NFL Films

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  NFL Films began with a wedding gift. Ed Sabol, a World War II veteran turned topcoat salesman, received a motion picture camera from his wife and started filming his son Steve's high school football games. That hobby led him to bid $5,000 for the rights to film the 1962 NFL championship game, double what anyone had paid for the previous year's game. The footage impressed Commissioner Pete Rozelle enough that he pushed the league's owners to buy Sabol's small company, Blair Motion Pictures, and fold it into the NFL itself. They resisted in 1964, then relented a year later. What came next was a film and television operation that would win 112 Sports Emmys, earn more than $50 million in revenue a year, and preserve footage that no one else was saving. The questions worth asking are: how did a home-movie hobby turn into a league-owned production empire, what made its style so distinctive, and what happens when the NFL controls its own story?

• 2. From Blair to NFL Films

  ›

  Ed Sabol named his original company Blair Motion Pictures after his daughter Blair. When Pete Rozelle convinced the league's owners to buy it in 1965, the name changed but the family leadership did not. Sabol received $20,000 in seed money from each of the then 14 NFL owners, and in exchange he committed to shooting every NFL game and producing an annual highlight film for every team in the league. The arrangement made NFL Films both a service provider and a storyteller, obligated to every franchise regardless of how its season had gone. When the AFL-NFL merger was agreed in June 1966, the two leagues stayed separate entities partly to give Sabol time to expand his operation before absorbing a much larger league. NFL Films began covering AFL games in 1968 under a division called AFL Films, though the AFL Films crews were simply regular NFL Films employees wearing different jackets to satisfy AFL loyalists. Ed Sabol was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame on the 6th of August, 2011, recognized as a major contributor to the league he had helped to transform. He died on the 9th of February, 2015, at his home in Arizona.

• 3. The Signature Style

  ›

  Salon.com television critic Matt Zoller Seitz described NFL Films as "the greatest in-house P.R. machine in pro sports history...an outfit that could make even a tedious stalemate seem as momentous as the battle for the Alamo." The tools behind that effect were deliberate and consistent. NFL Films used film rather than video for most of its work. One camera was reserved exclusively for slow-motion shots, producing the signature tight-on-the-spiral sequence: the quarterback releases the ball, the camera zooms in on the spinning football mid-air, then pulls back as it settles into the receiver's hands. Microphones on the sidelines captured both the sounds of the game and the talk among coaches and players. Radio call clips from local broadcasters were dubbed over key plays, because those announcers tended to be more enthusiastic about their home teams than the television networks. Multiple camera angles, heavy use of close-ups, and muscular orchestral scores completed the effect. The company compared its results to ballet, opera, and epic battles. Among the most recognized works to come out of that style is the poem and music cue called "The Autumn Wind", which became an official theme for the Las Vegas Raiders.

• 4. The Voice and the Score

  ›

  The narrators of NFL Films productions carried a specific quality: deep, powerful, baritone voices, and most came from the Philadelphia metropolitan area. John Facenda, Harry Kalas, Jefferson Kaye, Andy Musser, Jack Whitaker, and William Woodson all narrated NFL Films presentations. Actor Burt Lancaster was brought in for narrations in 1969. Burl Ives narrated the 1971 Washington Redskins highlight film. J.K. Simmons narrated the one-hour recap of the 2007 New England Patriots' 16-0 regular season. Team-specific films sometimes drew on personalities connected to the franchise: Carl Weathers, an actor and former Raiders player, narrated the 1985, 2000, and 2001 Oakland Raiders season reviews. New England Patriots announcer Gil Santos narrated year-in-review films for the 1974, 1976, and 1978 seasons. The orchestral scores matched the vocal gravity. Composer Sam Spence was a central figure, alongside Johnny Pearson, whose track "Heavy Action" became the theme for Monday Night Football. KPM Musichouse tracks appeared throughout the catalog, including Syd Dale's "Maelstrom" on the 1968 Minnesota Vikings highlight reel and the jazz track "Artful Dodger" during the Super Bowl V recap, specifically during the famous tipped 75-yard touchdown pass from Johnny Unitas to John Mackey.

• 5. Preservation and the Archive

  ›

  In the 1960s, many sports telecasts were broadcast live with no recording at all, and the tapes that did exist were often destroyed and recycled afterward. That practice did not fully stop until 1978. NFL Films' cameras at every game created a record that would otherwise not exist. Without that footage, no surviving film of the early Super Bowls would remain. Other sports felt the loss more sharply: in Major League Baseball, broadcasts of many World Series games before 1975 have been lost, and nearly all League Championship Series broadcasts from the first series in 1969 through 1978 are unavailable. NFL Films operates its own in-house 16mm and 35mm color negative processing lab at its headquarters in the Bishop's Gate industrial park in Mount Laurel, New Jersey. Film shot at games is rushed back to the facility and processed immediately to give the production team maximum time for weekly shows. The vault holds over 100 continuous years of football footage, drawn from NFL Films' own shoots and from material acquired from other sources. The lab is currently transferring all of its holdings into high-definition format, though the original film is kept intact, as it is expected to outlast tape in terms of degradation.

• 6. Beyond Football

  ›

  NFL Films has produced work well outside the game it was built around. The company filmed the Munich Olympics massacre for one of NBC's Olympics telecasts. It served as back-up film photography for the Stanley Cup Final, the NBA Finals, and the World Series. In 1983, NFL Films produced the music video for Journey's hit single "Faithfully". Working with Volkswagen Group, it applied its signature style to Audi's Truth in 24 series, documenting Audi's efforts at the 24 Hours of Le Mans race. A 1977 film on Colorado State University's football program used John Denver's "Rocky Mountain High" and an instrumental cover of the Beatles' "Tell Me What You See", and featured noted alumni who had gone on to NFL careers. NFL Films has also produced television commercials for the convenience store chain Sheetz, and its style has been parodied in commercials for NFL sponsors including Sprint Nextel and Burger King. The company's reach into scripted film and television has expanded in recent years, with productions including Fantasy Football for Paramount+ in November 2022, The Perfect 10 for Fox Sports Films in February 2023, and Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story for Hallmark Channel in November 2024.

• 7. The Sam Spence Dispute

  ›

  Sam Spence's name appears throughout the NFL Films music catalog, but his relationship with the company became the subject of a long-running dispute. Spence reported in an interview that he had been persuaded to sign a contract surrendering all rights to his music to NFL Films. He alleged that NFL Films had told him his music was in danger of being stolen, and that signing the document would empower the company to protect it in court. Instead, according to Spence, NFL Films used the contract to claim ownership of his work outright. The league never publicly returned the rights. Two albums released under the NFL Films name illustrate how central that music became to the brand: The Power and the Glory: The Original Music and Voices of NFL Films appeared in 1998, and Autumn Thunder: 40 Years of NFL Films Music followed in 2004. The dispute over who actually owned the compositions on those records remained unresolved.