Ben Gilbert

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.

Oh, that's awesome.

It being in PDF form makes it pretty useless, but I assume it's a PDF of a physical book that exists with all the records in it.

So this announcement in June of 66, you would sort of think, okay, this now just clears the way.

The next few decades are just laid out in front of us.

There's one league, there's no real competitors.

What could possibly challenge football?