ABSTRACT
National Football League (NFL) Commissioner Roger Goodell realized that football fans were shifting their attention from the game itself to a controversial player protest movement occurring before each game even started. Goodell’s office would need to take action before some football viewers decided enough was enough and abandoned the NFL forever. Rebranded from the American Professional Football Association in 1920, the NFL slowly built professional American football from an unpopular game that paled in comparison to college football into the country’s most watched sport. The NFL hardly competed with Major League Baseball, affectionately known as “America’s Pastime” since the 1850s. The NFL is a trade association with 32 franchises that distributes its profits among the teams. The NFL heavily focuses on game day organization and cherishes consistency among its pregame routines. The NFL game operations manual gives instructions on how games should be run in order to ensure that everything runs smoothly and improve viewer experience.
