Football is the sports fabric of the nation

It’s difficult to know precisely the moment when football overtook baseball as the national pastime, but, to borrow and modify a phrase, there’s no doubt left that whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn football.

The best indicator, in the spirit of the political year, is the polls.

According to Gallup, the year was 1972 when for the first time since polling began in 1937, football overtook baseball as America’s favorite spectator sport.

In answering the question “which is your favorite sport to follow,” football out-polled baseball by 32 to 24 percent in a survey that also included basketball, hockey, motorsports and ice/figure skating. That result has never changed, and it has never been that close since.

Today, the numbers are more like 40-10 football.

“No way,” Lamar Hunt said in an interview with Football Digest in 1979. “We couldn’t conceptualize what has happened, especially with the television. No one believed the numbers would be as high as they are.

“Not to steal baseball’s title, but we have become the national pastime. People build their schedules around Monday Night Football. It’s silly to say we knew it would become this big.”

Television and the spectacle of the game were the primary change agents for cultural conversion, though innovative and ambitious owners and executives and the competition of the free market introduced by the AFL and USFL were also catalysts.

Football is simply better on TV than baseball.

Fans and would-be fans first began to discover that in 1958’s NFL Championship Game, the so-called “Greatest Game Ever Played” between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants, featuring Tom Landry and Vince Lombardi as defensive and offensive coordinators.

More than 45 million, including President Dwight Eisenhower — a very humble football performer at West Point — watched 14 future Hall of Famers duke it out for supremacy.

That got the attention of TV and football executives. As baseball, perhaps sitting contentedly, did its thing every summer on the diamond, pro football saw the TV tube as revolution.

Hunt wanted a part of the action immediately, inquiring to the NFL and the Chicago Cardinals in 1958 about moving the team to Dallas.

Both declined, so Hunt recruited owners for his own league, which was able to survive because of TV.

“Television was the big factor,” Hunt said in 1979. “We got an ABC-TV contract the first year. It didn’t pay much the first five years, but at least we were on the network. Seeing Abner Haynes make a 60- or 70-yard run was just as exciting as seeing Hugh McElhenny.

“One of the key games was the 1962 Championship between the Texans and Oilers. We won the game in six quarters. We had an advantage because there was no other game on television that day and there was bad weather around the country. We had a tremendous audience.”

The NFL, meanwhile, was a league of 12 teams seemingly content with its provincial feel.

That changed with television propping up the new league.

Almost universally, the NFL gave the AFL the Cold War treatment, only a contemptuous and mocking tone acknowledging its presence.

“If they succeed, they can only help us,” said Redskins owner George Preston Marshall, at the time playing the devil’s advocate. “If they fail, they can only hurt themselves.”

He was right. In 1960, the NFL grossed $16 million. That figure rose to $46 million in 1965, just before the merger was announced.

Together, the two have become the greatest sports league known to mankind with revenues now in the billions.

Powerful enough to swat away the USFL like a gnat, though that upstart league — counting insurgent Donald Trump among its owners — did challenge the NFL for marquee players.

Nonetheless, the NFL, like its experience with the AFL, did learn a little something from the competition, ultimately expanding its product into the USFL cities of Phoenix, Jacksonville and Nashville.

“In life, as in a football game,” Teddy Roosevelt said, “the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard ... don’t foul and don’t shirk, but hit the line hard!”

That’s as American as baseball once was.

This story was originally published February 4, 2016 at 4:05 PM with the headline "Football is the sports fabric of the nation."