Paul Tagliabue, Former NFL Commissioner, Sports Broadcasting Hall of Famer, Dies at 84

Paul Tagliabue, Former NFL Commissioner, Sports Broadcasting Hall of Famer, Dies at 84His 17 years leading the NFL brought labor peace and lucrative television growthBy Brandon Costa, Director of Digital

Monday, November 10, 2025 - 12:32 pm

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Paul Tagliabue, the former commissioner of the National Football League and member of both the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame, died Sunday from heart failure at the age of 84.

Tagliabue was commissioner from 1989 to 2006 and oversaw an era of the league highlighted by labor peace and growth of the league internationally and on television.

Paul was the ultimate steward of the game - tall in stature, humble in presence and decisive in his loyalty to the NFL, current NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell who succeeded Tagliabue said in a statement. I am forever grateful and proud to have Paul as my friend and mentor. I cherished the innumerable hours we spent together where he helped shape me as an executive but also as a man, husband and father.

Tagliabue was inducted into the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame in 2012. The following was written about him upon his induction:

Paul Tagliabue has a way of looking at a big picture and neatly editing it down to its most essential parts. It's a character attribute his many admirers are quick to mention, and it's a trait that exhibits itself quickly in a conversation with the former commissioner of the National Football League.

For example, ask him to assess the health of the NFL when he left the job to Roger Goodell in 2006, and he presents a sensible, unassailable verdict: If you look at the business structure, it has three core components to judge: the game on the field, the game's presentation at the stadiums, and the game's presentation on television. If you look at that tripod from when I took over in the late '80s and how it is 16 years later, we were extremely innovative.

Case closed, and with a neat summation. Tagliabue, who turned 72 in November, is now senior member of the Washington, D.C.-based law firm Covington and Burling LLP, where he worked from 1969 to '89 as counselor and litigator for, among other sports enterprises, the NFL itself. From 1989 to 2006, he ran the league, in charge of what really is the national pastime, especially on television.

Tagliabue's predecessor as NFL commissioner, Pete Rozelle, was most responsible for taking the NFL into the modern television era, and it was during Rozelle's years that the football league made its first big steps on network television. Tagliabue built on Rozelle's success and made the giant leap forward: he helped make the NFL a television necessity.

You never want to be the guy who follows the guy, says Ed Goren, former vice chairman of Fox Media Group, referring to Rozelle's exalted status in the league and acknowledging that even talented executives often look very ordinary replacing a legend. You want to be the guy who follows the guy who followed the guy.'

Tagliabue seems to have passed on that happy situation to Goodell because he has left a mark just as enviable as Rozelle's. In Tagliabue's time at the NFL, the league grew from 28 to 32 teams and supported (to the tune of $150 million) the construction of more than 20 new stadiums. He negotiated TV contracts that made already rich NFL owners even richer and, in 2003, put the NFL in the cable business, with its own NFL Network.

ESPN reported that the NFL's gross revenues in Tagliabue's first year as commissioner were $1.1 billion. By 2006, they were $5.8 billion.

After two work stoppages under Rozelle, in 1982 and 1987, Tagliabue used his negotiating skills to make peace with the NFL Players Association; there were no work stoppages on his watch. He made labor peace in part by persuading the NFLPA to agree to a free-agency salary cap and getting team owners to agree to revenue sharing, a formula giving the NFL a mechanism that allows small-market teams an equal chance to compete with teams from larger ones.

We've got the best labor deal in sports. We've got the best league. He's been our leader. The whole way he's done this has been wonderful, the Pittsburgh Steelers' owner, the late Dan Rooney, enthusiastically told the Associated Press after the 2006 pact was finalized.

From a television standpoint, Tagliabue understood, perhaps better than anyone, what pro football meant to broadcast networks.

Oh, god, yes, he knew, says an admiring Dick Ebersol, former chairman, NBC Sports Group. With Tagliabue at the helm, the NFL for the first time asked each of the broadcast networks to spend more than they knew the NFL could make back on a [profit-and-loss] basis, Ebersol recalls. Where he was coming from was, he was telling the networks, Look, you deficit-finance all of those sitcoms and dramas, and none of them offer such consistent ratings strength as the NFL.' That is something that, intellectually, he and his team came up with, and I had to be on the other side of that. They definitely saw [the NFL] as the last bit of broadcasting-network beachfront property.

Tagliabue got what he wanted. When he came in, he negotiated a relatively modest $3.6 billion four-year contract with networks. But, by 2006, the Tagliabue-led NFL had negotiated eight-year contracts for nearly $24 billion, placed a primetime Sunday-night game on NBC, and still had a Monday-night game on ESPN-and some new Thursday games on its own NFL Network.

I like to say, and they like to hear, that the NFL has established that its product is the number-one entertainment concept in all of show business, more than any movie, more than a TV show, Ebersol says. The Monday-night game on ESPN is always cable's best-watched program; Taglia

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