The solution they hit upon to make football cool again: Cultivate offense and incentivize teams to go for the end zone rather than settle for field goals.Īt the annual owners meeting in March 1994, the NFL’s competition committee passed a bundle of new rules. Though television ratings remained strong, and Fox had purchased the rights to NFC games for an unprecedented $1.58 billion in December 1993, Tagliabue and the league’s other powers that be felt the on-field status quo was no longer acceptable. “The game suffers from a lack of identity and visibility,” Steve Miller, the head of sports marketing at Nike, told Newsweek.
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Longtime NFL writer Len Pasquarelli, then with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, said pro football had become “moribund” and “stale and predictable.”Ĭompared with professional basketball, the NFL seemed antiquated, ill-equipped to entertain fans in need of constant flash and action. Critics derisively referred to it as the National Field Goal League. Average yardage was also on the decline -pro football had become a game of inches. During the 1993 season, half of the league’s teams averaged less than two touchdowns per game. From 1983 through 1993, the number of touchdowns scored in NFL games decreased by 22 percent, while the number of field goals attempted rose 14 percent.
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