Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Acquired Podcast on the NFL (with Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal)
05 Feb 2025
Chapter 1: What is the Acquired Podcast and who are its hosts?
Yes.
This is kind of a freebie for us because normally I would have had to do a ton of research and that has now fallen on both of your shoulders. So Ben and David, you guys are the hosts of Acquired. Does it get back to you how much we talk about Acquired? Yes. Oh, good. Good, good, good. We never know if we're in a vacuum or not.
I know. Even my Hermes hiccup seemed to have made its way back.
Because you liked it so much and you wanted to buy one of the old bags.
And I stand by it.
I don't think there's anything wrong with liking one of those.
Right? Thank you.
It is a truly unique thing in the world, and they make it by hand, and it's special.
Wait, why'd you get in trouble? I was unrelatable.
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Chapter 2: How did Ben and David start the Acquired Podcast?
It was $900 grand a year for however many teams.
And what actually ends up happening is all of it, or at least half of it, goes to the New York Giants because they're the most harmed from the Jets joining in the same city.
Oh, interesting. So they didn't do that evenly.
No. Basically, Al Davis is a gangster. Wow. So this is where anyone with less than a 50,000 seat stadium needs to upgrade. They're like, this is the big times now. We're signing these huge TV deals. Once this is in place after the merger, two things happen.
One is the Super Bowl, which we can get to in a sec. Arguably the more important one is Monday Night Football. That starts in 68? Right around there. One of the other just incredible inventions of the NFL was they invent more football.
And prior to that, are they only playing on Friday and Sunday? They're only playing on Sundays. Which is a bad spot. When they originally conceived of this, it was no one watches TV on Sundays. So where can we get airtime? Cheap real estate.
Monday Night Football is the first time there's only one game happening at a time. So there's one nationally televised game. Before it was, oh, there would be like a game of the week that maybe more markets would see than others. But they're all happening at the same time. They do the deal with Rune Arledge and ABC to create Monday Night Football.
That basically invents the modern football telecast.
Eight and a half million dollars per year that ABC pays the league for one game per week. So it's $500,000 per game, which today seems like tiny. It's very large relative to the other TV contract. They're basically saying because it's one game, because it's primetime, this is a really expensive slot.
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