I'm about one hour into the four hour installment of the Acquired podcast on the NFL I have no intention of watching the Super Bowl (or any other NFL games) in the foreseeable future, but as with most of the Acquired episodes it (the podcast) is fascinating. It explains much of the world I've lived in and continue to live in.

I would recommend the podcast. There are so many interesting tidbits. Here are a few:

• President Teddy Roosevelt spurred the creation of the NCAA when his son was injured in a college game. Seems it was a violent game at the time where more rules where needed to prevent it from injuring the sons of the elite who where the principal players at the time at Yale, Harvard, etc. See https://www.thesportshistorian.com/teddy-roosevelts-role-in-the-creation-of-the-ncaa/ These changes gave us the forward pass, the line of scrimmage, 10 yards and 3 downs and outlawed formations that tended to injure players. Even in 1905 was football entering the American consciousness in high places.
• President Kennedy and brother Bobby got into the act by working to pass an anti-trust exemption for the NFL's TV deal as football and TV gained popularity and started to have wider cultural and economic impact. The league was becoming a media business, not just a sport.
• Insights into why baseball, then the dominate sport, ignored TV while football embraced it
• What's wrong about one team (the Cleveland Browns, named for head coach Paul Brown) winning all the games?
• How competition from two rival leagues (both involving Paul Brown) pushed the NFL to do things it needed to do in it's own interest.
• One of the stories played out in the podcast is how Pete Rozelle, the new commissioner of the NFL in the early 60s moved things to "League First" as a governing philosophy. He brought in profit sharing, top-down standardization and management of the brand of the league as a whole. There was increased centralization and control.

Listening to this I realized that this created the blueprint for modern sports. Major League Baseball (MLB) has followed the same arc. I followed the Cincinnati Reds for 40+ years. I attended every opening day game from 1976 to 2002. You see echos (mimikry) of the NFL strategy in MLB today. The focus is on manipulating you (the fan) as part of a collective. It is on capturing your attention. It is on treating you as the product, sold to advertisers (see Google as well !). They are no longer selling you a product (a fun day out with friends and family, a winning team to root for).

I could respect a world in which a rich family or person owned a team. Marge Shcott was owner of the Cincinnati Reds for a while. I loved Marge. She sat in the owners box smoking like a chimney when smoking was outlawed at the stadium. There were occasional tiffs between her and MLB over rules and indiscreet things she blurted out. In today's world she would have been canceled. She was controversial, likely with good reason. But she was a a real "local". She was "low brow", not part of the corporate blob. She did not toe the line. She loved her team. She brought her big St. Bernard "Schotzy" to the stadium. She was an individual.

But those days are over. MLB has adopted the Pete Rozelle model where everything is subject to the league and it's marketing machine. The owners, the fans and the game itself (pitch clock, anyone?) are all pawns. "Take me out to the ballgame?". No thank you.

I wrote about this in depth as the pandemic canceled opening day in 2020. Baseball was about spring, about hope, about lazy days at the ball-park with the Ohio river rolling ever-onward, about time with friends and family and connecting with the rhythms of life that you shared with loved ones. The titans of the sports world have killed that. It's time to look for them in other places.