The Super Bowl is the National Football League’s championship game, an advertising extravaganza in which 100 million television viewers are expected to watch the New England Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles compete for the Lombardi trophy.
However, the Super Bowl was not always the NFL’s championship game. In its earliest days, the Super Bowl pitted the NFL champion against the champions of a completely different league: the American Football League. The rivalry between the NFL and AFL is not only an interesting chapter in sports history, but also a turning point in the racial dynamics of professional football, one with ramifications that are still felt today.
The NFL first began play in the 1920s as a disorganized collection of midwestern semi-pro teams, most of which have long since faded into the mists of time, including the Canton Bulldogs, the Kenosha Maroons, and the Columbus Panhandles. But two of the bedrock franchises, the Green Bay Packers and Chicago Bears, built strong fan bases, and in time the league expanded to include 12 teams across the country, including the Detroit Lions and Cleveland Browns in the midwest and the New York Giants, Philadelphia Eagles, and Pittsburgh Steelers in the northeast.
By the late 1950s the NFL had emerged as a serious rival to Major League Baseball. Unlike the slow-paced national pastime, football was an ideal television sport. Yet, even as television ratings and surging attendance saw revenues pour into the league’s coffers, the NFL’s arch-conservative owners stuck to a 12-team league. They had no interest in sharing profits with new owners, and thus declined many opportunities to expand into markets beyond their 12-city footprint.
The NFL’s conservatism created an opportunity for a new league. In 1959 Lamar Hunt, scion of a wealthy Texas oil family, and a group of like-minded businessmen established a new 8-team football league, which they called the American Football League. The AFL began play in the fall of 1960, with most of its franchises located in non-NFL cities, including the Boston Patriots, Buffalo Bills, Dallas Texans, Denver Broncos, and Oakland Raiders.
The organizational and financial strength of the AFL came as a surprise to the NFL. In an effort to undermine the new league, the NFL persuaded the owners of one of the new AFL clubs—the Minnesota Vikings—to defect to the NFL before the AFL’s inaugural 1960 season. The Vikings ownership accepted the offer and Minnesota never played a down in the AFL. That same year the NFL established the Dallas Cowboys, an expansion team, in Texas as part of a thinly-veiled effort to run out of business the AFL’s Dallas Texans, which were owned by AFL founder Lamar Hunt. Three years later Hunt moved his team to Kansas City and renamed it the Chiefs.
The AFL struggled in its early years, drawing only about 15,000 fans per game. It added a franchise in Houston, but remained a second-class league in popular opinion for most of the early 1960s.
In frustration, the AFL filed an antitrust lawsuit against the NFL alleging, among other things, that NFL owners had conspired to drive AFL franchises out of overlapping markets, such as Minnesota and Dallas. But the Fourth Circuit completely rejected the AFL’s claims. In the 1963 case of AFL v. NFL, the Fourth Circuit defined the relevant market as the United States as a whole, and it noted that the NFL only had a presence in 14 of the 30 largest markets in the country. Moreover, most of the AFL’s 8 teams did not even have NFL competition in their home markets. The court concluded:
“There is no basis in antitrust laws for a contention that [the] American [Football League], whose Boston, Buffalo, Houston, Denver and San Diego teams enjoy natural monopolies, has a right to complain that [the] National [Football League] does not surrender to it other natural monopoly locations so that they too may be enjoyed by American rather than by National [Football League teams]. When one has acquired a natural monopoly by means which are neither exclusionary, unfair, nor predatory, he is not disempowered to defend his position fairly.”
Before the dust had even settled on the court’s ruling, however, the AFL began to emerge as a formidable competitor to the NFL on the gridiron. The AFL realized that the NFL had a huge vulnerability: the league's entrenched racism. In 1933 the NFL banned African American players, and had only partially and reluctantly reintegrated in 1945. Even into the 1960s, the NFL owners informally limited the number of black players on each team. In 1961, for example, there were only 83 African American players in the NFL. George Preston Marshall, owner of the NFL’s Washington Redskins, refused to sign any black players and had the team band play “Dixie” before the national anthem.
The NFL owners’ racism proved to be a key weakness. It gave the AFL’s owners an opportunity to compete, and ultimately thrive, against the NFL. Although the AFL’s owners were far from paragons of racial justice, they were nevertheless practical businessmen who saw the benefit of aggressively recruiting and signing talented black players. As the AFL diversified, the quality of play soon rivalled that of the NFL. The AFL’s television ratings and gate attendance grew accordingly.
The importance of African American athletes to the AFL was powerfully demonstrated in January 1965, as Michael MacCambridge describes in his excellent history of pro football, America’s Game. The AFL scheduled its annual All Star game for New Orleans, but when black players arrived they faced horrendous treatment in the defiantly segregated city. Restaurants, hotels, and taxi cab drivers openly discriminated against African Americans, and the city’s white population shouted racial epithets at the players. When the black players threatened to boycott the game in New Orleans, the AFL’s commissioner hurriedly moved the game to Houston. As MacCambridge notes:
“It marked one of the first instances of professional athletes working together to make a social statement, and seemed to foreshadow a more open discussion of race for many of the teams.”
By 1966, the high quality of the AFL forced the NFL to make concessions as well. Implicitly recognizing the AFL as an equal, the NFL agreed to pit its champion against the AFL champion at the end of the two leagues’ respective seasons. In January 1967, the NFL champion Green Bay Packers played the AFL champion Kansas City Chiefs in the first Super Bowl. The Packers won handily, and repeated as Super Bowl champions one year later over the Oakland Raiders. However, in one of the most famous upsets in American sports history, the AFL’s New York Jets defeated the NFL’s Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III in January 1969. The next year, the AFL and NFL agreed to merge into a single league, under the NFL name, starting in the fall of 1970.
The final game ever played by the AFL was Super Bowl IV. On January 11, 1970, the AFL’s Kansas City Chiefs resoundingly defeated the heavily-favored, NFL champion Minnesota Vikings in the Super Bowl. The game was played at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans, the same city that the AFL’s black All Star players had successfully boycotted 5 years before. The fact that the Chiefs won the game had special symbolic importance for, as MacCambridge points out, “the Chiefs were the first team in pro football to field a lineup in which more than half the twenty-two starters were African American.” African American players had put the AFL on the map, and, fittingly, African American players gave the AFL its final and most important victory.
The role of African American athletes in professional football has continued to grow in the years since the AFL-NFL merger. Today about 64 percent of NFL players are black, compared to only about 8% of professional baseball players.
But the NFL still suffers from glaring racial disparities. The league’s owners, head coaches, and front offices remain overwhelmingly white. Moreover, the practice of players taking a knee during the national anthem to protest racial injustice in America has divided the NFL like no issue in the modern history of the sport. But unlike the AFL owners, who agreed to the players’ demand to move the 1965 All Star game, the NFL’s owners show little willingness to listen to the players. One need look no further than former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Since leading the players’ national anthem protests, Kaepernick cannot find a roster spot on any NFL team. Race clearly still plays a significant role in NFL decision-making.
In the years since the merger with the AFL, the NFL has maintained a monopoly over professional football, with a handful of minor exceptions. The most prominent was a brief period in the mid-1980s, when a Donald Trump-led rival football league called the USFL challenged the NFL for two years. But the USFL ultimately folded and no one has ever come close to touching the NFL since.
Today the NFL generates annual revenues of $14 billion per year, which makes it by far the most profitable sports league in North America. By way of comparison the NBA generates "only" about $6 billion per year and the NHL generates about $5 billion.
But there are storm clouds on the horizon. The NFL’s television ratings have declined sharply by nearly 20% in just two years. Surveys consistently find that millennials are much less interested in following team sports, such as the NFL, than older generations are. Most important of all, the growing specter of CTE, a degenerative brain disorder caused by head trauma, threatens the NFL far more than the AFL ever did.
Therefore, as the NFL prepares for the Super Bowl in Minneapolis on Sunday night, the legacy of its rivalry with the AFL continues to shape the sport. But the NFL’s long-term future is cloudier than ever before.
Great post.
Posted by: Bernie Burk | February 04, 2018 at 09:52 AM
The NFL's tepid, if nonexistent response to domestic violence doesn't help. That elevator video was shocking. They alienated at least half the audience. So, I guy who is non-violently protesting can't get a gig, yet a guy who yanks a women by her hair can play again?
Posted by: Deep State Special Legal Counsel | February 04, 2018 at 08:53 PM