Former NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle’s genius will be validated once again this weekend, when teams from tiny Green Bay, shrimpy Buffalo and the modest cities of Kansas City and Baltimore appear in the second round of the NFL’s massively popular Super Bowl tournament.
Rozelle, who died in Rancho Santa Fe in 1996, had small-market clubs in mind in the 1960s and 1970s when he coaxed owners of NFL teams in big media markets to agree to the almost unthinkable:
Share all TV money on equal with the clubs in relatively puny markets.
A football collective for club owners. That’s what Rozelle had in mind.
“He said that, for the strength of the league, they had to share the money equally or the league would go to hell,” Jim Kensil, a former Associated Press sportswriter, told the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame.
Advocating for “league-think,” Rozelle fostered economic cooperation that led to better football competition.
He argued presciently that if the league auctioned off its telecasts as a single entity, the NFL pie would grow just fine.
He wanted fans in every market to believe their team would get a fair shake.
The NFL wasn’t so cuddly in how it funded the venues in which its teams played, as San Diegans discovered. NFL sharps perfected the art of shaking down cities and states for stadium subsidies, pitting municipalities against one another. If keepers of the public purse didn’t meet the NFL’s price, the league facilitated a club’s relocation to another city.
But, for the teams in small markets similar to San Diego and even much smaller, the NFL’s various economic rules — not just massive revenue sharing but also a hard salary cap, a salary floor and the franchise tag — have provided better opportunities for on-field success than their counterparts in Major League Baseball have received the past three decades.
Notice that when the NFL’s four divisional-round games kick off this weekend, clubs from Baltimore (29th in Nielsen’s media-market rankings, one spot ahead of San Diego), Kansas City (34th), Buffalo (54th) and Green Bay (69th) will form half of the Super Bowl tournament’s remaining eight-team field.
Along with Buffalo and Green Bay, little Jacksonville (41st) and New Orleans (51st) are much smaller than any MLB team’s media market, at least until Las Vegas (40th) receives the current Oakland A’s.
More to the point, several of the NFL’s smaller-market franchises have become steady winners that drive national TV ratings, a pair of traits seldom displayed by MLB’s smaller-market clubs the past few decades.
For example:
Expect Sunday’s game between the host Buffalo Bills and the Kansas City Chiefs to draw a large viewership for CBS, and despite Green Bay ranking well below MLB’s smallest media market — Milwaukee (38th) — the Packers’ game Saturday in Santa Clara against the San Francisco 49ers figures to garner a larger audience for FOX Sports.
Based in upstate New York, the Bills have won four consecutive AFC East titles. Their division rivals include teams based in New York (the country’s largest media market) and Greater Boston (fourth).
A Bills victory would deny the Chiefs a sixth consecutive berth in the AFC championship game, cooling a Kansas City dynasty that’s reached three of the past four Super Bowls, winning two.
In the past 30 years, Green Bay has seen 21 Packers teams reach the postseason, 15 win the divisional race, three ascend to the Super Bowl and two raise the Lombardi Trophy.
In Pittsburgh, which stands 28th in market size, fans can count on the hometown Steelers winning a majority of games in most seasons. The Steelers have advanced to 18 postseasons, nine AFC title games, four Super Bowls and two trophy ceremonies in the past 30 years.
Seeded first in the AFC, the Ravens seek their third Super Bowl trophy. They’ve won 57 percent of their games since debuting in 1996. In half of their seasons, they’ve reached the playoffs.
How many of MLB’s smaller-market teams have enjoyed comparable success to these NFL counterparts in MLB’s 30-year wild-card era?
Beyond the Cardinals, who brought 12 divisional titles and two World Series trophies to a St. Louis market now ranked 24th, the answer is one popularized by the Football Brothers Harbaugh.
Nooobody.
