David Rosenthal

And it really did depress attendance.

A saying ends up being developed in baseball that, sadly for baseball, they stuck to for a very, very long time, that radio wets the appetite, television satiates it.

Hmm.

It's a new revenue stream, but it's hurting the golden goose of ticket sales.

They did have a TV deal, but I think it was $5,000.

Yeah.

This is the thing.

Football, even amongst the individual teams, kept experimenting through the early 50s, whereas baseball basically shut it down and turned away from TV.

And one of the things that they figure out is, oh, television broadcasts depress the gate at home, but there's strong demand in local markets to see the team's away games when they're traveling.

And so for the first few years, that's the main model of television broadcasts of the NFL is just showing away games.

So this becomes a pretty meaningful revenue stream, even though, as you say, it would be a long time before TV would surpass the gate in revenue for the NFL.

By the end of the 50s, the league as a whole, with all the 12 separate contracts, was making over a million dollars in TV revenue annually, whereas at the beginning of the decade, it was less than $100,000.

And it also becomes clear that certain football games...

There's like a really big audience on TV for them.

In particular, the 1958 NFL championship game known as the quote greatest game ever played between the Giants and the Colts led by Johnny Unitas, a sudden death overtime dramatic win garners 45 million TV viewers across the country, including President Eisenhower.

national broadcast of the NFL championship game that year.

But 45 million viewers.

This was unprecedented.

There is a huge opportunity for professional football and television.

Yes.