NFL Draft Aces

Michael Oriard explores an area moderately learned in the vast flow of information about football. And that is the establishment of the NFL as a business, especially a media and entertainment enterprise instead of a simple sport played by romanticized warriors.

Oriard is first-rate on the history of the game and its development from a minor sport to the top tier starting in the late 1950s and 1960s. He nicely balanced football and its personalities, such as Lombardi, with the awakening of football as a business, primarily under the timely leadership of Pete Rozelle. People who remember the 1960s must delight in the history, and young fans could find much to learn. The author is informative and concise.

He then moves into the next wave, with Joe Namath as one of the anchors, with his free spirit and large contract as indicators that, in retrospect, were seminal that seem nearly quaint by now. Wow, long hair and white shoes! Here again, the personalities and the business evolved as parallel trends, influencing each other. Pete Rozelle started to lose his grip and the stakes got too high as football became America’s #1 sport and the media coverage preordained problems became public. Financial visionaries such as Jerry Jones of Dallas were about to open another whole dimension.

Oriard writes extensively about the beginning of the labor movement within football, all the way to the current relative peace. This is maybe both one of the strongest and weakest parts of the book. The strength is that the topic is moderately unfamiliar and normally underestimated in its importance, plus Oriard the ex-player has that insider’s perspective. The weakness may be that it may be more than many fans wanted to know, and Oriard certainly is not impartial. Even so, the one-sided scenery of owner-player relationship in the ancient days is nearly appalling to read now. Younger fans may also be shocked to hear how small revenue football had and how small players made.

Oriand tackles one of the third rails of sports, that of why black athletes dominate, black cultural issues as they relate to football, and both devious and obvious racism. He makes some reasonable observations, while also embroidery and hawing around specifics where you cannot really win. The “exception” in my title is that he really must have stayed away from acumen, other than the obvious history of blacks being kept from so-called skill positions that allegedly needed mental skills beyond their capacity. Wading into general acumen controversies served no function, and Oriand misrepresented the well-known “Bell Curve” book anyway. In this case, stick to your knitting.

Oriand closed with the transition from Paul Tagliabue to Roger Goodell as the new commissioner, naturally a time to re-assess the state of the business. To Oriand, Goodell fits football’s continued growth in complexity that demands far more than Pete Rozelle the PR man. Oriand is very optimistic about football’s future, yet he doesn’t shy from some of the risks.

That attitude helps the general tone and credibility of the book. A out of breath “homer” would have been uninteresting. A unenthusiastic beat-down would have been unrealistic and pointless. As he said near the end, “Is the NFL be converted into 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 commissioner will manage that balance over the coming years will be the tale of the post-new NFL, whatever it will be called.”

I can’t argue with that. What I hope Oriand and Goodell realize is that excessive commercialization is itself a major risk. Major sporting events already are flirting with unwatchability with all the commercials and side shows. It’s one area that could have gotten a bit more attention here. Why exactly is it that people like me watch less football than before, why don’t I want to pay for the NFL Network, and why don’t I like being shaken down at every opportunity by Dan Snyder?
Rating: 4 / 5