Pretty cool.

was Feb 3rd 2008

the game was good but not spectacular. At least that’s my opinion. The fact that it went into overtime was exciting but the actual game winning play was predictable and nearly inevitable. Of course I was only 12 when I watched the game so my analysis by memory is a little vague.

 A lot of people forget that Baltimore was a much better team that year than the Giants and it is a credit to the G-men that they almost won.

the game was not a sellout. there were about six thousand empty seats. I do agree with you though that the game was the catalyst for the NFL’s rise to dominance in professional sports. The fact that it went to sudden death overtime really excited many fans. That and the "Violent world of Sam Huff publicity put the NFL on the map

Believe it or not it was 1951…I googled this info..

Schilling, 2003, p. 171). The DuMont television network televised five NFL games in 1951, including the championship game between the Los Angeles Rams and the Cleveland Browns. DuMont paid $475,000 for the rights to the NFL’s annual championship games through 1955 (NFL, 1951; “Pro football and DuMont sign a $475,000 pact,” 1951). By 1953, DuMont obtained rights to broadcast a game each week (Brooks & Marsh, 1979, p. 290; Neal-Lunsford, 1992, p. 73). Both DuMont and the NFL realized the benefits of the arrangement: Nine of the twelve NFL clubs ended the 1953 and 1954 seasons in the black, thanks largely to revenue from television, while DuMont realized its largest advertising income from coverage of professional football and basketball (Heldenfels, 1994, p. 167). An internal DuMont memorandum in late 1954 notes that Nielsen ratings for professional football had risen 26% over the previous year, while ratings for NCAA football had fallen 15% from the previous year (Hubbell, 1954). At the close of the 1954 season, DuMont estimated its football coverage reached 400 million viewers (DuMont, 1955). Such success did not go unnoticed elsewhere. Archival material indicates that in early 1954, NBC was investigating the potential costs of carrying the NFL and had even met with the league’s commissioner, De Benneville “Bert” Bell, and various potential advertisers. In one memorandum written in early 1955, an NBC executive states, “I believe most strongly that NBC should carry pro-football” (Culligan, 1955, p. 1; see also Gardner, 1954; Martin, n.d.; Martin, 1955).

Despite its brief success covering professional sports, the DuMont network was “programmatically underdeveloped, poorly positioned in terms of its affiliates, and insufficiently supported by advertisers,” (MacDonald, 1994, p. 65) and folded in 1955 (Weinstein, 2004, pp. 187-189), leaving individual NFL teams to negotiate television deals with local television stations. The major teams were successful in extracting revenues from local television stations and sponsors. However, the less prominent teams residing in smaller markets failed to receive any attention from local television stations. It was under these circumstances, in late 1955, that professional football gained the attention of television executives of CBS, whose concern for attracting viewers to their television sets on Sunday afternoons ultimately helped transform football into one of the most lucrative venues for television. In broadcasting the entire 1956 National Football League season CBS shifted professional football broadcasts from a model established by Major League Baseball in which local stations carried local teams’ games to one in which networks would package, sell, and air multiple games in different regions of the country.

Interesting stuff…I lived in New Enland and watched a lot of Giants games on the CBS station in Hartford.

While preparing to watch about three NCAA games today I suddenly realized that it was not so many years ago that there were only one or two games televised each weeekend. Thank God that’s changed!

Wow…I don’t remember Dumont. Did they carry The Honeymooners? I do remember though my father buying an Admiral 20" or so black and white tv in 1961 for the princely sum of $400 if I remember correctly. That was a huge amount of money then. We had to save for a long time before we got it. No Citi cards in those days.

You are so right. I remember in 1964 when I saw my first Toyota. I was washing cars for a Ford Dealer when someone noticed it parked in front of the shop. We all laughed our a**es off because we knew the Japanese couldn’t even make a decent transitor radio back then.

From what I’ve read the president of Sony came to America and was so humiliated by the fact that “made in Japan” was synonomous with garbage that he went home and convinced his people to commit to quality.