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The Secret Meeting That Reshaped the NFL: A Historical Account · Sports History Network

• 0:47
  Before there was a Super bowl, there was a secret meeting in Dallas with two owners of the teams on each side that met in a car, sat there and mapped out a strategy to plan out what the future
• 0:59
  of the National Football League would be.
• 1:01
  That's our story today as we flash back into the mid-1960s here on the gridiron timeline.
• 1:09
  Our story starts with not a game, but with an insult.
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  For six years, the National Football League called the American Football League a lot of things.
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  A minor league, a Mickey Mouse operation, a nuisance that would fold into the moment.
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  Real football fans would look away.
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  But the nuisance did not fold.
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  It grew.
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  Assigned players.
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  The NFL had ignored it at landed television deals that the NFL couldn't ignore.
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  And by the middle of the 1960s, the two leagues were no longer rivals.
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  They were at war.
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  And wars are expensive now.
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  The war had been fought with checkbooks.
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  Every college star became a battlefield.
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  Both leagues bid against each other for the same 22 year old kids.
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  And the price just kept escalating up and up.
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  In 1965, the New York jets signed a quarterback out of Alabama named Joe Namath.
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  The number that hit the papers was $427,000.
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  The richest contract in the history of professional football.
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  And a message is sent with suit simple.
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  The AFL would not be outbid for the top players in the nation.
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  For the NFL it was a crisis dressed as a game.
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  They had the history, they had the prestige of the championships.
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  But the history doesn't pay the bills.
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  Every dollar the AFL spent was a dollar the NFL had to match.
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  And both leagues were bleeding.
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  And the men who ran them knew it couldn't go on for long.
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  Now here's the part that sounds like a movie because basically it was.
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  In the spring of 1966, two men began playing and a meeting in secret.
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  One side, Tech Sram, the general manager of the Dallas Cowboys, the NFL's guy.
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  On the other side was Lamar Hunt, the owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, the man who had founded the AFL in the first place and moved his team out of the Dallas area just a few years before so
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  his team could be have their own identity in Kansas City.
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  Now they met in cars in a parking lot, far away from owners, away from the press, away from anyone who could blow it up before it got started.
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  Two men on opposite sides of a six year war sketching a peace treaty on scratch paper.
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  And the piece they drew had a name neither league could say out loud yet.
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  A merger.
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  On June 8, 1966, the two leagues made it official and the terms would reshape professional football not over decades, but overnight.
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  And here's what they actually agreed to.
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  The two leagues would stop fighting over players with a common draft beginning in 1967.
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  They would stop competing for championships.
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  Instead, each season's league champion would meet in the one shared title game starting in January 1967.
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  A game that didn't even have a name yet and what we now call the super bowl.
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  And by 1970s season, there would be no AFL at all.
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  All 10 AFL franchises would be folded into a single organization.
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  One name, one commissioner, Pete Roselle.
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  And the NFL wasn't absorbing the rival.
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  It was merging with one.
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  But there was a price.
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  The AFL paid the older league 18 and a half million dollars in an indemnity.
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  Call it a tribute, a buy in.
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  No way that they could get in without it.
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  But either way, the money was the quiet part, the part that told you that really was conceding to what.
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  Now, this was the part that nobody remembers.
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  It's the part that tells you that the merger really cost.
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  Roselle wanted one thing above all.
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  A championship game between the two equal conferences.
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  But there was a math problem.
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  10 AFL teams, 16 NFL teams.
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  To make two equal sides, three NFL teams would have to leave their league.
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  Enjoy the AFL side.
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  Now, think about what that meant.
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  The Baltimore Colts, the Cleveland Browns, the Pittsburgh Steelers.
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  Three of the oldest, proudest franchises in the game.
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  Asked to walk away from the league, they spent six years mocking.
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  One official who was there put it plainly.
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  It was like being asked to move into the lesser league.
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  That was not.
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  That's how they saw it.
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  But the meetings turned bitter.
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  For a while, it looked like the whole thing would just collapse over pride.
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  Then one man stood up, Art Modell, the owner of the Browns.
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  And he told the room that he would move his franchise to the new conference on two conditions.
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  That Wellington Mara, owner of the Giants, give him his blessings and the Art Rooney, owner of the Steelers, would come with him.
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  Rooney came, the Colts followed.
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  And the conference service was balanced.
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  In the rivalries those moves created, they're some of the best in football today.
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  Now, there's one last gate.
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  Merging the two leagues was, on paper, illegal, a violation of federal antitrust law.
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  So the deal needed permission from the United States Congress of all parties.
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  Now, permission came with a price tag of its own.
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  To get the votes, the league promised new teams, expansion franchises for politicians who wanted football in their cities.
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  The most famous of them, the New Orleans Saints, born as a bargaining chip.
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  Before it ever took a snap.
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  Congress passed the exemption in late 1966.
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  And the deal was done.
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  And on January 15, 1967, the Green Bay packers and the Kansas City Chiefs met in the first AFL NFL World Championship game.
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  A game with no trophy name, no roman numerals, and no idea what was going to become of the biggest single event in American sports.
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  But The packers won 35 to 10.
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  But the real winner that day was the merger itself.
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  The two leagues have gone from a war to a shared championship in under a year.
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  Every super bowl you've watched, the roman numerals, the halftime show, two conferences colliding in February.
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  It all traces back to June 8, 1966, and to a secret meeting between two men that were supposed to be enemies.
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  The NFL didn't beat the AFL that year.
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  They bought it.
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  They merged with it.
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  They called the whole thing one League.
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  And the game you're watching today is the one they designed in that parking lot.
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  Thanks for joining us.
• 6:57
  Today you find more football history at your portal to Gridiron History, pigskindispatch.com and our Gridiron timeline where you can find any event from 1869 all the way to the current times.
• 7:09
  We're here for you and we're telling the story like it is, with facts and and we'd love to have your input.
• 7:15
  Pigskind dispatch Gmail.com is a way to get in touch with us.
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  Until next time, everybody.
• 7:19
  Have a great gridiron day.
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