In the late 1960s, as their game began to grow rapidly, Commissioner Pete Rozelle and his good friend, then Browns owner Art Modell, who doubled as the league president, began to see how perfect the NFL was for TV and what that may mean going forward.
Indeed, the sky seemed to be the limit in their eyes.
They were visionaries in this realm, to be sure, but even with that, there was no way they could have seen just how high the sky really was.
The NFL has grown exponentially — on steroids, no less. Whenever their is live league action on TV, whatever it is, the ratings for it blow everything else out of the water, no matter what that programming is.
The league has gotten so huge, in fact, that even something other than games draws astronomical ratings.
Welcome to the NFL Draft, this year in Green Bay, which begins Thursday night with the first round, the jewel of the proceedings, continues Friday night with the second and third rounds and concludes Saturday with rounds four through seven. It will run up against the NBA playoffs, the bellwether of that league, all three days and will
annihilate it in the ratings. Those games, which are extraordinarily popular, entertaining and exciting, might as well be a PBS special on tungsten. The audience will be reduced greatly. It will pale in comparison. Sports fans are sports fans in that they watch all the sports, but when the the NFL Draft is on, they put all the other sports to the side and lock into the selection process of the pro football’s new wave of players.
You see, the NFL is the only pro sports entity that has a sport within a sport. That’s the draft. The NBA Draft draws some eyes, and so does the Major League Baseball Draft, but the NFL Draft is so much more attractive — it has lapped the other drafts several times over, and then some — that hundreds of thousands of people stand out in the potential —even likely — freezing cold of late April in the upper Midwest, as they will next three days around Lambeau Field, to see it live — that is, if they have binoculars or a telescope, or both. But they couldn’t care less, for they will be there, right in the middle of it all.
There are draftniks who don’t watch any NFL games but only the draft, and as soon as this year’s draft is over, they will begin focusing fully on next year’s draft. They couldn’t care less about the games, for they just get in the way.
Somewhere, Rozelle and Modell are looking down on all this in utter disbelieve. Fifty-five years ago, in 1970 when the NFL’s merger with the AFL was being fully completed, fans found out who their team picked in the draft when they turned on the 6’oclock evening news and watched the three-minute sports report . . . at the tail end of the half-hour, right after the news and weather, and just before the network news. Gib Shanley on Channel 5 had to talk as fast as an auctioneer to get it all in.
As Browns fans were eating their supper on TV trays in the living room in front of the tube, they gagged on their meat loaf when they learned their team had traded future Pro Football Hall of Famer Paul Warfield, the best receiver in the game, to the Miami Dolphins for their No. 3 overall draft pick, which they used to take Purdue quarterback Mike Phipps.
What?!!!!!
Just think how that would be covered today on the telecast of the draft. Mel Kiper’s hair would stand straight up.
Steve King
