In our previous episode, we talked about the ever expanding National Football League, which is already the biggest, richest sports league in history. The NFL is a tight confederation of 32

teams that are essentially run as individual firms, unlike the European soccer leagues, where the worst teams are pushed out each year,

replaced by teams from the lower ranks, the NFL is a closed ecosystem, and it is an

extraordinarily powerful one.

The NFL lies at the center of not only sport, but also media and advertising, gambling, pop culture

and politics, and just about anything else you can think of. It may be sacrilegious to say this but it may also be true.

The NFL, which plays most of its games on Sunday afternoon, is the closest thing we have today to

a national religion. In 1960 on Meet the Press, Martin Luther King

Jr. made the following observation about church going.

I think it is one of the tragedies of our nation one of the shameful tragedies

at 11 o'clock on Sunday morning is one of the most segregated hours if not the

most segregated hours in Christian America. If Sunday morning church time is or at

least was the most segregated hour in America, would it also be sacrilegious to say

that the rest of Sunday is the least segregated?

There are countless constituencies attached to this game.

Because of that, the NFL draws enormous attention and it often sets the cultural or political agenda, especially when it comes to society and race.

The story we began last week looked at an NFL policy called the Rooney rule named

after the late Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan Rooney. The rule was adopted in

2003 and it required that whenever an NFL team hired a new head coach, which happens on average about every three years,

that they interview at least one candidate who isn't white.

Some people saw this move as long overdue since the majority of NFL players were black

and the vast majority of head coaches were white.

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