David Rosenthal

You've probably heard of most of those teams.

Very, very differently.

But then in 1959, right after the new AFL announces that they're going to start their league and commence operations, Burt Bell dies suddenly.

And so once again, just like back with the AAFC, the league is in crisis and forced to act.

And unlike the AAFC, things are going to be different.

A little different this time because of the television aspect.

People might know them better as the Kansas City Chiefs today.

Yes.

So Hunt, he's been studying the NFL.

He knows about the league-first mentality.

He's also been studying baseball.

He's been meeting with baseball owners, including Branch Rickey of Brooklyn Dodgers and Jackie Robinson fame, who at that point in time was out of Major League Baseball and was trying to start a third independent league.

A third independent baseball league, yes.

With some pretty radical ideas, really borrowing from the NFL and the league-first mentality, he wanted to embrace television in this new baseball league and have a radical solution where all the clubs in the league would share all of the revenue from a television deal.

Pretty crazy.

So Lamar Hunt and the new American football league, the AFL,

They take this cast aside idea from baseball and they run with it.

Hunt says, we'll just centrally negotiate one national television contract for the entire AFL and then we'll split the revenue completely equally amongst all the teams.

This is like the epitome of the league first mentality.

It'll be great for us and it'll help us compete with the NFL.