On Any Given Sunday

On Any Given Sunday by Robert S. Lyons

One of those owners was Bert Bell, who began running the Philadelphia Eagles in 1933. When his players complained that they couldn’t afford to live on what he was paying them, Bell invited them to sleep on the floor at his house. To the delight of Bell’s two young sons, lots of the players accepted the invitation.

Bell became Commissioner of the NFL in 1946. He’s credited with coming up with the phrase “On Any Given Sunday, any team can beat any other team.” This had not been true of Bell’s Eagles. They almost always lost, in part because Bell had named himself coach of the team and he wasn’t very good at it. But he was good at holding the league together, and he saw it grow from a joke into a phenomenon.

On Any Given Sunday provides lots of stories about the days when Bert Bell had to get special permission for his team to even play on Sunday…when college football drew ten times the fans the pros drew…when nobody could have imagined the partnership between the NFL and network television that would eventually change the landscape of sports in the United States.