Customer Reviews

Tailgating, Sacks, and Salary Caps: How the NFL Became the Most Successful Sports League in History

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This book serves as a functional primer for NFL fans eager to learn the history of the NFL from a business and organizational perspective. However, the author falls short of providing any sort of novel and intellectually-stimulating critical analysis of the league. The writing style is so formulaic and dry that it quickly grates on the reader. Bottom line: this book does great with recounting facts and providing a detailed overview of the NFL's history as a business, enough to make me glad I'd read it. But it wasn't a very enjoyable read.

As a diehard NFL fan, I was thrilled to find out about this book because I'd been looking for a book that 1) would explore the NFL history from a business and organizational perspective 2) would provide independent, critical analysis of the NFL and 3) would do so with intellectual flair, rigor, and creativity.

Having read the book, I now feel that I have an understanding and appreciation for the business and organizational history of the NFL. Yost does a good job highlighting the key business decisions and agreements that have shaped the NFL into the organization it is today, and weaving personal profiles of relevant managers, commissioners, and television producers.

He also has a knack for writing in easily digestible tidbits. Each chapter is broken down into smaller, clearly delineated sections, which helped keep the pace of the book moving forward.

These sections were important for me, because I found his writing style to be grating after a few chapters. He tends to write sections and paragraphs following a simple formula: a statement/claim in the first sentence is backed up by a recitation of evidence: either facts, multiple examples, or quotes attributed to relevant people.

Although this is a no-nonsense approach, and clearly demonstrates that the author doesn't make any wild, unsubstantiated claims, it got old and annoying for me quick.

It was a bit grating on the brain when he'd back up statements with language and quotes that read as if they were lifted straight from league or team press releases. For example, in a section describing league merchandising and the consolidation of official league clothing into a single license awarded to Reebok, the author writes (p. 130) "Reebok develops polo shirts for warmer days, light jackets and sweaters for fall-like weather, and thick parkas for late in the season. Even the NFL's bulky winter wear is more stylish today, and as well-branded."

Halfway through the book, I thought it was going to be entirely a book of celebratory worship. "Gee whiz, hooray for the amazing NFL and their genius decisions and incredibly rich history of brilliant commissioners." But the sole injection of criticism on the part of the author comes from his views on stadium financing. Chapter 9 seems to have been written by a different person, a Bizarro Yost able to find fault with his subject. He makes a convincing case that the NFL vastly overstates the economic benefit of stadium construction, ensuring that public stadium financing results in a net economic loss for the local community and its taxpayers.

In any case, I'd learned a lot about the league when I was done with the book. But I can't help but think that there are a lot of interesting stories about the league's past that weren't covered, perhaps because they put the league in a bad light, and Yost was weary of stirring skeletons too deep in the NFL closet. And the book was hampered by the author's dry, repetitive structure and writing style. I was glad to get the facts, I just wish it were a more fun and engaging read.

I wasn't around then, but from reading it seems to me that during World War II baseball was indeed America's pastime. Football was a distant relative, perhaps about where soccer is today. Now the World Series comes and goes, while every bar and restaurant has a Super Bowl party, and the supermarkets are loaded with Super Bowl displays of beer and snacks.

This book doesn't describe the sport or talk about the coaches. It's about the hard business facts of how the NFL has created a monopoly and built a business model around it for the overall good (that's financial good) of the league.

There are several surprising points: The NFL format appeals to the two prime target audiences of consumers: 18-49 year old males and FEMALES OF ALL AGES, FROM PRETEEN GIRLS TO MIDDLE-AGED MOMS. Really, that big a female audience?

ABC has lost Monday Night Football. It moved to ESPN. Did ABC lose out in the bidding wars? Guess who owns ABC - Disney. Guess who owns ESPN - Disney. Disney simply decided it could make more money moving it to ESPN.

Like I said, this book is about the business aspects, and they are not simple. This is big business, serious business, fascinating business.

Fascinating! A brilliantly written insight into all those things you always wondered about the business of the NFL. Already an accomplished writer, Yost's Wall Street pedigree shows through in every page. No spin. Just how it should be. Highly recommend, and a must read for anyone interested in the sports business.

Mark Yost does a terrific job of explaining how the NFL was formed, how it has been sustained and how it may have peaked. Starting in the early 1900's, Yost describes the logical and unselfish thought process that formed the leauge and carried it through present day. As a sports business buff, this is just the kind of detail I have been looking for. Yost describes contracts in the detail of Likely To Be Earned (LTBE) and Not Likely to Be Earned (NLTBE) incentives and references several different cities to describe the benefits, real or perceived, of publicly funded stadiums and the public's share of gaudy Super Bowl numbers.

The only thing that I would caution about this book is that it was written in 2006 when the Owners and Players' Union and just agreed to a new Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA). Yost covers this CBA in detail and it is very interesting, however the Owners have recently decided to back out of this CBA early, which hurts the book's validity a little bit.

All in all, a tremendous book!

Baseball may be the Great American Pastime, but professional football is America's passion. With revenues in the billions of dollars, massive TV audiences thirsting for its product and merchandise flying off the shelves in thousands of stores, the National Football League is a textbook example of how to build and maintain a thriving pro sports league. While professional baseball, basketball and hockey have all experienced labor strife and endured difficult financial times, the NFL has largely avoided such crippling problems. That's mainly because of its salary cap and a revenue-sharing system that benefits teams in smaller media markets as well as teams in major metropolitan cities. In the NFL, owners and players consider themselves partners in an enormously successful enterprise, rather than operating as greedy adversaries trying to squeeze every penny from each other. Like any other multi-million dollar corporation, the NFL succeeds because of smart management and foresight. We believe that both the casual fan and the rabid NFL loyalist will appreciate author Mark Yost's expert examination of the league's economic infrastructure and behind-the-scenes politics. Highly recommended.