Where this was said
The Founding of the NFL (1920)
At 39:36 · chapter starts 14:34
The founding meeting of the American Professional Football Conference — soon renamed the NFL — took place in an Ohio car dealership, driven by George Halas's vision to legitimize pro football in a country where the college game was sacred and the professional version was considered morally suspect. The three-part plan: don't raid college rosters, standardize the rules, and borrow Jim Thorpe's colossal star power as the league's first president. Jim Thorpe was not merely famous — he had won two Olympic gold medals in Stockholm in 1912 in events he'd never competed in before, led the tiny Carlisle Indian Industrial School to a national championship, and played baseball, basketball, and football at world-class levels. The distance between Thorpe and any other athlete, David Rosenthal argues, was greater than it has ever been since. [1] — David Rosenthal "Jim Thorpe won two Olympic gold medals in 1912 in events he had never competed in before, played baseball, basketball, and football at a wo…" 16:55 But institutional legitimacy couldn't save most teams from economic reality: of the 15-odd franchises active in 1920, only the Decatur Staleys (future Chicago Bears), the Racine Cardinals, and the Green Bay Packers survived. The rest folded or moved as small-market economics and the baseball-dominated sports landscape made professional football a money-losing labor of love. Crucially, the league began without Black players being excluded — Fritz Pollard, a Black man, was the star player and head coach of the inaugural AAFC champions. That changed in the mid-1930s when George Preston Marshall pushed to adopt baseball's segregationist policies, a stain that the Redskins carried longest, not integrating until 1961.
Jim Thorpe won two Olympic gold medals in 1912 in events he had never competed in before, played baseball, basketball, and football at a world-class level, and became the first president of the proto-NFL at its 1920 founding. The founding of American's most valuable league was anchored by a Native American multi-sport GOAT — a fact almost entirely forgotten today.
1977 was the first year the NFL made more money from television revenue than from ticket sales, a full 30 years after the dawn of the TV era.
Bert Bell's 'any given Sunday' doctrine wasn't just a slogan — it was the structural blueprint for the NFL's dominance. By mandating competitive balance through reverse-order drafts and schedule stacking, Bell guaranteed that every game mattered and every stadium could fill seats, laying the foundation for a $23 billion annual business.
