The National Football League (NFL) playoffs begin this weekend. Over the next several weeks, twelve teams–six from each conference–will contend for a chance to play for the Lombardi Trophy in Super Bowl XLVIII, held at the MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, NJ. Holding a virtual monopoly on professional football in North America, the NFL manages its brand carefully, cracking down on both on and off-field violations it deems harmful to its image. Within its monopoly, it also runs a tightly-regulated talent market in order to maintain a certain level of competition between matched up teams on “any given Sunday.” Despite a spate of scandals, serious questions regarding player safety, and a host of of bad actors, these factors have helped the NFL achieve popularity beyond its progenitors’ wildest expectations.
Beginning with the first Super Bowl (held in 1966) and the merger of the AFL and NFL (completed in 1970), professional football has gradually displaced baseball as America’s favorite sport over the past half-century or so. Although baseball enthusiasts demur, the NFL clearly has the corner on per-game-attendance and national television ratings. Most likely, the 2014 Super Bowl will once again reign as the most watched television event of the year. Further, through the trickle-down effect, more than twice as many high school boys play football than baseball. Football also excels beyond baseball in its aggressive marketing plan, a plan The New York Times once called full of “bombast and an abiding nationalistic spirit.” Without a doubt, by the end of the 1980s, professional football players competed on an immense stage with an enormous audience. As such, they were uniquely positioned to address a significant portion the population, most of whom were men. For the ever-entrepreneurial evangelicalism, the growing popularity of professional football provided another opportunity to connect with that audience.
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