Brand NFL: Making and Selling America's Favorite Sport

Conclusion

CONCLUSION Paul Tagliabue’s announcement on March 20, 2006, that he was stepping down as commissioner presented an obvious occasion for assessing the state of the National Football League after nearly 17 years of his guidance. Tagliabue broke the news just 12 days after the owners resolved their dispute over revenue sharing, in principle anyway, in order to extend their collective bargaining agreement with the Players Association through 2011. This was the commissioner’s last piece of unfinished business, and it was most fitting that this was so, because Tagliabue’s principle legacy to the nfl, and the achievement he claims most to prize, is labor peace. Tagliabue strengthened all three pillars of the new nfl. In a considerably more complex media environment than Pete Rozelle ever faced, Tagliabue positioned the nfl for one astonishingly lucrative set of agreements with the television networks after another. Al Davis and Jerry Jones initially drove the pursuit of new and upgraded stadiums, but Tagliabue through the G-3 program and in other ways nurtured the stadium boom while applying at least a little friction to the franchise free agency that could have been much more disruptive than it was. As new technologies transformed the media landscape, Tagliabue repeatedly positioned the nfl to take advantage of the latest and most profitable. His one notable failure—to place a franchise in Los Angeles after 1995—seems driven by factors beyond his control.∞ According to Forbes magazine, Tagliabue’s greatest achievement was ‘‘the creation of a tremendous amount of wealth for his bosses.’’≤ But labor peace was Tagliabue’s highest priority on becoming commission, and I am convinced that history will judge it to be his most important legacy. Labor peace created the stability that freed owners to pursue new revenue streams and spared fans yet another troubling spectacle of millionaires striking for more money. For Tagliabue, agreeing with Gene Upshaw and the Players Association on the extension in 2006 was easy. Persuading the feuding owners to accept more revenue sharing to make the extension possible marks his major triumph in keeping alive the league-first philosophy on which the nfl has uniquely prospered. (Although Tagliabue was subsequently criticized for conceding too much to the players, the fault belonged entirely to the owners, whose delaying past the deadline left them no real choice but to leap at Upshaw’s final o√er.) CONCLUSION 251 In a slightly di√erent assessment of Tagliabue’s accomplishments as commissioner , SportsBusiness Journal’s Daniel Kaplan mentioned labor peace along with revenue growth and record tv contracts, as well as ‘‘a strict steroids policy,’’ but he put above all of them Tagliabue’s ‘‘transforming the very entity he leads from what was essentially a football league with some tv contracts into something approaching a full-scale media company.’’≥ It is telling that in the early weeks after Tagliabue’s announcement, speculation on his successor included not just insiders Roger Goodell and Rich McKay but also possible candidates from outside the nfl, perhaps an executive from an entertainment, media, or technology company. Kaplan contended that ‘‘refereeing how media and digital rights are divided locally and nationally will be one of the key tasks of the new commissioner.’’ He also noted, though, ‘‘While the league may look to someone with more media experience to drive the league, there will be a strong emotional pull to ensure that the person has a firm connection to football.’’∂ This remains the tension at the heart of the nfl today. Has 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 new commissioner will manage that balance over the coming years will be the story of the post-new nfl, whatever it will be called. The eventual naming of Roger Goodell, an nfl insider with broad experience but particularly in marketing and media, was both predictable and fitting. The modern nfl thrived under a pr man. The new nfl required a corporate attorney. As the nfl now moved deeper into the new century, it operated more and more as a multimedia entertainment business, and in Goodell it chose the man who replaced Sara Levinson in overseeing what was then called nfl Properties. (The owners selected Goodell over Gregg Levy, the league’s outside counsel, the position Tagliabue held before succeeding Rozelle.)∑ Goodell took over the most successful organization in professional sports, soaring on an...