The new league quickly made a decision that was crucial to its success: to pool its broadcasting rights and sell them as a single package to ABC. Deciding in 1961 to do the same, the NFL was aiming to maintain its competitive advantage.[8] The NFL faced an obstacle that the AFL did not, however, in the form of Judge Grim’s 1953 order. The NFL filed a petition, which the DOJ opposed, seeking a ruling from the U.S. district court that its agreement with CBS did not violate the earlier court order. In an opinion commonly referred to as United States v. National Football League II (1961), Judge Grim pointed to the provision in his order prohibiting the NFL or its teams from making contracts “having the purpose or effect of restricting the areas within which broadcasts or telecasts of games … may be made.” The current agreement gave CBS the right to determine, without input from the NFL, which games would be shown on television and where. The transfer of these rights to CBS, which took away from individual teams the ability to decide which of their games would be televised, was an obvious violation of the earlier order, Grim ruled.
The NFL lobbied Congress to override Grim’s order, and Congress responded quickly, enacting the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 on September 30.[9] The act provided that antitrust laws would not apply to any “joint agreement” in which a professional sports league pooled and sold the rights to telecast its games. An agreement that prohibited the televising of games in certain areas (other than a home area blackout provision such as the NFL employed[10]) would not be included in the antitrust exemption.[11] The Senate Judiciary Committee’s report expressed the view that without the act, many teams would not be able to earn enough television revenue to survive, threatening the continued existence of professional football. AFL Commissioner Joe Foss, no doubt wary of a similar challenge to his league’s broadcasting contract, testified to Congress that television revenue was crucial to the survival of a professional football team, making it necessary to prevent large TV revenue disparities between teams.
With the legal roadblock out of the way, the NFL completed its deal with CBS, giving the network the exclusive right to telecast NFL games for two years for more than $9 million. When that contract ended, CBS won a bidding war against the other networks, paying more than $28 million to renew for another two years. With this contract, the NFL’s television revenue exceeded its gate revenue for the first time. The following year, the AFL moved from ABC to NBC, selling the rights to its games for $36 million over five years. The symbiotic relationship between professional football and national television had been solidified.
Having survived in large part because of its ability to secure national television contracts, the AFL entered into a merger agreement with the NFL in 1966. The contract provided for an annual AFL‑NFL World Championship Game beginning in January 1967[12] and a full merger under the NFL banner in time for the 1970 season.[13]