NFL Football: A History of America's New National Pastime

Abstract

The National Football League (NFL) seems nearly omnipresent today in the United States. Even people who are not football fans know the team names and recognize the star players. That was certainly not the case one hundred years ago when the league was founded at a car dealership in Canton, Ohio. How this change occurred is the story that Richard C. Crepeau tells in NFL Football: A History of America's New National Pastime. Originally published in 2014, the University of Illinois Press issued this revised edition in 2020 to coincide with the NFL's centennial. The author has expanded a couple of chapters from the previous edition and added a new chapter.The book is divided into three sections: “The Formative Years,” “The Rozelle Era,” and “The New NFL.” Within each section, chapters are often thematic, which occasionally means there is some repetitiveness. The first section examines the birth of professional American football in the 1890s and its slow growth through the early decades of the twentieth century. Initially centered in the factory and mill towns of the Ohio Valley, professional football developed as a game to entertain the working class on Sundays. By 1920, team owners decided to create an organization, the American Professional Football Association, the forerunner of the NFL. The league's first decade was rocky; few teams survived into the 1930s. (An excellent appendix lists all NFL franchises by the year they were founded, including those that folded.) Crepeau moves through the NFL's formative years quickly. The league's founding and first decade are covered in about thirteen pages. The author then summarizes the next decade and a half (1930‒45) in twelve pages. This is mostly a work of synthesis, so Crepeau cannot be blamed if the literature on early professional football and the first several decades of the NFL is thin. But readers hoping for more on the formative years will be disappointed.Crepeau begins to hit his stride by the third chapter, which examines the late 1940s and 1950s. In this chapter, some important themes emerge—the NFL as a business enterprise, the reoccurrence of labor disputes, race and racism in the league, and the role of television in shaping the sport. These themes are continued into Part 2, which looks at what Crepeau calls “The Rozelle Era.” This is the book's longest section, and it forms the core of the book. In this middle section, chapters follow a general chronology but are also organized thematically. Chapters 4 and 5 examine the rise of professional football as a major cultural phenomenon in the 1960s, as well as the NFL's dispute and eventual merger with the American Football League (AFL). Television, of course, played a major role in propelling professional football to the forefront of American culture. As Crepeau notes, “The landscape of the NFL changed permanently with the coming of television, the AFL, and the commodification of nearly everything” (61). Thanks to the game's seemingly made-for-television controlled violence and drama, Crepeau argues, by the end of the 1960s, “football was clearly the national pastime” (90). In Chapter 6, the author takes a deep dive into television contracts and the ever-increasing amounts of money that they brought to the league. After discussing expansion, battles over team moves, and the league's handling of various publicity problems (Commissioner Pete Rozelle's specialty) in Chapters 7 and 8, Crepeau turns to labor disputes in Chapter 9. His coverage of the formation and growth of the NFL Players Association (NFLPA), as well as the three major strikes of the 1970s and 1980s, is excellent and probably makes Chapter 9 the strongest one in the book.Section 3 begins with the rise of Paul Tagliabue as the new commissioner following Rozelle's retirement, and the subsequent chapters focus on Roger Goodell's tenure as commissioner. Although Crepeau does not ignore social and cultural issues in the book's concluding section, at times, it comes across as largely an institutional history of the league from 1990 to the present, with the commissioners—Tagliabue and then Goodell—as the central actors. The author devotes two pages, for instance, to Goodell's handling of Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice's assault of his fiancée in 2014; the emphasis is on Goodell, not on domestic violence. The final chapter examines the Super Bowl as America's gaudy new national holiday.Creapeau's book examines the NFL as a business and a cultural phenomenon. It succeeds on both accounts. Anyone looking for a short overview of the NFL's meteoric rise to America's national pastime should begin with Crepeau's book.