger now causes one of the league ownership rules to be in violation, which is no two teams can be in the same media market.

Well, we now have a problem and we need to compensate you for that.

And I think the Giants actually got more because Joe Namath was the other one in their city.

And so what you also start to see because of this deal is the real modernization of the NFL.

They decided that anyone with less than a 50,000 seat stadium needs to change that.

They said that for what football has become after this merger, modern NFL in America, that's not a suitable place to play football anymore.

And so you either need to build a new stadium or expand your stadium.

And then the other final thing that is a consolation prize for the AFL is that they actually got to bring their records over, whereas the AAFC, I don't think they did.

I don't think those counted as NFL records.

I did find, this is linked in the show notes in our sources, I kept reading about the NFL records and the NFL rulebook, and I was like, does this exist or is this theoretical?

Every year, the NFL publishes a 1,000-page PDF article

of all of the historical everything, all the scores, all the games.