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The NFL gets religion
Cold, Hard Football Facts for February 23, 2008
The NFL finally yielded on one of its most bumbling PR disasters by agreeing to let church groups throw Super Bowl parties. The Salt Lake Tribune, and other publications, reported the story in recent days.
In recent years, most notably in 2007 in Indiana and again in 2008 in New England and elsewhere, the NFL put the smackdown on church organizations that wanted to celebrate the Super Bowl with parties.
The NFL has grown to its dominance in North American sports by fiercely protecting its brand name, probably the most valuable in all of sports. For example, media outlets and other organizations can't host publicity events with the word "Super Bowl" or other NFL-protected terms in it. The Cold, Hard Football Facts understand the need to protect the brand's integrity and, more importantly, to squeeze every last sliver of revenue out of a name that took so long to build.
But the notion that local church groups posed some sort of the threat to the league by hosting Super Bowl parties once a year made the NFL look like the evil monolith it's so often portrayed by those it steamrolls.
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