The Lesson We Learn about Women's Sports from the 1957 NFL Championship
This was the last title the Detroit Lions Won!
The final game of the 2024 NFL regular season is The Game of the Year!
The 14-2 Detroit Lions host the 14-2 Minnesota Vikings. The winner gets the NFC North title, the number one seed in the NFC conference playoffs, and home field advantage until the Super Bowl. The loser may be the best 5th seed in the history of the NFL playoffs. The loser also doesn’t get a division title and has to travel the road if they want to get to the Super Bowl.
Given the stakes in this game, it will not be surprising if NBC gets the highest television ratings for the season. The Lions-49ers game on Monday night – which did not impact the playoffs at all – attracted 22.3 million viewers on ESPN. Only three regular season games on NBC drew a bigger audience this year. So, a significant game with the Lions (and the Vikings!), should get more than 25 million viewers. Right?
As a person who was born in Detroit and has always been a Lions fan, this game is immensely significant. In the fifty years I have followed this team I can’t remember a more important regular season game. Once upon a time, though, significant games were more the norm for the Lions. For example, consider the 1957 NFL championship game.
The game was a matchup between the Detroit Lions and Cleveland Browns. From 1950 to 1955 these two teams had won five NFL championships. Three times these teams had met win in the title game, with the Lions prevailing in 1952 and 1953 and the Browns taking the title in 1954. The 1957 game also featured a rookie running back named Jim Brown. Not only had Brown led the NFL in rushing yards in 1957, the Associated Press also named him league MVP.
Given all these storylines, one would probably be surprised to learn the national television audience for this game was nonexistent. And by nonexistent I don’t mean the audience was small. What I mean is that the game wasn’t even televised.
Here is how Mike Palumbo tells the story:
Prior to the 1956 NFL season, DuMont sold its (NFL) broadcast rights to CBS. By 1955, NBC became the television home to the NFL Championship Game, paying $100,000 to the league for the rights. CBS’ NFL coverage began on September 30, 1956. Both NBC and CBS passed on the rights to the 1957 championship game. ABC apparently considered televising the game, but could not gain enough clearance of affiliates to make a telecast feasible. So for the third straight year, there was no telecast.
As it turns out, this was the last time the Lions won an NFL title. And unfortunately, the nation didn’t see it happen on television.
Unfortunately, the Lions title came one year too early. The NFL championship in 1958 – between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants – wasn’t just televised. This game changed NFL history.
Later in the decade, the NFL’s popularity on TV got a major boost. December 28, 1958, was the turning point. The Baltimore Colts, led by star quarterback Johnny Unitas, defeated the favored New York Giants 20–17 at Yankee Stadium, winning the NFL championship. A thrilling game, it was the first NFL playoff game to be decided in sudden-death overtime. An estimated 40 million people, a huge audience at the time, watched the national telecast of the game. Many professional football experts consider the 1958 championship game to be the starting point for the NFL’s swift rise to become the most popular sports league in the country
Just to review. The 1957 game – between the two dominants teams of the 1950s – wasn’t televised. The next year, the NFL championship game suddenly had 40 million viewers.
It appears network executives made a mistake back in 1957. Given the history of the NFL, though, the decision made about the Lions and Browns title game wasn’t that surprising.
Throughout most of the 21st century, NFL teams have averaged more than 60,000 fans per contest and sellouts are quite common. No one would have guessed this story nearly a century ago. As the following graph illustrates (using attendance data from Pro-Football Reference.com – which oddly ends in 1959), back in 1934 NFL teams averaged less than 15,000 fans per game. At this time – as noted in Slaying the Trolls -- the NFL was less than 15 years old and the league’s franchise failure rate was around 90%.
Source of Data: Pro-Football-Reference.com
By the end of the 1930s, the NFL began to stabilize and average attendance surpassed the 20,000 mark. Like we see in the attendance data from Major League Baseball, there was was a spike in NFL attendance at the end of World War II. In the late-1940s, though, that spike had vanished, and average attendance was back below 30,000 per game.
By 1952, though, average NFL attendance was once again above 30,000 per contest. And then throughout the 1950s we see consistent growth. By the end of the decade, the NFL was far removed from the instability we had seen just 25 years earlier.
Although the league had grown, the NFL had not taken off yet. That take-off —as the above quote indicates — comes after the 1958 title game demonstrated how many people would watch the NFL on television. In the 1960s and 1970s, the major networks broadcasted the NFL consistently on Sundays (and eventually Monday night). This consistent coverage causes the NFL to explode.
The story of the NFL is not unique. Initially a professional sports league struggles to find fans. When that happens, attendance is low and franchise failure rates are high. After a few decades – and yes, it tends to be decades – the fans gradually arrive. The attention from the fans, though, tends to skyrocket once the media starts broadcasting the league’s games consistently. This isn’t just the story in the NFL. It also appears to be the story in both the NBA and women’s basketball (stories I will tell on another day).
So, what comes first? Is it the fans? Or the media?
There are those who think the media simply broadcasts what the fans want to see. The story of the NFL casts doubt on that story. Once again, the last championship won by the Detroit Lions would seem to be must-see television. But the networks passed. The next year, 40 million people tuned in to watch the 1958 title game.
The NFL didn’t suddenly get popular in 1958. An audience had been building gradually throughout the 1950s. But it wasn’t until networks began broadcasting the NFL consistently that the NFL became the dominant sports league in America.
It is important to emphasize that network executives couldn’t have known this would happen. Once again, no one saw the Lions win their last championship (really feel the need to repeat that point!).
Okay, now let me connect this story to women’s sports. It should not be surprising that once the major networks started broadcasting women’s basketball – both in college and the WNBA – on a consistent basis, women’s basketball took off. It is tempting to think the growth of women’s sports is about the stars we see. But no one thinks the NFL became immensely popular because of Johnny Unitas or any other star player in the late 1950s and 1960s.
It is more likely, that television networks making the games available to a huge audience is what made it possible for a huge audience to appear!
We should all remember this point as we watch women’s sports explode in the 21st century!
I should close with that observation (very much like that story!), but I feel compelled to make one final observation about the Lions and Vikings game this Sunday.
According to Pro-Football Reference, the 1970 season is oddly similar to 2024. According to that site’s Simple Rating System (a measure I very much like based on average margin of victory and strength of schedule), in 1970 the Lions and Vikings were the most dominant teams in the NFL. Both teams had to think a Super Bowl was a real possibility. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Both teams got eliminated in the NFL’s Division Round. In other words, neither team won a playoff game that year.
As a Lions fan, I am hoping for a better result in 2024. But I also know, the playoffs are not a scientifically designed experiment (a point I am pretty sure we made in The Wages of Wins). Any team that gets in the tournament could win the whole thing. And any team can also lose at any time. So, as Nick Fury might say, as a Lions fan you hope for the best and make do with what you get!