John K. Laub
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At the dawn of the twenty-first century, pro football stood alone as the apotheosis of modern American sport, a financial and cultural dynasty, both tempted and plagued by greed and always in danger of overstretch. At the same time, it was a mass media juggernaut responsible for the ten most-watched television programs in history, and one of the few solid pieces of common ground left on the increasingly balkanized map of modern American popular culture.
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- Michael MacCambridge
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Adding show business to football broadcasting initially meant enhancing the game's storytelling ability, not reducing but amplifying football's epic or mythic power. More cameras, including the use of close-ups, slow motion, and relays, meant an ability to capture the raw human emotions of joy, agony, disappointment, and rage."
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- Michael Oriard
Over 100 million Americans watched Super Bowl XLIV on February 7, 2010, setting an all-time record for viewership; an 8% increase over the previous Super Bowl. The CBS network sold 30-second advertisements during the broadcast for $2.6 million. The National Football League generates well over $8 billion in revenue annually and has its own cable television network. Why do fans continue to spend millions of dollars on supporting and rooting for their favorite football teams?
While football fans enjoy the Super Bowl and BCS Championship game every year, few gridiron aficionados know the history and growth of college and pro football as big business in American consumer culture. After WW II, two cultural transformations--television and consumerism--intersected to catapult football to the top of the sports industry. This unit offers students an opportunity to appreciate the impact on themselves as consumers of the dynamic between sports, technology, big business, and the federal government. The NFL has dominated the sports industry during the past fifty years by marketing, branding, programming, and promoting its athletes and the game through shrewd decisions by its owners and commissioners. Students will watch documentaries and films, read secondary sources and research topics to learn how football and consumerism converged in the mid-1960s to create a billion-dollar industry. The unit will provide new classroom strategies, ignite students' intellectual curiosity and connect sports and consumer culture to contextualize and enhance their knowledge and appreciation of the game. It provides the opportunity to identify the growth of amateur and professional football as one of the most profitable consumer industries in the country and trace its influence on American consumerism especially male consumption, an understudied phenomenon given the stereotypically feminine association with shopping and consumption. All lessons are designed and presented in order to examine and answer the following essential question: How have gridiron industrialists, competitive coaches, college athletic departments, the federal government and fanatical fans embraced amateur and professional football and kindled a multi-billion dollar consumer culture in the United States?
The students will employ critical thinking skills to synthesize historical knowledge of football with current consumer theory, free-market enterprise, and the rise of television. The classroom scholars will increase their business vocabulary and study how the game has shaped the consumer culture. Students will explore the ascent of college and professional football while investigating the myth of the amateur athlete and the impact of federal legislation on the industry. The curriculum unit also focuses on the research process in order to prepare students for the demands of college. The scholars will research the immense business of college and professional football, profits in our consumer culture and marketing and branding of the sport to the American public.
Several essential questions guide the unit:
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Why do Americans spend billions of dollars of discretionary income on NFL and college football products in the consumer culture?
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How did college football effectively forgo its amateur status and become a billion-dollar industry?
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How did technology and the federal government intersect to create a gridiron consumer culture worth billions?
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How has the film industry, corporate commercials and NFL Films illustrated and portrayed professional football in America?
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Why did League Think increase revenue in the NFL?
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How did the NFL rise to the summit of American sports and market itself in America's consumer culture?
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How did the NFL retain its dominance over the AFL and USFL?
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How have the courts ruled in antitrust lawsuits against the NFL?
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