Professional football today is a $6 billion sports entertainment industry. In this astute field-level view of the National Football League since 1960, Michael Oriard looks closely at the development of the sport and at the image of the NFL and its unique place in American life. At the heart of this story is a question with no simple answer: has the extraordinary commercializing and ''branding'' of NFL football since the late 1980s ironically weakened the cultural power of a sport whose appeal for more than a century was fundamentally noncommercial?