While the NFL finally achieved a respected status as an indisputably major professional sport in the 1950s, it wasn't really until the 1960s that the league began to lay the foundation for its rapid ascent to economic dominance. In 1959, longtime NFL Commissioner an old-timer who had been involved in running the league since 1933—died of a heart attack suffered in the final minute of an intense Steelers-Eagles game in Philadelphia. Early the next year, after 23 rounds of disputed voting by the league's owners, a bright young executive named Pete Rozelle was elected the new Commissioner. Rozelle would serve in the position for nearly thirty years, overseeing the NFL's rise to the pinnacle of the American sports business.

Rozelle's most important insight was to see that the NFL's future would be intimately bound up with the rise of television as America's most important medium of popular culture. Unlike baseball, which was always better experienced live in the ballpark rather than on TV, football naturally made for good television. The game's highly concentrated bursts of violent action fit neatly into T.V. The do-or-die nature of third downs provided frequent peaks of dramatic tension. Even the game's frequent timeouts and stoppages in play provided plenty of breaks in the action, which could be filled with commentary from commercials, in Rozelle's mind, it seemed obvious that football and television were practically made for one other.

But NFL owners, who traditionally made their profits almost entirely from the gate revenues generated by selling game tickets, initially viewed TV as a curiosity at best and a threat at worst. If people could stay home and watch the game for free on television, some owners reasoned, why would they pay good money to come out to the stadium? But Rozelle foresaw that television could not only grow the game by exposing the NFL to fans unable to attend in person, but it could also provide its own significant revenue stream by allowing the league to sell valuable broadcast rights and advertisements.

In 1961, Rozelle moved the league's offices from sleepy Bala-Cynwyd to the epicenter of America's growing media and advertising industry: New York City. Almost immediately, he struck a pair of deals that changed the NFL's economic fate forever. First, he convinced the league's owners (and Congress, which had to approve a special exemption to antitrust law) to agree to a new revenue-sharing plan that allowed the NFL to sell its league-wide broadcast rights as a single package then distribute the proceeds in equal shares to all teams. The NFL's unique (and, critics charged, vaguely socialistic) revenue-sharing plan guaranteed that small-market teams like the Packers could remain financially competitive with teams located in larger and more lucrative media markets; the economic parity thus established helped to maintain the on-field competitive balance that has long distinguished the NFL from other sports—most notably Baseball, where cash-strapped small-market teams typically know before the season even begins that they have little or no chance to compete against wealthy ball clubs like the Yankees.

Having secured agreement to his revenue-sharing plan, Rozelle quickly followed up by negotiating the NFL's first league-wide TV deal in 1961. The CBS network paid $4.65 million a year for the right to broadcast NFL games through the 1962 and '63 seasons. Under the revenue-sharing plan, that meant that each NFL team would begin the season with $332,000 in the bank. Since $332,000 was more than most teams' payrolls at the time, that meant that all NFL franchises were virtually guaranteed profitability, even before playing a single down or selling a single ticket. It took Pete Rozelle less than one year to prove the worth of his TV-centered economic model to the league's owners.

The NFL has never looked back. Over the years, the value of the league's television contracts has grown exponentially; the current six-year deals with NBC, CBS, FOX , and ESPN, which are locked in through 2011, will pay the NFL's 32 teams a staggering total of more than $12.7 billion.