David Rosenthal

Just like back with the AAFC now, they realized they got to go meet the enemy on the field where they are.

So the plan is to expand to both Dallas and Houston immediately to meet the AFL there in Texas.

Yep.

Right down the street.

Speaking of proximity and right down the street, the next move that Roselle makes, remember, he's from L.A.

He gets the importance of media, advertising, everything.

At this point in time, the league offices were in Philadelphia because Burt Bell was in Philadelphia and he had been the owner of the Eagles.

He's like, Philadelphia is not the place where we can run the modern NFL.

Oh yeah.

Famously the stacked scheduling.

He would do it with dominoes on his kitchen table.

So Rozelle's like, no, this is not going to work.

We're going to move league headquarters to New York, to Manhattan, first to Rockefeller Center, and then to Park Avenue, where the league is to this day.

We need to be right there next to the television industry, next to the media industry, and just as important, next to the advertising industry.

Yes.

These are relationships we got to cultivate with Madison Avenue.

After he moves the headquarters to New York, Rozelle contracts the Elias Sports Bureau, which did professional statistics for Major League Baseball.

The NFL up to this point didn't have professional statistics arms that would distribute game stats and box scores out to all the newspapers across the country.

Speaking of writing about the NFL and publishing, the other thing that Roselle knows is, especially with a game like the NFL, which is a weekly drama, it's not just about like baseball with getting the daily box scores in the newspaper.

You also got to create human stories and arcs and mythology around the game.