David Rosenthal

man, did history turn on a knife point.

For the NFL's sake, from their perspective, thank God, A, the AAFC went into business and forced the NFL into a competitive response to expand, to change the game, and to start to discover and understand this league-first mentality.

And then also, thank God, they beat them by the end of the 40s and the beginning of the 50s because now the NFL is the only game in town

for professional football in America, and they're the only national league right as TVs are showing up.

And really, actually, they're the only game in town for national sports television programming, period.

Because there are other sports, most notably baseball, as we've been talking about.

But baseball...

If anything, they were a victim of their own success because it was the dominant professional sport.

They made so much better attendance numbers.

They had all the games, 162.

The gate, the ticket sales were so important to baseball that with the admin of television, the baseball owners thought television was bad.

And they end up fighting it.

Indeed, baseball had a lot to lose.

And to be fair to all of them, in the early days, and I think for a long time, local market home television airing of home games absolutely depressed in-person attendance.

It would later take a presidential order from Richard Nixon to end the home blackouts.

And even then, only if the home games were sold out would the blackout be lifted.

It wasn't until after September 11th that blackouts were lifted, even if the home game wasn't sold out.

But it's a mess.

But Ben, as you say, in the 50s, these early television experiments are being run with sports.

And like, it is pretty bad.