Brand NFL: Making and Selling America's Favorite Sport (Caravan Book) (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The National Football League is more than a collection of well-sculpted athletes; it is a business colossus that has mastered marketing and features media- savvy players, and owners who have taken full advantage of corporate sponsorship. Oriard, a former NFL offensive lineman in the 1970s and now a university professor, examines how the NFL became a business titan, examining the effects of such landmark events as the 1960 hiring of NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle and how the 1993 labor agreement between the players and owners made the league's economic structure more stable and thus much more lucrative. Oriard sometimes gets off track in detailing the league's rise to iconic status, but even his diversions on the players' struggles with owners and how racial stereotyping (even when black quarterbacks are no longer an anomaly) still colors the game are enlightening and well researched. With his casual humor and refreshing lack of academic-speak, Oriard has fashioned a riveting examination of how a violent sport has become a staggering mainstream American success. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

The National Football League begins its new season this week at the absolute top of the American sporting heap. Nothing else comes even close. Just about all sports in this country, "amateur" as well as professional, are big business now, but pro football is the biggest. The numbers, as reported by Michael Oriard, are staggering:

"For 2003 Forbes calculated gross revenue of $5.3 billion for 32 franchises. Over $2.5 billion of that came from television, or $80 million per club. The average head coach made $2.5 million; the average player made $1.2 million, with top stars making several times that much. A salary cap set total player salaries at $75 million per club. Ticket prices averaging $52.95 seemed almost an afterthought, pocket change from the premiums for club seats and luxury boxes leasing for tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Nearly 140 million Americans watched some part of the Super Bowl that year, for which a thirty-second ad cost $2.1 million. The average franchise was worth $733 million, with the Washington Redskins topping $1 billion."

Pro football as Americans know it is still primarily an American game -- to the rest of the world, "football" is what we call soccer -- but the NFL's reach is global. Last winter, I watched most of the playoff games and the Super Bowl in my apartment in Lima, Peru, brought to me courtesy of ESPN and/or Fox Sports. A sports bar less than half a mile from the apartment carries NFL games every weekend and advertises them prominently on a blackboard outside. Doubtless its clientele consists primarily of American tourists or business people, but nonetheless this bar manages to conduct a thriving business based substantially on making NFL games available in a country where most sports fans find American football totally alien.

All of which obviously is very good for the people who own the teams as well as their employees and the players, but the NFL's success is not without its limitations. As Oriard points out in this thoughtful, informative overview, the league's obsessive focus on "image" is complicated by players' use of recreational and performance-enhancing drugs, by various embarrassing crimes committed by a handful of them and by racial tensions and discrimination that persist despite the NFL's efforts to ameliorate them. More fundamentally, Oriard wonders whether the NFL may have gained the whole world but lost, or at least compromised, its soul. It's a question that experience entitles him to ask. Before obtaining the advanced degrees necessary for employment in academia -- he is professor of literature and related subjects at Oregon State University -- Oriard played for four seasons (1970-73) for the Kansas City Chiefs. He was a lineman, and a second-team one at that, but he knows firsthand the joy as well as the pain that football can give to those who play it, and he cherishes that joy as experienced by players and fans alike. He is concerned about "oversaturation" of NFL games and products, but he thinks "the greater danger lies in devaluing the actual football games if they become simply part of a larger spectacle or a multipronged marketing campaign." He worries about a "new NFL" dominated by "labor peace, television contracts, and stadium revenue." He writes:

"Arthur Blank, owner of the Atlanta Falcons, spoke for the entire new NFL when he told a reporter, 'You must go out and find customers. You must provide good entertainment value irrespective of the product on the field.' Irrespective of the product on the field. Before 'Monday Night Football' in 1970, no such 'irrespective' was conceivable. Now, it informed the fundamental thinking of NFL owners and league executives."

The debut of Monday Night Football coincided with the completion of the merger between the NFL and the American Football League, the decade-old competitor (invariably described in sports journalese as "upstart") that had forced a compromise after driving player salaries steadily upward, most famously with the $427,000 contract awarded to Joe Namath by the New York Jets in 1965. Namath brought to pro football a "live-and-let-live philosophy in defiance of tradition and the Establishment," and when his Jets beat the Baltimore Colts in the 1969 Super Bowl -- the greatest upset in the pro game's history -- the staid old NFL was forced to change in order to accommodate the altered realities of post-1960s America. It became somewhat hipper and, like the hippies who metamorphosed into yuppies, it went commercial.

Oriard traces this evolution in convincing detail. He is scarcely the first former player to write about the game -- Jerry Kramer's Instant Replay (1968), published while its author was still a member of the Green Bay Packers, remains to this day the best book about football qua football -- but the combination of his playing experience and his deep knowledge of the league's inner business workings makes for a unique and useful point of view. Much of the material in the first two-thirds of the book will be familiar to readers of Michael MacCambridge's America's Game (2004), the best history of pro football to date, but his discussion of what can fairly be called the game's larger meaning is especially interesting and insightful.

Oriard wastes no time in declaring himself: "I always understood that players drew the fans who made the owners rich; that the players, not the owners, risked crippling injury on every play only to become crippled in middle age anyway, even if they managed to avoid major injuries. Readers may occasionally find a former player's bias in the chapters that follow." So it will come as no surprise that his sentiments lie with the players in the three strikes that afflicted the league in 1974, 1982 and 1987, but he is also quick to point out weaknesses in the players' strategy, and he makes plain that they were far from unanimous in support of their union. As he says, their real victories were won in the courts, which finally assured them rights of free agency -- the same rights that all people are supposed to enjoy in the American workplace -- and, ironically, helped lead not merely to labor peace but also to a more profitable NFL, for owners every bit as much as for players.

Considering that Oriard was in college in the late 1960s and that his own time in the NFL was in the early 1970s, it's understandable that he brings a '60s sensibility to this book. He thinks (and he's right) that despite the genuine progress the league has made on race, it is still woefully short of genuine equality in the front offices as well as on the field. He is deeply disturbed (as he should be) by the league's callous attitude toward serious injuries suffered by active players and by its indifference to Alzheimer's and other maladies that former players undergo years after leaving the game -- maladies that doctors not affiliated with the league almost unanimously attribute to concussions and other football-related injuries.

Yet Oriard is also a football guy to the core, and he does not shirk from acknowledging that violence and risk of injury are part of the game's appeal to fans and players alike. "Football's power from its beginnings derived from the players appearing larger than life and meeting physical demands that seemed heroic in contrast to ordinary human experiences," he writes, and he insists that "those who respond to its fundamental nature will remain fans no matter what the packaging, while those who respond to the packaging may be briefly attracted but will not become real fans." Later he writes:

"Football makes little sense according to the rules we learn to live by in our modern world. That is why it appeals so powerfully, not just to working stiffs wearing dog masks and barking in the end zone seats in Cleveland, but also to TV executives and CEOs in luxury suites. . . . Football ultimately is what it is and what its fans make of it, no matter what efforts go into the packaging. It is deeply ironic that the NFL has become a financial colossus but can no longer afford to trust football's power. The league needs those 80 or 90 million casual fans, on top of its passionate 40 million, to feed the money machine it has created. Yet without that inherent power all the marketing in the world would be pointless."

Thus in the end Oriard, for all his toughness, reveals himself to be something of a romantic: "We no longer live in a Heroic Age, our values have changed, yet football itself is an expression of a longing to recover the heroic." Perhaps so, though one should no more confuse football "heroism" with the real thing than one should venerate John Wayne for his celluloid "heroism." But Oriard is right to insist that if pro football permits the essential nature of the game to be lost in all that marketing, if it becomes all sizzle and no steak, something very American and very valuable also will be lost.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press (July 19, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807831425
• ISBN-13: 978-0807831427
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #566,742 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars very solid, with an exception, April 2, 2008

By	T. Burket "tburket" (Potomac, MD United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Michael Oriard explores an area relatively uncovered in the vast flow of information about football. And that is the establishment of the NFL as a business, especially a media and entertainment enterprise instead of a simple sport played by romanticized warriors.

Oriard is first-rate on the history of the game and its development from a minor sport to the top tier starting in the late 1950s and 1960s. He nicely balanced football and its personalities, such as Lombardi, with the awakening of football as a business, primarily under the timely leadership of Pete Rozelle. People who remember the 1960s should enjoy the history, and young fans could find much to learn. The author is informative and concise.

He then moves into the next wave, with Joe Namath as one of the anchors, with his free spirit and large contract as indicators that, in retrospect, were seminal that seem almost quaint by now. Wow, long hair and white shoes! Here again, the personalities and the business evolved as parallel trends, influencing each other. Pete Rozelle began to lose his grip and the stakes got too high as football became America's #1 sport and the media coverage meant problems became public. Financial visionaries such as Jerry Jones of Dallas were about to open another whole dimension.

Oriard writes extensively about the beginning of the labor movement within football, all the way to the current relative peace. This is possibly both one of the strongest and weakest parts of the book. The strength is that the topic is relatively unfamiliar and normally underestimated in its importance, plus Oriard the ex-player has that insider's perspective. The weakness may be that it may be more than many fans wanted to know, and Oriard certainly is not impartial. Even so, the one-sided nature of owner-player relationship in the old days is almost appalling to read now. Younger fans may also be shocked to hear how little revenue football had and how little players made.

Oriand tackles one of the third rails of sports, that of why black athletes dominate, black cultural issues as they relate to football, and both subtle and obvious racism. He makes some reasonable observations, while also hemming and hawing around specifics where you cannot really win. The "exception" in my title is that he really should have stayed away from intelligence, other than the obvious history of blacks being kept from so-called skill positions that allegedly needed mental skills beyond their capacity. Wading into general intelligence controversies served no purpose, and Oriand misrepresented the famous "Bell Curve" book anyway. In this case, stick to your knitting.

Oriand closed with the transition from Paul Tagliabue to Roger Goodell as the new commissioner, naturally a time to re-assess the state of the business. To Oriand, Goodell fits football's continued growth in complexity that demands far more than Pete Rozelle the PR man. Oriand is very optimistic about football's future, yet he doesn't shy from some of the risks.

That attitude helps the general tone and credibility of the book. A breathless "homer" would have been uninteresting. A negative beat-down would have been unrealistic and pointless. As he said near the end, "Is the NFL become primarily a media company, or, is it still, above all, a national *football* league? It is both, of course, but the balance has been shifting, and how the commissioner will manage that balance over the coming years will be the story of the post-new NFL, whatever it will be called."

I can't argue with that. What I hope Oriand and Goodell realize is that excessive commercialization is itself a major risk. Major sporting events already are flirting with unwatchability with all the commercials and side shows. It's one area that could have gotten a bit more attention here. Why exactly is it that people like me watch less football than before, why don't I want to pay for the NFL Network, and why don't I like being shaken down at every opportunity by Dan Snyder?

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A rather dry history of the NFL, May 18, 2008

By	Glennard - See all my reviews

The author is a college professor and the book reads like a term paper. He quotes other sources to the point where there are so many footnotes is disrupts the reading. And even though he is a former player he gives precious little info about his personal experience and opinions. The colorful characters and mud-splattering drama you associate with the NFL are mostly absent. A great case study and historical text if that's what you want. But not entertaining.