Politics & Power Quote by Will McDonough

Rozelle didn’t just sell football; he sold a weekly habit, packaged like national weather. Will McDonough’s line is less a neutral compliment than a blueprint for how modern sports became a media product first and an athletic contest second. The key verb is “used.” Television isn’t framed as a passive amplifier of the NFL’s greatness, but as an instrument Rozelle wielded to manufacture scale, urgency, and consensus. The Super Bowl, in this telling, isn’t merely “created” as a championship; it’s engineered as a shared civic appointment, a ritual that turns fandom into something closer to a holiday.

The subtext is a little sharper: the “American public” is treated as a market to be reached, aggregated, and held. McDonough is pointing at a pivot in power. Once TV becomes the delivery system, the league commissioner becomes less a steward of the sport than an architect of attention. That’s why “biggest sporting event in the world” lands like both triumph and warning. It implies dominance, yes, but also a kind of inevitability: if you control the broadcast, you control what counts as culture.

Context matters. Rozelle’s tenure tracks with the postwar boom, the rise of network television, and the transformation of leisure into mass consumption. McDonough, a long-time NFL reporter, is recording the moment when football stopped being regional and became a national language, with the Super Bowl as its loudest, most lucrative sentence.