Ellington

Looking down at the spectacle of the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans on a game day Sunday is one of the highlights of my career as a football junkie.

When I was younger, I saw only the pure joy created by the atmosphere inside the dome, one of the loudest and rowdiest settings in sports. Of course, I hung on every movement from the players I'd come to idolize and imitate.

These days, I'm 27 years old and officially a working man; I have a much different view on things. Now, all I see is dollar signs. I see 80,000 people who paid an average of $106 each to get in the gate. At least 40,000 of those fans are wearing an NFL officially licensed Drew Brees jersey ($99.95 at NFLshop.com). Roughly 20,000 paid $25 to park.

At least 30,000 of them are drinking $7 Budweisers (and some will drink many, many of those), and sponsors are constantly reminded fans of the businesses around New Orleans that made this game possible.

I think about the television contracts—extended in 2011—that pay the NFL $27 billion over nine years. According to Forbes, that's $200 million per team, per year, before anyone buys the first ticket. The NFL would have dominated all 10 of the top spots on Nielson ratings list for 2012, if it weren't for the opening ceremonies of the Summer Olympics and the Grammy Awards (spots nine and 10, respectively.)

I look at all of this, and I think, "Man, these guys have got it figured out." Then I realize this same scene is unfolding in 15 other stadiums around the country at the same time, and the money becomes mind-boggling.

Forbes reports that the NFL is worth $35 billion. The average NFL team, it says, is worth $1.04 billion. To the fans in the stands—who live and die with their players, follow them off of the field on Twitter and use their first names as if they are family members—I'd wager it's worth even more.

So, how did the NFL grow to become part of the fabric of American life? The answer might surprise you, but if you look at the way the league is set up, you will see the secret to the league's success is its philosophy, which is inherently communist.

I hear you groaning, but stay with me on this.

One word you'll hear if you follow pro football long enough is parity. In football, parity is the idea that there cannot be one dominant team, or even a handful of them. In the NFL, any team can beat any other team on any given day. That kind of balance doesn't happen overnight, and the methods the NFL uses to achieve it are so red, it would make Lenin or Marx blush.

The big secret to the NFL's parity success is revenue sharing. The NFL takes the entire league's massive amount of profits, puts it in one big commie pot and splits it evenly 32 ways—after paying the league's front-office expenses, of course.

What that has created is a league of 32 organizations that can all afford to invest in their brand, their stadiums, their talent on the field and the communities they play in. It's why the Atlanta Falcons, the league's 26th-ranked team in terms of revenue, are looking to build a new stadium to replace their current home, the 71,250-seat Georgia Dome.

Major League Baseball, seeing the NFL's success and scrambling to get their own act together, broke with 100-plus years of tradition and started making teams place 31 percent of their profits into their own commie pot and split it equally. But, since revenue sharing began in 2002, only one team outside the top 10 in payroll has won the World Series (Florida, 2003).

By comparison, fans of 11 different NFL teams have watched their team lift the Lombardi Trophy after winning the Super Bowl in the 16 years since 1996.

Then there's the salary cap: Football teams can only spend a certain amount on their talent, and while that number is $123 million this season, every team can afford it. By setting a hard limit for the total dollar amount that teams can spend, it creates a situation where one team can't out-spend another into insignificance.

Not to pick on MLB, but its luxury tax, where the teams pay a hefty amount of extra money to pay more than the $170 million allowed by the league, only affects the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox.

It's not all about dollar signs, though. The NFL has taken other practical steps to insure competitive balance, like how it set up its draft. Pro football has a cut-and-dry system in place: The team with the worst record in the NFL gets the first pick of fresh talent from the college ranks, and the Super Bowl winner has the last pick. There's also a rookie salary cap, to make sure none of the 32 teams get hamstrung having to pay a ridiculous amount of money to players who don't pan out.

The league started a Competitive Balance Committee in the late '90s that is still around. It consists of six league officials and six NFL coaches, who rotate (of course), and suggest rule changes to improve the league. (If you ever wondered where the after-the-play officials' review came from, now you know.)

The NFL has also set the mold on scheduling. If your team wins the Super Bowl, it will play the hardest schedule in the league the very next year.

Finally, although the NFL player's union may not be as strong as the MLB's or the National Basketball Association's, it did successfully survive a lockout last season and, in the end, it got most of what it wanted (you guessed it: more money).

I say all that to say this: The NFL shows us that collective bargaining, revenue sharing and competitive balance are a lot more than marketing phrases. They are the formula that has turned a two-league merger in 1966 into the most popular brand in North America.