Articles by Jack M Silverstein

“Eli Manning is a first-ballot Hall of Famer!”
No.
He is not.
On Wednesday, the Pro Football Hall of Fame released its list of the 25 modern era semifinalists for the class of 2025. I recently led a group of Hall analysts and historians in building our own list of 50, published at Hall voter Clark Judge’s site Talk of Fame, and Eli did not make our list. I was not surprised to see him in the actual Top 50 stage, and I am disappointed but not surprised to see him in the semifinals.
This isn’t a knock on Eli. My disappointment comes from two factors. First, the selection committee prioritizing newly eligible players over players running out of eligibility. Second, I’m disappointed in the Eli first-ballot talk because anyone elected first-ballot is the elite of the elite of the elite, which he is not.
That finalist round of 15 is where the Hall journey really starts, because that’s when voters actually discuss and argue cases. For some, they didn’t even get that far.
First-ballot semifinalists took the place of deserving candidates from the 1990s
Eli is one of six first-ballot semifinalists this year, while the voters sent three 1990s All-Decade members to the senior pool this year by passing them over without once discussing their cases in the final 15:

Cornelius Bennett, two-time UPI AFC Defensive Player of the Year
Ben Coates, who most people would probably pick as the number 2 tight end of the 1990s
Neil Smith, the 1993 sack champ whose defection from Kansas City to Denver helped put the Broncos over the top en route to two championships

Eli Manning doesn’t belong as a first-ballot Hall of Famer
Since 1990, the Hall has elected every modern-era QB first-ballot except for one. Eli still does not belong in that group. Those first-ballot QBs are Dan Fouts, Joe Montana, Jim Kelly, John Elway, Dan Marino, Steve Young, Troy Aikman, Warren Moon, Brett Favre and Peyton Manning. The other modern-era QB in the Hall since 1990 is Kurt Warner, elected on the third ballot.
This trend might change over the next decade, but we know that Drew Brees, Tom Brady and eventually Aaron Rodgers will be first-ballot Hall of Famers. Patrick Mahomes could retire today and be a first-ballot QB. That’s 15 quarterbacks. I added Eli to that group and evaluated them in 34 quarterback categories, mostly individual, some team. Eli was the only one not in the top 3 in this group in any of the 34 categories, including the ones where his resume stands out: Super Bowl rings and Super Bowl MVPs.
So no, Eli is not a typical first-ballot Hall of Fame quarterback. But none of those 15 quarterbacks are on the ballot with him this year, nor is Philip Rivers (eligible 2026), Cam Newton and Ben Roethlisberger (2027) or Matt Ryan (2028). Smooth sailing right?
Again, that’s a no. As Jets representative voter and Giants supporter Gary Myers noted in February on the SB Nation’s Giants YouTube show with Big Blue View: “I’m anticipating the most intense debate we’ve ever had. This really appears to be a divisive issue.”
Myers has made his view known: he thinks Eli belongs in on the first ballot. He and I have debated Eli’s candidacy; at one point on Twitter, Myers laid out his philosophy as a voter.
“First ballot is overrated in my opinion,” he wrote. “When I vote it’s based on who the five more worthy candidates are that year. It has nothing to do with how many years they are on the ballot.”
We disagree about the importance of years on the ballot, but looking at Myers’s position, it’s a reasonable stance: vote for the best five. The problem is that this year, Eli is not in the top five. I don’t even think he is in the top 15, which is the number of finalist slots.
Who should be a Hall of Fame finalist before Eli Manning?
Using Gary Myers’s framing that remaining eligibility does not matter and you vote for the best resumes, Eli should not be among the 15 finalists that voters debate in their annual meeting.
Who has a better resume? I think there are 17 semifinalists who belong in Canton before him. Let’s start with these nine, all of whom are either past finalists or in their first year of eligibility (ALL CAPS):

Antonio Gates — 8-time Pro Bowl, three-time AP first-team All-Pro (AP1), All-Decade, No. 7 in career receiving TDs and first among tight ends

LUKE KUECHLY — 7-time Pro Bowl, 5-time AP1, 2013 Defensive Player of the Year (DPOY), All-Decade

EARL THOMAS — 7-time Pro Bowl, 3-time AP1, All-Decade

MARSHAL YANDA — 8-time Pro Bowl, 2-time AP1, All-Decade

Jahri Evans — 6-time Pro Bowl, 4-time AP1, All-Decade

Torry Holt — 7-time Pro Bowl, 1-time AP1, 2-time receiving yards champ, All-Decade

Jared Allen — 5-time Pro Bowl, 4-time AP1, 2-time sack champ, 2011 Sporting News DPOY

TERRELL SUGGS — 7-time Pro Bowl, 1-time AP1, 2011 AP DPOY, 2011 PFWA DPOY

Reggie Wayne — 6-time Pro Bowl, 1-time AP1, 1-time receiving yards champ

That’s nine players who clearly have a better resume than Eli, starting with Gates, who was nearly a first-ballot inductee last year. Seven of those nine players peaked as elite at their positions, some as the undisputed best. Voters are split on Holt and Wayne; I’m a Holt guy, who carved out an AP1 when Moss, T.O. and Marvin were at their best. He also led the NFL in receiving yards twice. Wayne did it once, and also had an AP1.
Obviously wide receivers have two All-Pro first team slots to a QB’s one, but Eli had zero All-Pro selections: not first team, not second team, not all-conference. He was voted to just two Pro Bowls in his 16 seasons and was named as a replacement player for two more Pro Bowls. While the top line of Eli’s resume are his two game-winning drives in two Super Bowls, six of the above nine have rings, another two started a Super Bowl and lost, and the last one is Gates, one of the greatest tight ends in NFL history.
What other 2025 semifinalists were more decorated than Eli? Let’s start with one more player who is in his first year of eligibility:

Adam Vinatieri — 3-time Pro Bowl, 3-time AP1, 3-time FG% champ, NFL’s all-time leading scorer, All-Decade
Vinatieri is a weird one of course, because kickers just don’t get as many accolades as quarterbacks. Only one per year gets named to the Pro Bowl, and kickers rarely miss the Pro Bowl, meaning there are fewer replacement Pro Bowlers, something Eli got twice. Like QBs, there is only one AP1 kicker per year; Vinatieri got it three times. Even if Vinatieri retired after 16 seasons like Eli did, he still would have a 2-0 lead on AP1 selections.
Among the other returning 2024 finalists, these four are all also more decorated than Eli:

Eric Allen — 6-time Pro Bowl, 1-time AP1, 1993 UPI NFC DPOY

Darren Woodson — 5-time Pro Bowl, 3-time AP1

Willie Anderson — 4-time Pro Bowl, 3-time AP1

Rodney Harrison — 2-time Pro Bowl, 2-time AP1

Finally, three semifinalists getting late in their eligibility deserve a debate:

Richmond Webb — 7-time Pro Bowl, 2-time AP1, 2-time NFLPA AFC Offensive Lineman of the Year (1993, 1994)

Steve Wisniewski — 8-time Pro Bowl, 2-time AP1, 6-time AP2, 1991 NFLPA AFC Offensive Lineman of the Year

Ricky Watters — 5-time Pro Bowl, 1-time scrimmage yards champ, top 10 in scrimmage yards in eight of his 10 seasons, Super Bowl-record three touchdowns

Depending on how much you value quarterbacks over, say, kickers or offensive linemen, you might not put each of these 17 players above Eli Manning for Hall induction in 2025. But I think most people who evaluated the semifinalist list based on Gary Myers’s rule of electing the top five eligible would not put Eli Manning in the class of 2025. I think many people would even leave him out of the top 15.
Obviously there’s a top bar of Hall of Famer, the guys we call the “Stand up, Sit down” players, because all the presenter has to do is stand up, say the player’s name and sit down and he gets elected. After that, you can call someone “elite,” which can be applied in different ways by different people. But just to put a number on it, let’s say “elite” players make the Pro Bowl 50% of their career, or make All-Pro 40% of their career, or make first-team All-Pro 30% of their career. The semifinalist list has:

50% Pro Bowl: 9 players (Kuechly, Thomas, Holt, Wisniewski, Yanda, Webb, Evans, Gates, Watters)
40% All-Pro: 5 players (Kuechly, Wisniewski, Yanda, Thomas, Evans)
30% All-Pro 1st team: 4 players (Kuechly, Evans, J. Allen, Thomas)

The guys on all three lists: Luke Kuechly, Earl Thomas, Jahri Evans. The guys on the Pro Bowl list plus one All-Pro list: Steve Wisniewski, Marshal Yanda. Again, that’s five players right there, plus Gates is six. At most, five of the final 25 will get elected this year, and it could be as low as three.
Eli’s main PFHOF calling card is his two championships. Of the 17 players, Vinatieri has four rings, Woodson has three, and two more players have two.
As for the six semifinalists I left off the above list, I imagine that some people would argue a few of them belong in Canton before Eli:

Fred Taylor — 2024 finalist, 1-time Pro Bowl, 1-time AP2

James Harrison — His 2008 is one of the single greatest seasons in NFL history, winning DPOY and a ring while returning a pick-six 100 yards in SB XLIII

Steve Smith — 5-time Pro Bowl, 2-time AP1, 2005 receiving triple crown

Robert Mathis — 5-time Pro Bowl, 1-time AP1, 1-time champ, 1-time sack champ, career leader in forced fumbles

Vince Wilfork — 5-time Pro Bowl, 1-time AP1, 3-time AP2, 2-time champ

Hines Ward — 4-time Pro Bowl, 3-time AP2, 2-time champ, 3-time SB, SB MVP

Anquan Boldin — 3-time Pro Bowl, 1-time champ, 2-time SB

Giants fans should be on board with passing over Eli Manning for the Hall of Fame this year
If you’re a Giants fan, this probably seems harsh to Eli. But the common approach to voting — prioritizing new players and skill position players — is one of the reasons that, say, Carl Banks was never a finalist. He’s now adrift in the senior pool.
In the modern pool, 2025 is the 5th year of eligibility for Justin Tuck, another two-time Giants champ who, unlike Eli, did receive All-Pro selections. Tuck also had fantastic Super Bowls, with two sacks and a forced fumble in XLII and two sacks in XLVI. Tuck has never been discussed.
This is Tiki Barber’s 14th year of eligibility. He made the semis for the first time ever last year and has not been a finalist. Voters left him out of the semis this year. Let’s say Eli makes the finals this year but does not get in. 2026 has two first-ballot locks in Drew Brees and Larry Fitzgerald. 2027 brings Rob Gronkowski and Adrian Peterson. 2028 brings Tom Brady and J.J. Watt. Add Rivers and Roethlisberger and Eli could easily end up taking up a finalist slot for four years and could enter 2029 still on the ballot along with Rivers, Roethlisberger, Ryan and (admittedly outsider) Cam Newton. All of that could keep Tiki out of the finals until he has just two years remaining, if he gets to the finals at all.
I’m not saying Tuck or Tiki should get into Canton, nor am I saying they shouldn’t. Hell, I know that Tiki has his share of Giants fan detractors. All I’m saying is that they earned their turn in the room as finalists, the only time that voters formally discuss players. So did Richmond Webb. So did Steve Wisniewski. So do two players bizarrely missing from semis, who have never been semifinalists, Kevin Williams and Logan Mankins. Williams was AP1 more times than Eli was a Pro Bowler.
Unlike all of them and many others, Eli Manning is not in danger of being forgotten. His accomplishments will resonate as long as the NFL exists, and that resonance might make his case feel like a breakaway slam dunk in 10-15 years rather than a contested three-pointer this year. He was also a great teammate and great leader who seems like a good person. He won the 2016 Walter Payton Man of the Year. If he gets in one day, I’ll tip my cap. There is no doubt that his day in the room will come.
For the sake of the process — and even his fellow Giants — I hope voters push that day to at least next year.

Jack M Silverstein is Chicago’s sports historian, a Pro Football Hall of Fame analyst, a jury member in PFHOF voter Clark Judge’s “Judge & Jury” series, Bears historian of Windy City Gridiron and author of “Why We Root: Mad Obsessions of a Chicago Sports Fan.” Say hey at @readjack. […]

When he was arguably America’s most successful football man, when his beloved Bears were defending champs and the NFL’s first dynasty, George Halas stood in his friend’s office and looked upon the technology that maybe, just maybe, held the key to survival for his still-fledgling league.
“There it is, George,” Chicago Tribune city editor Don Maxwell told the Bears owner and coach. “Television.”
The year was 1947, and the National Football League was entering its 28th season. For 27 seasons, I think it’s safe to say that no one had more faith in the NFL than George Halas — meaning no one was more in tune with its challenges. The NFL had several.
There was the All-American Football Conference, which played its first season in 1946 and immediately established itself as a formidable foe. There was the game-fixing scandal in the ‘46 NFL Championship Game, with two players coming under investigation for bribery.
There was the chaos of the player pool — World War II saw 79% of NFL players from 1941 to 1944 miss time, with players still making their way back in ‘46; the NFL had banned Black players from 1934 to 1945, ending in 1946 for regulatory reasons that became competitive ones; the AAFC was a new landing spot for college stars, players returning from the war and Black players; and young players were ending their NFL careers after just a few years because the salaries couldn’t justify the injuries.
All the while, there was the still-present challenge of winning consumer interest and dollars, with pro football still chasing college football and baseball among the team sports.
On the flip side, the post-war release valve unleashed a flood of sports fans to pro grid games in both leagues. The NFL had established its history and heroes, the foundation of the myth-making that fans and writers need. And TV was coming.
Around the time Halas was talking television at the Trib, the Basketball Association of America was finishing its inaugural season. The BAA played three years and merged with the National Basketball League, taking the “National” from one and the “Association” of the other to form the National Basketball Association for the 1950 season. The NBA eventually claimed 1947 as its first season, meaning its 28th season was 1974.
Like the NFL in ’47, the NBA in ’74 was a long way from the cultural and economic powerhouse it is today. It battled an influential competitor, the ABA, along with its own players union, which was suing the NBA to end the reserve clause. Unlike the 1947 NFL, the 1974 NBA had its championship televised, but tape-delayed. The Finals would remain tape-delayed for another seven years.
The 2023 WNBA Finals, meanwhile, set a 20-year viewership peak and rose 36% from 2022.
“We’re so young,” soon-to-be repeat WNBA champion Kelsey Plum explained about the state of the WNBA on the “All The Smoke” podcast during last season’s WNBA playoffs. “Where we are in our league versus where the NBA was … we’re technically bigger. So we have to give ourselves a little bit of grace.”
As the WNBA enters its 28th season, sports fans have noticed something: WNBA salaries are quite a bit less than those of their male counterparts. The good sign is a mass of fans noticing anything. That shows a young league’s emotional relevance, which increases during seismic shifts. The WNBA has experienced a few such shifts since COVID. And the media wave that George Halas foresaw in 1947 is in progress.
This is the path from entertainment to identity. This is the journey to “we.”
Inside Year 28
The 28th NFL season started with the largest crowd to ever witness a game with an NFL team, a record that would stand until 1994. On Aug. 22, 1947, 105,840 fans filled Soldier Field to watch not an NFL game, but the 14th so-called Chicago College All-Star Game between the defending champion — the Chicago Bears — and a college all-star team.
By this point, the NFL was holding its own with Major League Baseball for paying attendance. In six of eight seasons leading up to the end of World War II, the NFL’s single-game attendance leader out-drew their MLB counterpart in their shared ballpark.
Yet they still trailed the college game. Big-time college football stadiums were bigger than the Major League Baseball stadiums where nearly all post-war NFL teams played. In 1947, the Packers were the only NFL team playing in a stadium built for an NFL team. In December of ’47, over in the rival AAFC, the Los Angeles Dons saw 82,675 fans attend their game against the New York football Yankees at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, what the papers called “the largest crowd ever to see a professional league football game” and still over 23,000 fans fewer than the college all-star game four months earlier, in which the collegians toppled the 1946 champion Bears.
“Soldier Field was packed,” recalls Upton Bell, who was in August of 1947 the nine-year-old son of commissioner Bert Bell. Upton Bell attended the first five post-war all-star games, countless NFL games and many other sporting events.
“There was nothing like anything I had ever seen during that period like the Chicago all-star game,” he says. “The NFL needed that game each year to help their popularity. College football was king.”
During the NFL’s first four decades, commissioner Bell was one of the league’s great visionaries and a major proponent of television. In 1939, Bell owned the Philadelphia Eagles when the Eagles and Brooklyn Dodgers played the NFL’s first televised game.
“From that game on in, I can’t tell you how many times I heard my father say that the NFL was ‘The most perfect game for television’ and that that was their key to becoming the biggest thing,” Bell says. For the 1947 season, Halas signed the NFL’s first television contract, with WBKB paying the Bears $900 for each of the Bears six home games.
“The year 1947 was great in the back office,” Halas wrote in his autobiography. “Salaries exploded but we ended well in the black.” The NFL’s 28th season showed the league on increasingly stable ground. In 1948, the league signed a “game of the week” TV deal with ABC, the first league-wide network deal.
The NFL-AAFC player fights drove up salaries for both stars and role players. In ’47, rookie Charley Trippi drove a three-way bidding war between the NFL, AAFC and MLB to grab an unprecedented $100,000 deal from the NFL’s Cardinals (the equivalent of about $1.4 million today). One newspaper in 1948 estimated “benchwarmers” were making between $7,000 and $8,000, putting pro football closer to the established MLB, where in 1946 the average National League salary was $9,800 (about $157k today).
Yet the NFL game that historians commonly cite as the game that launched the league to the forefront of American consciousness was still a decade away in their 39th season: the 1958 NFL championship game, the Baltimore Colts beating the New York Giants 23-17 on Alan Ameche’s famed overtime touchdown, the only overtime game to decide an NFL championship until Super Bowl LI.
“I was there: the sudden death game,” Bell says. “That was on national TV, and from there, the NFL just soared.”
The NFL’s 41st season was 1960, the first year of the NFL’s newest challenger, the AFL. The NFL’s 47th season ended with the NFL-AFL championship game, AKA Super Bowl I. The two leagues officially merged for the NFL’s 51st season in 1970, the last time that a rival league had any success taking on the NFL.
Over in the NBA, the game was strong but the business was stuck. The NBA’s 28th season was 1974, the league’s fourth year of litigation with its players union, whose president Oscar Robertson was the lead plaintiff in an antitrust suit to block a potential NBA-ABA merger. The suit argued that considering the NBA’s reserve clause, a merger with the ABA would result in a pro basketball monopoly for the NBA.
In the AAFC years, “the best team I had seen of that period was actually the (AAFC’s) Cleveland Browns,” Bell says. The NBA in ‘74 had arguably a bigger problem: One of the two best players in professional basketball, Julius Erving, didn’t even play in their league. The two players who historians argue saved the NBA, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, were in high school. Their legendary NCAA Championship was five years away.
The NBA’s 35th season, 1981, was the final time the league broadcast the Finals on tape delay. Two years later, in Season 37, 16 of the league’s 23 teams were losing money. David Dupree of the Washington Post wrote a much-syndicated column about the NBA’s troubles; one newspaper ran it under the headline: “NBA heading towards financial ruin.” This was after three straight championships for either Magic and Kareem or Larry Bird, with Dr. J’s 76ers and Moses Malone’s Rockets as the three runners-up. The stars were bright in the NBA, and big TV money was starting to roll in, with the first season of a four-year, $88 million contract with CBS.
Yet the league was losing between $15 million and $20 million a year.
“We must face up to the fact that a few of our teams are in financial trouble,” commissioner Larry O’Brien said.
The player most responsible for helping teams go from red to black, Michael Jordan, came to the NBA in 1984 for its 39th season. The NBA’s television boom came in its 45th season with its groundbreaking NBC partnership. The league fully cashed in on the Magic-Larry-Michael triumvirate in 1992 with the Dream Team, the capstone to its 46th season. The next year, season 47, for the first time ever, the NBA Finals outdrew the World Series on TV. Three months later, the NBA and Turner Broadcasting announced a four-year extension of their cable contract, the final TV bump this new sports superpower needed to connect with fans.
“The addition of those games on TBS means that every playoff game will now be available on a national TV network,” commissioner David Stern said at the press conference announcing the deal. “We’re very pleased about that.”
The WNBA in 2024: Not behind, but ahead
When Caitlin Clark signed her debut four-year Indiana Fever deal that pays her $76,535 as a rookie, fans compared that figure to her No. 1 pick male counterpart, Victor Wembanyama, who earned $12.2 million. The wage gap is too great to ignore.
Yet viewed through the lens of a league’s 28th year, the WNBA looks much better. A constellation of superstars over the past decade became household names: Sue Bird, Elena Delle Donne, Skylar Diggins-Smith, Sylvia Fowles, Brittney Griner, Maya Moore, Candace Parker, Breanna Stewart, Diana Taurasi and A’ja Wilson among them. These stars forged strong fan identities in a number of markets, while the 2021 Chicago Sky championship activated the Chicago fanbase to complete the much needed L.A.-Chicago-New York market power.
The NFL in 1947 was battling the AAFC and the NBA in ‘74 was battling the ABA; the WNBA has no rival league. While sports fans in 1947 were in the early stages of viewing pro football as the equal or even superior to the college game, sports fans in 2024 on a whole seem further along in viewing the women’s game both in line with the men’s and on its own terms.
Part of this is support from NBA players. While individual NBA players had friendships with individual WNBA players when the W launched in 1997, the past 10-15 years has seen a rise in widespread alignment between NBA players and WNBA players. NBA players attend WNBA games and shoot commercials together.
So when sports fans, especially male sports fans, see Steph Curry sharing a court with Sabrina Ionescu at the 2024 All-Star weekend, and the conversation is about hoops instead of gender, and they’re seeing Ionescu’s lights-out shooting skills against the player who rewrote all the rules around the three-point shot, it’s harder for them to sit in their prejudice.
“I tell fans all the time: Don’t come ‘support me’ — come watch me play,” Plum told former NBA players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson on the pod last fall. “Like, when you go watch Devin Booker play, you don’t say, ‘I’m here to support Devin.’ You’re here to see this man hoop.”
The past 12 months have felt to me like a shift among many American sports fans between “supporting” the women’s game and simply watching them hoop. A lot of that starts with college. The women’s NCAA National Championship game this year drew 18.9 million viewers, compared to just 14.8 million for the men’s title game, the first time ever that the women’s game had more viewers than the men’s.
Clark obviously played a huge role in that boom, but so did a collection of college stars including Angel Reese, Paige Bueckers, Juju Watkins, Cameron Brink and the undefeated champion South Carolina Gamecocks. When refs whistled UConn for a moving screen to essentially decide their Final Four game against Iowa, sports fans blew up in debate and discussion.
Not because they were watching women — because they were watching sports.
The momentum from the tournament led to a record 2.45 million viewers watching the 2024 WNBA draft. Clark’s arrival in Indiana gives that basketball-crazed fanbase one of the most marketable stars in sports today, while Reese and fellow recent MOP Kamilla Cardoso landed in Chicago to power the next stage of post-2021 Sky basketball.
It’s a crucial stage in a team’s, and a league’s, development. Crucial for the league because success is so much easier when fans in big markets are locked in. Crucial for the team because a championship creates identity. It penetrates. It creates obligation. For fans who came on board in 2021, this Reese-Cardoso club will be the first Sky team they’ll feel responsible for watching.
The 2021 Sky were hugely important to Chicago. With the city reeling from the endless Bears doom cycle and no city-wide title since the 2015 Stanley Cup, the Sky added a hometown hero in Candace Parker and captivated fans who just needed someone to cheer for. Chicagoans needed a champ. The Sky supplied one. Just as folks who didn’t care much about hockey sprayed champagne in 2010 because “We won the Cup!”, folks who didn’t care much about the Sky — only in their 16th season, the equivalent of the pre-Jordan 1982 Bulls — started texting each other with, “What time are we on?”
The key, of course, is that they have to be on.
“If you show it, they will watch”
Charles Silverstein loved the Black Hawks.
His son, yours truly, merely appreciated them.
Television was a big part of the reason.
My father was born in 1950 and grew up in the Budlong Woods neighborhood of Chicago. That year, Arthur Wirtz became Hawks co-owner. The Black Hawks, as they were then known, were in year 28 the year my dad turned four. Though they were in a lull, they had two Stanley Cups under their belt and hockey remained huge in Chicago. Professional basketball had failed here with several teams in several leagues, most recently the Stags of the BAA and NBA.
My dad and his brother were 10 years old when the Hawks won the Stanley Cup in 1961, finalizing their journey to caring about the Hawks as much as they cared about the Bears and Cubs.
Five years later, in 1966, Arthur’s son Bill became team chairman, while Dick Klein founded Chicago’s third attempt at an NBA team: the Bulls. Wirtz wondered then what Halas wondered in 1947: Would TV drive fans away from home games? Halas figured he would cross that bridge when he came to it; Wirtz just blew up the bridge. By the early 1970s, Wirtz had banned Hawks home games from television, while Klein, a basketball junkie and exuberant promoter, was in his first deal with WGN-TV. The Bulls gained a following in the 1970s with the Dick Motta-led teams of Mr. Bull, Stormin’ Norm, Butterbean and Chet the Jet. But they were still considered a niche franchise, behind the Bears, Hawks and whichever baseball team one rooted for.
By the time I was becoming a sports fan in the 1980s, the combination of the Hawks’ middling seasons and the explosion of Michael Jordan made me a natural Bulls fan over hockey. Yet something else did too: TV.
While ticket prices were rapidly rising for Bulls game, I could catch every game on television at a time when I couldn’t even watch Hawks home playoff games. While I waited for the Cubs to finally reach a World Series in my life (and waited… and waited…) and waited for Ditka’s Bears to win a second Super Bowl as we all knew they would, the rise of MJ, Scottie and the gang meant the Bulls occupied an increasingly large piece of my emotional pie.
In 1992, the Bulls and the Hawks made their respective championship rounds. Bulls games on TV didn’t stop fans from showing up; the team was in the midst of their eventual 610-game sellout streak. Meanwhile, the only way to watch the Hawks home games in the ‘92 Stanley Cup outside of Chicago Stadium was Wirtz’s pay-per-view service HawkVision.
Championships plus television: For a generation of Chicago fans, that was the formula that turned us into rabid hoops heads and away from the puck. It didn’t matter if the Bears, Hawks, Cubs or Sox were losing. The Bulls were our primary emotional draw. They made us whole. And that gave us patience. In the 1990s, if you couldn’t participate in an NBA conversation, you almost weren’t even a sports fan. I didn’t become a “we” Hawks fan until 2010 when they won their first Cup since Charlie Silverstein was 10.
What happened three years before? Bill Wirtz passed away and his son Rocky immediately put home games back on television.
A pro team planting itself in a sports fan’s heart only happens after years of building. Colleges don’t have that challenge. When you attend a school, you are the school. Not surprisingly, the women’s college game has had a rabid following for decades; in 1983, nearly 12 million fans tuned in to see the first NCAA women’s national title game. A new pro team has to build to that. First fans watch a team, then they root for a team, then they are the team. When a team becomes part of your identity, that’s when you stay with them through losing seasons. That’s when you watch no matter what else is on. That’s when you’re not choosing to participate, you’re compelled to.
In the six seasons after their dynasty, the Bulls went 119-341, a .258 winning percentage, finished dead last in the division in five of six seasons — and still led the NBA in cumulative attendance.
Call it fandom or call it addiction, but having a team in your heart is the stuff that moves dollars and eyeballs.
A league can’t reach fan identity without a cultural flashpoint or two. The WNBA is undergoing such a flashpoint akin to the 1958 NFL championship game or the arrival of Magic and Bird, and it’s happening in Season 28, not Season 33 (1979 NBA) or Season 39 (1958 NFL).
Gambling will bring it there too. “Gambling Helps Americans Get Rid of Money” the headline said. The date: Oct. 16, 1946, the NFL’s 27th season, and post-war America was flocking to stadiums, betting on ballgames and beginning to buy televisions. Nearly 80 years later, a new golden age of sports betting is upon us. For good or ill (I say ill), gambling is fueling sports engagement, which will help boost WNBA interest.
But addiction to gambling and addiction to a team are separate, and what the WNBA is now seeing is the everyday attention from everyday fans. This March, to be a proper sports fan, you had to watch women’s March Madness. That’s where the hot conversations were. That’s where you could participate in the most important discussions in American sports for that moment.
That carries into the WNBA. The victories are coming, as are the growing pains.
“The WNBA and its teams have so much room to improve community, media, public and player relations,” says WNBA insider Subria Whitaker. “The right partnerships and collaborations improve accessibility, visibility and marketability.”
Through her organization Grow the Game, Whitaker consults and works with women’s sports teams, including in the WNBA, to launch athlete marketing campaigns, fan events and other branding and promotional activities. This month, she saw what we all saw: the WNBA struggling to provide that accessibility and visibility. In short, to keep up with its own growth.
On May 3, the preseason debut of the Reese-Cardoso Sky was supposed to be available for viewing. It wasn’t. Instead, a fan at the Target Center live-streamed it on Twitter, leading to over 100,000 Sky-Lynx viewers at halftime and more than 545,000 by the end of the game.
“Growth is happening so fast, it’s so accelerated, and I’ve been saying this in our own organization: that business as usual isn’t going to work anymore,” Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve said about the TV mistake and fan savior. “You’re going to get left behind, and this is an example.”
For the Sky’s second preseason game, May 7, the WNBA made sure to stream on WNBA League Pass. That same day, the league made a huge announcement: They would spend $50 million over the 2024 and 2025 seasons to set up full-time charter flights for team travel — a plan that, while proving tricky in the details so far, signals a promising future. Along with the pay gap between the men’s and women’s game, WNBA fans, players and reporters have noted the disparity in travel and television.
The league appears to be closing those gaps, with all of this progress driving toward big speculation around the league’s next collective bargaining agreement in 2027.
For a growing league, nothing is more important than visibility. Sports fans have to know that they can tune in wherever they are and watch a WNBA game. Per Front Office Sports, the WNBA earns about $60 million annually from its TV and streaming deals. League ratings are rising; Upton Bell wonders if the league needs to shift from a summer start to a fall start to capitalize on fan association of “basketball season.”
“All of the other sports were positioned well and grew with television,” Bell says. “If you said to me that the WNBA is now on when the regular basketball season is, you know what I’d say to you? I like their chances after 28 years as well as any of the other ones.”
Whitaker prefers the summer schedule. It’s the space the W has carved for itself. But they agree on this: The WNBA is reaching new fans, and those fans must have access to games. It’s the reason George Halas wrote his own Bears press releases in the 1920s and made friends with people like Don Maxwell. It’s the reason the ABA would spend its own money to fly reporters to games while they duked it out with the NBA. As a major discussion point, the WNBA-NBA wage-gap shock might be winding down this decade. Bell and Whitaker know the key, just as Halas and Bert Bell did.
“We know the saying: ‘If you build it, they will come,’” Whitaker says. “In the WNBA, it’s, ‘If you show it, they will watch.’”
Jack M Silverstein is Chicago’s sports historian, the Bears historian of Windy City Gridiron, and author of “Why We Root: Mad Obsessions of a Chicago Sports Fan.” Follow his 1990s Bulls book research at readjack.substack.com. […]

In Sept. 1995, Dana Carvey took the stage at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to film his new HBO comedy special, and after just two minutes in which he riffed on standing ovations and other meta standup commentary, he started his set in earnest with a declaration of a bygone era:
“Well, all I can say to you folks is: Fuckin’ 49ers!”
While this might seem an odd pronouncement in 2024, back in 1995 the Niners were defending champs and winners of five of the past 14 titles. Their victory in Super Bowl XXIX eight months earlier made them the first franchise to win five Super Bowls, part of a two-decade-long run in which they would miss the playoffs only twice, one of them in the nine-game 1982 strike season, the other in 1991 when they went 10-6 and mollywhopped my playoff-bound Bears in the season finale 52-14, leaving my postseason confidence deeply, and rightly, depleted.
From 1981 to 1998, the 49ers won 10 or more games in every season that had 10 or more games. They went undefeated in the Super Bowl, reached another five NFC Championships, had back-to-back Hall of Fame quarterbacks, the greatest wide receiver of all time, rewrote the rules of the modern NFL offense and remarkably sent more players to Canton on defense than on their more famous side of the ball. They had three of the top eight biggest ass-whippings in Super Bowl history to that point, including what remains No. 1 today, their 55-10 blasting of the Broncos.
In Super Bowl XXIX, the Niners set records for both the fastest score in a Super Bowl and the fastest two scores in a Super Bowl. Steve Young threw a Super Bowl-record six touchdowns, Jerry Rice and Ricky Watters both tied the Super Bowl record for touchdowns in a game, and Deion Sanders became the first player ever to play in a World Series and a Super Bowl. Niners fans, Dana Carvey included, had reason to believe one or two more championships were coming to the Bay before the century’s end.

RVR Photos-USA TODAY Sports

Nearly a quarter of the way into the next century, the Bay remains barren.
One thing they have been able to regenerate is their QB greatness. When I think of 49ers history, I think of quarterbacks. The Niners began in 1946 as a charter franchise of the AAFC with rookie QB Frankie Albert named second-team All-Pro behind future HOFer Otto Graham. The two men led their teams to the 1949 AAFC Championship, the first playoff game in 49ers history, the Browns victorious. Albert held the job until 1951; he would be the last 49ers quarterback to start for more than three seasons and not win a league MVP until Jeff Garcia.
Following Albert was Y.A. Tittle, who won UPI MVP in 1957 and brought the Niners to their second playoff game, the 31-27 blown-lead loss to the Lions we heard so much about during the NFC Championship Game. Tittle begat John Brodie, who took the starting job in 1960 and held it for over a decade, leading the Niners to their next playoffs in 1970 and their first playoff win.
Three straight playoff appearances were succeeded by eight straight without, all the way up to 1981, when third-year pro Joe Montana knocked out the 70s Cowboys and kicked off what Carvey’s audience rightly viewed as the greatest dynasty of the Super Bowl era. Under Bill Walsh’s leadership, the 49ers of Montana and then Steve Young completely altered the NFL’s best practices of the passing game, in large part due to the passer rating statistic, which the NFL formalized in 1973.

Tony Tomsic-USA TODAY Sports

Entering the 1980s, a season passer rating over 100 was like an NBA player scoring 70 points in a game before 2020 — a freak occurrence, not a goal. Ken Stabler and Bert Jones did it in 1976, and it didn’t happen again until Dan Marino and Joe Montana in 1984. 49ers QBs then started popping them back like Tic Tacs: Montana in 1987 and 1989, and then Steve Young in 1991, 1992, 1993 and a record of 112.8 in 1994, the only QB to top 100 in any of those four seasons, and the first in league history to do it two straight years, much less four straight.
Montana and Young were the beneficiaries and navigators of an offense that Bill Walsh launched while an assistant with the Bengals to cater to the humble abilities of emergency starter Virgil Carter. The late Chris Wesseling described what became known as the West Coast offense as “a horizontal, ball-control passing scheme intended to compensate for Carter’s physical shortcomings while also hiding an expansion-team-caliber offensive line.”
Walsh brought the offense to San Francisco where his offense and his coaching tree blossomed. George Seifert kept the offense humming after Walsh retired, winning two more championships. Mike Holmgren famously climbed the branches as a 49ers assistant before taking the head coaching job in Green Bay in 1992, bringing the West Coast to second-year pro Brett Favre. While no one hired Holmgren’s brilliant offensive coordinator Sherman Lewis, Holmgren offensive assistants became head coaches and brought the West Coast offense to the Raiders (Jon Gruden), Lions (Marty Mornhinweg) and the 49ers again (Steve Mariucci).
As Holmgren built a powerhouse in Green Bay, his 49ers offensive coordinator successor helped the Niners get back to their perch as the NFL’s No. 1 offense in points and yards: Mike Shanahan, father of Kyle Shanahan. Despite the younger Shanahan making clear in 2019 that “I don’t run the (bleeping) West Coast offense,” it’s understandable why fans today look at Shanahan turning the former “Mr. Irrelevant” Brock Purdy into an MVP finalist and trace a line back to Walsh, especially on the same franchise. Purdy may have led the NFL in a host of dynamic passing stats this year, but he also led the NFL in that other tried-and-true Walsh stat: passer rating.
Like Walsh and Holmgren, Kyle Shanahan has a way with quarterbacks. He steered Matt Ryan to an MVP, helped Jimmy Garoppolo start a Super Bowl and has unlocked the now-laser-armed Purdy. That makes Shanahan a fit with the 49ers, who always seem one step ahead of the NFL in quarterback trends. Heck, even in San Francisco’s one other Super Bowl appearance, the Niners were frontrunners in re-shaping the position, as second-year pro Colin Kaepernick was a leader in a new wave of dual-threat QBs sweeping the league.

Jack Gruber-USA TODAY

Bringing this full circle is another former Holmgren Packers assistant who left the club in 1999 for his first head coaching job and took the West Coast offense with him: Andy Reid. With Reid and Shanahan facing off in the Super Bowl for the second time in five years, this historian’s eyes gaze back to the 1980s and 1990s.
And a lot of good all that history does for the modern Niners fan.
Today’s 30-year-old 49ers fan was born in 1993, give or take, bequeathed a dynasty on its last legs. Promised a lifetime of championship parades, they instead received the same annual invitation most of us get to someone else’s Super Bowl party. Before this hypothetical Niners fan progeny turned 10, they had the misfortune of seeing the first Niners team miss consecutive postseasons since Montana’s rookie year. They hit the playoffs twice, got destroyed by the future champion Bucs and then set off what is surely one of the most bizarre streaks in the history of sports: Starting in 2003, every 49ers season has either reached the NFC Championship Game or missed the playoffs altogether. They had terrible losses in 2011, 2012 and 2013, blew a Super Bowl in 2019, blew the NFC title game in 2021 and got deconstructed by the Eagles last year.
Now they’re here, in Las Vegas, and you’ll pardon them if they’re still healing from the Super Bowl heartbreak of Kap and Jimmy G. You’ll excuse them if they don’t want to bask in the rays of Montana and Young. You’ll understand if a John Brodie article is not their cup of tea, or if they say that the tales of Y.A. Tittle and certainly Frankie Albert can wait a month or two.
The year is 2024, and Niners fans are ready for some history they can call their own.
Fuckin’ 49ers?
Fuckin’ A.

Jack M Silverstein is Chicago’s sports historian, the Bears historian of Windy City Gridiron, a Not in the Hall of Fame committee member, a Pro Football Hall of Fame analyst and a contributor to PFHOF voter Clark Judge’s Talk of Fame. Follow his 1990s Bulls book research at readjack.substack.com. Salute to Bryan Frye. […]