Ben Gilbert

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.

So it was one of his few strategic flaws, I think, was gating the content for too long.

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 Roselle 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.

Yes, this is my biggest criticism.

The thing that got them here, this league first mentality, is eroding because of the way that the revenue splits are happening.

So you look at the local stadium sponsorships, you look at every stadium is dedicating more and more real estate to luxury suites.

The local merchandise sold in the stadiums is local revenue.

And so the teams are making more and more money locally.

So a greater percentage is coming from things the teams are doing on their own.

And you got to wonder if that individualistic, I'm Jerry Jones and the Cowboys deserve all the revenue mindset will be the thing that eventually kind of causes them to get unseated in some way.

Yeah, this is a great place to talk about that.

Let's go to 1993 and talk about the first time free agency and the salary cap comes into the NFL, how that's computed and how that impacts the sort of leverage going forward.

The league has been negotiating with the Players Association for a while, I think since the 60s, in various collective bargaining agreements.

But the 1993 one is unique.

The NFL didn't really have free agency for a while.

And in 1993, players finally got it, at least as long as a player had been in the league for four years.