Pete Rozelle

After the sudden death of Bell in 1959, NFL team owners met in 1960 to find a successor and also map a strategy against the rival AFL. When owners deadlocked on Bell's replacement, Reeves offered Rozelle as a compromise candidate. Over the opposition of some of the league's most influential owners, Rozelle was elected the new NFL commissioner. He set to work immediately to convince NFL team owners to pool all media revenues and share them equally among all teams, putting each franchise on an even footing with the others. The rival AFL had already announced its intentions to follow a similar policy, and Rozelle thought the NFL needed to do the same to ensure its competitiveness against the new league. He also urged that the NFL provide a united front for the teams by bargaining collectively with the television networks for coverage contracts. To accomplish the latter, Rozelle was forced to argue before Congress for an exemption from the Sherman Antitrust Act. In September 1961 Congress approved such an exemption for the NFL.

As its television exposure grew, football attracted more and more fans. In 1962 Rozelle negotiated a $9.3 million contract with CBS TV. Football's growing popularity benefited not only the NFL but the rival AFL. The two leagues became locked in a costly bidding war for new players during the first half of the 1960s. By 1966, the situation had become untenable. Rozelle consulted with team owners in both leagues to promote the idea of a merger between the rival organizations. He also went back to Congress to argue for another exemption from antitrust law to make such a merger possible. He was successful on both fronts, and the AFL was merged into the NFL in 1966. The AFL became the American Football Conference (AFC), while the NFL teams were grouped in the National Football Conference (NFC). The merger and related organizational changes paved the way for the first Super Bowl, which was played between the Green Bay Packers of the NFC and the Kansas City Chiefs of the AFC in January 1967. A few years later, in 1969, Rozelle negotiated a contract with ABC TV creating "Monday Night Football." In 1974, Rozelle married Carrie Cooke, the former daughter-in-law of Washington Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke.