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The chapter looks at the emergence of the modern National Football League (NFL) in the 1960s. It explores the growing popularity of the players and discusses how football became the nation's favorite spectator sport. It looks into the achievements and stardom of Jim Brown. The chapter provides a detailed examination of the role of Pete Rozelle in the emergence of the image of the modern NFL. He is termed as the master architect of the modern NFL. The chapter also provides an overview of the promotional role of NFL films and the Super Bowl.

This chapter charts the National Football League's (NFL) meteoric rise, thanks to NFL Films' unwavering designation of pro football as a unique and unifying reflection of America. Fueled by a combination of sport and media's increasingly profitable symbiosis and Commissioner Pete Rozelle's image-consciousness, the NFL enhanced its marketing efforts during the 1960s and began to diversify aggressively, creating branded products that reached out to audiences beyond the white, middle-class men who composed its typical fan base. The Rozelle-era NFL solidified its prominence in American culture through its merger with the American Football League and subsequent development of the Super Bowl. This chapter examines how the NFL made connections to as many potential fans as possible by establishing national television exposure, branding various items, organizing athletic events for kids, donating to charitable causes, and creating a tourist attraction. It looks at one production that codified NFL Films' signature aesthetic practices, They Call It Pro Football, and how it situates professional football as “the sport of our time.”

This chapter examines how broadcast television helped NFL Films transform pro football from a sport that appeared primarily on Sunday telecasts and evening news recaps into a spectacle that could be consumed throughout the entire week and year. It discusses NFL Films productions designed to augment and publicize exceptional National Football League (NFL) broadcast events, specifically the annual Super Bowl and ABC's Monday Night Football. It shows how NFL Films strengthened the NFL's relationship to television to attract television viewers (and sell advertising time) around the clock. The company's productions demonstrated that nonlive sports television programming could have appeal throughout the week and throughout the year. Furthermore, NFL Films anticipated and precipitated the continuous sports television that developed along with cable television.

This chapter explores crucial contradictions that went unremarked in the NFL’s crusade to make itself a bulwark of Americanism. From its image as a ruggedly capitalist enterprise (even as its commissioner and owners reiterated the need for collectivization) to its sending players to Vietnam to support the war effort (while simultaneously flexing political muscle to prevent those players from serving) to its feverishly jingoistic public spectacles —extending to its bid for official sanction as part of the Bicentennial—the NFL’s patriotic efforts were at once its most contested and its most emblematic. By 1976, that position had been accepted at multiple levels of government and officially sanctioned by the Bicentennial Administration, which allowed the NFL to promote the Super Bowl as a sanctioned event.

This chapter explores a range of responses to professional football as a cultural force: campaign consultants compared their efforts to playing the game and tallied won-lost records; politicians referred offhandedly to game plans and fourth quarters; journalists pondered what socially engaged sportswriting should cover and how to critique or resist the cultural/political dynamo that the NFL had constructed. The interconnections and affinities between football and politics provoked a huge, not always coherent range of attempts to grapple with this new culture. This new language did not simply pit left against right. Instead, the kinds of spectacle embodied in the new politics and football moved in multiple directions, empowering many different contestants to make themselves heard

This chapter examines the formation of the Raider Nation in Los Angeles through media interpretations of the team and fan participation in an imagined community. It begins by discussing the Raiders' move from Oakland to Los Angeles that culminated in a Super Bowl championship in the 1983 season. It then considers the significance of the Los Angeles Raiders' Super Bowl victory to the city and especially its Black and Brown communities, along with the racialization of Black masculinities and its relationship to a Raiders image that still persists throughout California. It also explores the imagined African American and Latina/o community of the Raider Nation as well as attempts by Raiders fans themselves to position their team as a symbol of a Los Angeles of “second chances.” While the Raiders have been long gone and the possibility of their return is contentious, the chapter shows that African Americans and Latinas/os continue to use the “Silver and Black” as a means to raid Los Angeles and its landscapes.

Paul Tagliabue was a logical choice to succeed Pete Rozelle as Commissioner given his two decades as chief legal advisor to the league. It took fifty hours of debate by the search committee, four owners meetings, and eleven ballots to reach this logical decision. His first major achievement was coming to a labor settlement with Gene Upshaw and the NFLPA. Al Davis was instrumental in this process. This set the stage for the next round of television contracts netting $33M/team/year over the next four years and an expansion of network coverage and DirecTV. Then came expansion and relocation of franchises. Tagliabue moved to expand NFL involvement in public issues including moving the Super Bowl out of Arizona over the MLK Day controversy. Internal issues included the revenue sharing policies that were under threat by Jerry Jones and Dallas. The market was also expanded with the creation of NFL Properties led by Sara Levinson from MTV and a direct appeal to women fans. NFL Revenue increased significantly. Race continued to be a major issue. There was an increase in black quarterbacks, but no significant change in coaching and executive ranks. A Diversity Committee was created in 2002 and the Rooney Rule was adopted I 2004 with initial promising results but it was not sustained over the next 15 years. In March of 2004 Tagliabue announced his retirement amidst great praise for this time as Commissioner. The one issue that he failed to address was that of concussions and head injuries.

Super Bowl XLIII of 2009 featured one of the closest contests in Super Bowl history. If not for the miraculous catch by Santonio Holmes in the waning seconds, the Steelers might have kicked a game-tying field goal and the Super Bowl would have gone into overtime. In a sense, however, overtimes can ruin great games, because, with all too high probability, whichever team gets the ball first wins. Instead of one of the best, the game might have been remembered as dubious, maybe even ignominious, with many “what ifs.” This chapter proposes an auction method to eliminate the coin flip’s randomness by letting the teams bid to determine the initial possession.

This chapter explores the homoerotic subtext of the Super Bowl, the annual championship game of the National Football League (NFL). Historically, athletic prowess and a consuming passion for sports have been defining aspects of masculinity in America. In his ESPN essay “Jock Culture,” Robert Lipsyte, a former New York Times sportswriter, talked about “jock culture” and its relation to American masculinity. And in his memoir, Man in the Middle, John Amaechi—the first pro basketball player to come out—shared his thoughts about the wavering borderline between homosociality and homosexuality in jock culture. “Coming out threatens to expose the homoeroticism of what they prefer to think of as simply male bonding,” he writes. Super Bowl commercials offer a borehole into the anxious unconscious of the American male.

In the Orwellian year of 1984, during Super Bowl XVIII, a commercial for Apple’s Mackintosh computer ran and became one of the most eye-catching and provocative sixty-second spots ever made. It was never shown again on television. As directed by Ridley Scott, the commercial portrays the grim world of the future dominated by Big Brother until a beautiful, athletic woman liberates everyone. For his next feature film Scott embraced the fantasy genre with Legend, a good versus evil tale set it a mythical land. Disaster hit the production when the entire elaborate set burned down. Miraculously, no one was injured, and the fairy tale environment was quickly rebuilt. The original version of Legend did poorly in front of test audiences and Scott cut it down radically, which hurt the film even more at the box office. In 1986 Ridley Scott Associates was expanded with the addition of a New York office, with more to come in the future.