By Lea Kahn, Staff Writer
With football mania nearing its peak in time for Sunday’s 46th Super Bowl game or Super Bowl XLVI, in football-speak there was a time when professional football and its players were neither respected, prized nor paid millions of dollars.
But it wasn’t so long ago that professional football was considered a “ramshackle sport (that) had no fan base at all,” according to Craig R. Coenen, the author of “From Sandlots to the Super Bowl,” which traces the history of the National Football League. Dr. Coenen spoke to about two dozen football fans at the Lawrence Library last week.
”Now, professional football is huge. About 96 percent of the tickets (to a National Football League game) are sold. I’m a Green Bay Packers fan, and I am on the waiting list (for season tickets). I am 17,000 from the top of the list,” said Dr. Coenen, who teaches history at Mercer County Community College.
Professional football and the Super Bowl are so huge, in fact, that the annual match-up of the two top teams transcends the sport altogether and is an unofficial American holiday, he said. A coveted 30-second advertisement during Sunday’s game costs an average of $3.5 million.
It wasn’t always this way, he said. Although the NFL traces its origins to 1920, many professional football players chose to play under false names in the early years because the game “had no respect,” he said. No one cared about it, he added.
”Professional football was a boring game,” Dr. Coenen said. Scoring was low. Between the 1920 and 1933 seasons, 10 percent of the games ended with no score. More than half of the games were shut-outs, with one team scoring zero points.
The lack of continuity also contributed to the lack of interest in professional football, he said, noting that 60 franchises, or teams, played in the NFL from 1920 to 1932 from the Rock Island Independents to the Staten Island Stapletons. In 1933, there were eight franchises. About one-third of the teams in the NFL disbanded after each season ended.
”How can you develop an allegiance to a team if you don’t know whether it will still be there,” Dr. Coenen asked.
Professional football was a losing game, financially, he said. A franchise cost about $50 in the 1920s, and about $2,500 in 1933 the equivalent of $40,000 in today’s dollars but only about 7 percent of the teams made money each season.
Meanwhile, the 1920s marked the golden age of college football, Dr. Coenen said. While college football was not financially successful, the loss was offset by the ability to attract students to a college. It also generated interest among the school’s alumni, he said.
College football and semi-professional football which was the next rung up on the ladder attracted spectators because many were related to the players, Dr. Coenen said. It was the same boring game as professional football, but “you would go to see someone you know play” on the team, he said.
Eager to draw fans, NFL teams resorted to gimmicks from Native American Indians who played on the Orange Indians team and who rode in on horseback, to live bear wrestling and the Texas Rangers team from Buffalo, N.Y., that was made up of “real” Texas rangers, Dr. Coenen said.
”(But) the gimmicks had no staying power,” he said.
The turning point came when a few rich men who were interested in football decided to buy teams and did not care whether the team won or lost its games or made money, he said. These investors didn’t mind losing money on something they liked, he added.
That stability allowed the NFL to make some changes in the rules that were designed to attract spectators, Dr. Coenen said. Those changes ranged from making the football smaller, to moving goalposts and allowing more forward passing, with the result that more points were scored during a game from an average of 8 points per game in 1932 to 18 points in 1945. Last year, the average number of points scored in a game was 22.
But it was television that proved to be key in making the NFL as popular as it is today despite the sport’s initial wariness of the new technology in the 1950s. The concern was that televising the games would reduce the number of tickets sold, so it was agreed that a team’s home games would not be televised, Dr. Coenen said. That agreement lasted until 1972.
And football was just “made” for TV, Dr. Coenen said. Baseball is better appreciated from a seat in the stadium, but football is better appreciated on TV because the cameras make every viewer at home feel that he or she is sitting on the 50-yard line, he said.
The first NFL championship game was televised in 1958 and drew 40 million viewers. It was dubbed “the greatest game ever played” by Sports Illustrated magazine, Dr. Coenen said. The Super Bowl, which was first shown on TV in 1967, was the “crowning moment for the sport,” he added.
”The Super Bowl (which determines the NFL championship) is a cultural experience. It is a social gathering. Football (and the NFL) is the leading American spectator sport and it will continue to grow,” Dr. Coenen said.

