Once upon a time, tuning in a pro football game was easy. You just dialed the TV set to the nearest CBS affiliate.
“It was something that was always there,” says John Madden, who is there now.
“Those were utopian days,” says Bill McPhail, who was there then.
That something-and those days-end Sunday.
When the final word is said after the NFC title game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Dallas Cowboys, the National Football League severs its 38-year relationship with the network. Gone will be the days of Ray Scott, Chris Schenkel and Tom Brookshier, of Brent Musburger, Phyllis George and Irv Cross, of Madden, Pat Summerall and Terry Bradshaw.
It was a relationship that benefited both parties.
In the early 1950s, a few NFL teams-including the Bears and the Cardinals locally-realized the promotional impact of television and had set up their own ad-hoc networks. By the 1954 season, those telecasts were drawing 37 shares and the big networks started to pay attention.
That’s when CBS, through the urging of McPhail, then its sports department executive, jumped in.
“That was television in its infancy,” recalls McPhail. “CBS almost didn’t have a (sports) department. It just a had few things, like the Kentucky Derby. NBC had college football, which was much more popular. So about the only thing available to us was the NFL. You thought of pro football as sort of blue-collarish. But it was gaining.”
With the aid of then-Commissioner Bert Bell, McPhail was able to make deals with individual clubs not associated with those syndicated networks, such as the New York Giants on DuMont or the Washington Redskins in the South.
“My idea was to put together a package of NFL teams for the network,” says McPhail. “So we just talked to individual teams. We weren’t thinking in terms of the whole league. Bert Bell was more interested in us taking care of the have-not teams.”
And the gap was widening for some of those “have-not teams,” such as the Green Bay Packers, who were earning $35,000 a year from CBS while the Giants were getting $400,000 a year from DuMont.
While CBS began its association with the NFL in 1956, it wasn’t until Pete Rozelle became commissioner four years later that revenue sharing became a feasible solution.
“He could readily see that if TV and radio money was going to spiral,” says McPhail, “he should be allowed to negotiate for all the teams and that all the teams get the same amount of money.”
One of Rozelle’s first acts was to get the owners to support the move of the Cardinals to St. Louis to open up the Chicago market, which, in effect, had been blacked out for years by having two teams.
With the Cardinals moved, Rozelle negotiated his first all-league CBS deal for $2.3 million, only to have it slapped down in federal court for antitrust violations. Rozelle, however, reacted quickly, turning to Washington lawmakers to have the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 enacted.
“Pete and I took a trip to all the cities in the league, saying why this (contract) would be good on a promotion basis or an exposure basis,” says McPhail. “The big thing was to get the NFL out to the people and to places like Lincoln, Neb., which had never seen anything like that. It wasn’t that easy convincing some of those teams.”
But by 1962-63, the contract cost doubled to $4.65 million, but so did the ratings. The affiliates weren’t as difficult to convince as the owners.
“NFL football was certainly more desirable than `Sunday Sports Spectacular,’ ” says McPhail. “We had great acceptance from the affiliates.”
Still, CBS, after nearly 10 years of televising NFL regular-season games, was without the crown jewel-the title game. Under Bell, the league awarded those rights annually to NBC, something that rankled McPhail.
“Bell’s theory was that this was marvelous to keep two networks involved in this,” he says. “Our theory was that this wasn’t fair-we do the games all year long and here comes the big game and it goes across the street. All of that changed when Pete came in.”
By 1964, not only was CBS earning the rights to the NFL title games, but all three networks were interested in the league. The bidding on a two-year deal ended with a $28.2 million rights fee, which leapfrogged to $75.2 million in 1966. By then, the NFL on Sunday afternoons became a way of life in millions of households across America.
The telecasts “were something you could count on,” recalls Madden. “All those years, you associated the Bears and Packers with CBS. Or the Giants, Redskins, 49ers, Eagles, Cowboys. All those things you just associate with the NFC and CBS. People grew up with that. And now it’s not going to be there anymore.”
But because it was there in the beginning, McPhail sees CBS as instrumental in pulling the NFL toward revenue-sharing, a concept that kept the league in financial well-being.
“CBS was the vehicle that got the league together,” he says. “It was important to us, but it also was very important to them. We really worked hard at convincing all the clubs that a one-package (contract) was to their advantage. And, of course, the money went up a lot. Some of them weren’t getting anything.”
By 1969, the NFL ended its decade-old war with the American Football League. The ’70s dawned with a four-year, $185 million TV package that included NBC (for AFC games) and ABC (for “Monday Night Football”).
“It was really a partnership,” says McPhail. “When CBS and the NFL became partners and pro football grew-and it really grew in a hurry-here came the AFL and NBC. And it was bitter. When Pete called me to tell me about the merger, it was a shock. I just could not believe it.”
When Paul Tagliabue took over from Rozelle as commissioner, he relinquished much of the TV negotiations to the league’s Television Committee, headed by Browns owner Art Modell. But with Rozelle’s departure, the clubby atmosphere of negotiations changed. To offset the increasing losses incurred by the broadcast networks, the league had turned to cable to help keep the network’s fees down.
All that changed, however, when Modell approached his fellow owners two years ago to try and get them to give the networks some relief from the current contract, and offered a contract extension at the current rate. Cowboys owner Jerry Jones spearheaded the drive to oust Modell and took control of the Television Committee himself.
With Jones now in charge, the NFL played hardball with CBS, despite the network’s protestations of million-dollar losses on its $1.06 billion, four-year contract for NFC games. When Fox Network upped the ante by $100 million a year, CBS bowed out.
McPhail says he felt the same shock last month when he heard about the Fox deal that he did when told about the NFL-AFL merger more than 25 years ago.
“I was very hurt emotionally,” says McPhail, now an executive with Turner Broadcasting in Atlanta. “I don’t understand the money anymore. I do think greed has become the big word in sports.”
