What if football, that brutal ballet of strategy and savagery, owed its modern empire not to a silver-tongued showman but to a lanky lawyer who once rebounded his way through college courts? Paul Tagliabue, the second-longest-serving commissioner in National Football League history, died last week at the age of 84. Over 17 years at the helm, from 1989 to 2006, he transformed a 28-team patchwork into a 32-franchise juggernaut and grew league revenues from multimillions to billions, all while steering clear of the strikes and lockouts that had scarred predecessors.
Paul John Tagliabue was born on Nov. 24, 1940, in Jersey City, New Jersey, and raised in a working-class neighborhood. Tagliabue arrived at Georgetown University on a basketball scholarship, standing 6 feet, 5 inches as a forward with a knack for crashing the boards. He started three seasons for the Hoyas, captaining the 1961-62 squad and leading the team in rebounds during his junior year. Off the court, he served as class president and earned finalist honors for a Rhodes Scholarship, graduating with honors in 1962. Three years later, he claimed a law degree from New York University, blending Ivy League polish with blue-collar grit that would define his negotiations in the high-stakes arena of professional sports.
Tagliabue’s path to the NFL traced a deliberate arc through corporate corridors. After clerking for a federal judge and stints at two powerhouse New York firms, he caught the league’s eye in 1969. Hired as outside counsel to negotiate the AFL-NFL merger’s antitrust exemptions — a high-stakes legal tango that fused the rival leagues into a single powerhouse — he joined the commissioner’s office full-time two years later. Under Pete Rozelle, he honed a reputation for meticulous deal-making, from stadium leases to broadcast clauses. By 1989, when Rozelle stepped down after 29 years, Tagliabue had ascended to chief operating officer, positioning him as the unflashy heir apparent. Owners elected him unanimously, betting on a steady hand to navigate salary-cap skirmishes and expansion fever in the wake of the USFL’s antitrust defeat.
Early challenges tested that resolve. The league faced labor woes, with players chafing under restrictive rules and owners digging in against free agency. Tagliabue forged an unlikely alliance with Gene Upshaw, the Hall of Fame guard turned executive director of the NFL Players Association. Their rapport — built in marathon sessions over coffee and concession stands, blending Upshaw’s locker-room candor with Tagliabue’s courtroom precision — yielded a landmark 1993 collective bargaining agreement, introducing free agency with a salary cap. The deal lasted for seven years without a hitch, followed by extensions that blanketed Tagliabue’s tenure in industrial calm. No strikes, no lockouts: just 17 seasons of unbroken play, allowing the NFL to focus on growth rather than gridlock. Under this peace, attendance soared, and the league’s cultural footprint widened, highlighted by the NFL’s first overseas game — a 1986 exhibition in London that Tagliabue expanded into a global blueprint. (Though the U.K. deserves an apology for being sent the Jacksonville Jaguars every season.)
Television became Tagliabue’s masterstroke. Teaming with owners such as Robert Kraft of the Patriots and Jerry Jones of the Cowboys, Tagliabue orchestrated deals that ignited a media rights arms race. In 1990, he inked a four-year, $3.6 billion pact that split rights among CBS, NBC, and Fox. Kraft, joining the media committee at Tagliabue’s urging, championed syndication experiments. Jones pushed for premium pricing. Their handiwork peaked in 1998 with a $17.6 billion, eight-year accord, fragmenting games across networks and cable. Revenues quadrupled, allowing the league to fund gleaming stadiums from Baltimore to Houston.
Expansion mirrored this momentum. Tagliabue greenlit four new franchises: the Carolina Panthers and the aforementioned Jaguars in 1995, followed by the restored Cleveland Browns and the Houston Texans, pushing the league to 32 teams. Yet, in 2005, as Hurricane Katrina swallowed New Orleans, Tagliabue faced his starkest trial.
The displaced Saints were playing “home” games in San Antonio and Baton Rouge, with owner Tom Benson eyeing a move to Texas. Tagliabue refused to let the league’s Crescent City foothold erode. He rallied owners for $200 million in loans and grants, twisted arms in Washington for aid, and by January 2006, with the Superdome refurbished and a playoff berth secured, the Saints returned triumphant. He retired months later, handing the reins to Roger Goodell as the league was reaching its zenith.
Like tens of millions of Americans, I cannot imagine my September-through-January Sundays and Monday nights without football. That we can have such an exhilarating product pumped into our homes every week on broadcast television is semi-miraculous. The NFL is so good on TV that it can sometimes seem as if the medium was invented specifically for football. But it wasn’t until Tagliabue that football’s full TV potential began to be realized. And, for that, we millions of football fans around the country salute Paul Tagliabue this week — as surely as the network executives at CBS, Fox, NBC, and ESPN must be doing as well.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and the Allen and Joan Bildner Visiting Scholar at Rutgers University. Find him on X @DanRossGoodman.
