I wonder why the NFL is banned from doing so? I’d assume state championships for high school are largely completed by then.
It goes back to 1961. Prior to that each team signed its own television contracts - more or less the same as NFL teams do today with radio broadcasts, or baseball teams do with local television broadcasts.
Pete Rozelle would not be surprised to see television's impact on the NFL as the league celebrates its 100th season this year.
apnews.com
Rozelle convinced Wellington and Jack Mara (Giants), Dan Reeves (Rams) and George Halas (Bears) that a single contract covering all teams and splitting the revenues benefited everyone. That meant the Packers and Giants would be receiving equal shares, instead of the old deals where New York sometimes got as much as 10 times more than Green Bay.
“We were able to do it because the owners thought league. All of the franchises have remained viable and have the means to compete with the rest of the league. That’s what I think all sports should be,” Rozelle said in David Harris’ 1986 book “The League”.
Rozelle originally had a deal with CBS in 1961, but it was voided by a federal judge due to antitrust laws. Rozelle went to Congress and was able to get them to pass the Sports Broadcasting Act, which allows leagues to negotiate broadcast deals.
“They (Mara, Reeves, Halas) made decisions that perhaps were not good for their individual teams in the short term, but in the long run paid off for the entire league,” he said.
From what I can gather from reading between the lines, Rozelle made the decision to not compete directly with college and high school football as a concession in order to appease the judge and get around the antitrust law. He worked with a congressman from New York, who wrote the bill as an amendment to the Sherman Antitrust Act. It passed, and the rest is history.
It's an interesting business case contrast between the NFL and MLB. The NFL was gaining popularity after the 1958 overtime championship game. rferred to then as
The Greatest Game Ever Played. At that point in time baseball, college football and boxing were all more popular than the NFL. But starting with nationwide broadcasting of those Sunday games, the NFL surged past all three to become America's most popular sport. It's all because the big market owners did what was best for their league. In contrast MLB owners have taken the opposite tack over the years - resulting in big market teams retaining large revenues and large payrolls, while smaller market teams having extreme difficulty competing due to smaller revenues.