David Rosenthal

The Browns, the 49ers, and the Baltimore Colts.

Here we are now.

It's the dawn of the 50s and television installed base is here.

So, TV set sales in America in 1946, the first year after the war, were 7,000 TV sets sold in America.

In 1947, there were 14,000 TV sets sold, so the market doubled.

In 1948, there were 172,000 television sets sold, and it only grew exponentially from there.

Oh, I love that you looked this up.

By this point in the early 50s, there are 25 million homes in America with a television set sold.

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.