In an annual summer ritual, NFL teams go about the business of two-aday workouts under the broiling July and August sun in preparation for the season. For some reason this ritual has a mesmerizing affect on a good number of 18-34-year-old men who can’t wait for the start of the season when their favorite team, players, or fantasy players get onto the field.

With the September 8 season opener just weeks away, it’s a good time to ask, just what makes the NFL so great?

It can’t be the draw play where a running back runs straight up the middle in an attempt to get two or three yards. And it can’t be the 13 minutes or so of real action in a game.

It has to be something more than that.

When I speak to sports business management students at colleges and universities around the country about the business of sport, they are in awe of the National Football League but when you ask them the reasons why they hold the league in such high esteem, their answers have very little to do with the actual playing of the game.

A couple semesters back in 2004, I asked Ithaca College sports business management students, in particular, what draws them to the game? Point spreads, over and under betting, bringing beer and food to tailgate parties, hanging out with the guys, painting their bodies, and screaming in a way you could not do in public, they said. Only one student, who had played football in high school, said he actually went to a game — to watch the game. Virtually the same answers in the same proportion came back from students at Niagara University, Cortland State, NYU, Montclair State, Temple, and other schools.

The NFL is more than a game. It’s an event, a life experience.The league doesn’t have very many games: Each team has just eight regular season home games a year and two preseason games (two postseason if a team gets lucky). Because of the scarcity of games, each one becomes an event, a chance to bet and hang out in the parking lot with the fans and, yes, watch a game.

How the NFL became the NFL is interesting.

Between the 1920s and the late 1950s, team owners had no idea about the potential for their pro football franchises. The NFL was a ragtag organization comprised of players who tossed the pigskin as a secondary occupation. There were others who sensed that eventually football would become a powerhouse business and attempted to get in on the industry in the decades between the 1920s and ’40s, challenging the NFL’s pro football monopoly, but most of them — with the exception of three All American Football Conference owners in 1950 who gained entry into the NFL — failed miserably. In the 1950s there were no NFL competitors because pro football was a third–rate business with a high rate of failure. In 1952, the Dallas Texans folded and the NFL was forced to take over operations. The franchise would eventually resurface in Baltimore.

Just 12 teams were in business between 1950 and 1959 and the teams were playing just six home games a year. In fact, the 1957 Heisman Trophy Winner, John David Crow, considered playing for the Chicago Cardinals to be a step down from college, as his alma mater, Texas A & M, had better football facilities than the Cardinals, who were playing “selected” home games in Minneapolis and Buffalo. There was no organization plan for how to expand football. The 12 NFL team owners tried, in the 1950s, to devise an expansion strategy but no one had a game plan, which is odd given how much of football revolves around the game plan.

It was television, in need of programming in the 1950s, which changed the course of football and sports. Television and football were made for one another and football became the perfect game for sports TV viewers. In 1950, baseball, horse racing, and boxing were major pastimes in America, but by 1965, the NFL eclipsed Major League Baseball in fan popularity, according to the pollsters.

Five events changed pro football forever:

• The New York Giants won the 1956 NFL title and Madison Avenue advertising agencies took notice of the Giants’ defense and the team’s handsome star, Frank Gifford.

• The Chicago Cardinals’ ownership was looking to get out of Comiskey Park and drew the interest of two Texans with a lot of money, Dallas’ Lamar Hunt and Houston’s Bud Adams.

• The 1958 championship game between the Giants and the Baltimore Colts — a game that has been called the greatest ever — culminated in Johnny Unitas’s leading the Colts downfield for a game–winning touchdown in overtime. It may not have been the greatest game, but it had the greatest impact on television and served as the catalyst for the mushrooming popularity of pro football. In November 1959, Giants middle linebacker Sam Huff appeared on the cover of Time Magazine.

• If life begins at 40, the NFL celebrated its 40th birthday in grand style October 31, 1960, when CBS further hyped the Giants–Colts matchup by producing a prime time special, “The Violent World of Sam Huff,” a half-hour special about the Giants’ middle linebacker narrated by the most trusted man in America, Walter Cronkite.

• That 1958 NFL Championship Game led Hunt and Adams — who could not in separate bids buy the Cardinals from the Bidwill family — to form the American Football League and start play in 1960. In 1961, both leagues got the green light from Congress to sell their TV rights as a group to the highest bidder eliminating concerns about violating antitrust laws, further enriching team owners; the two leagues would merge (after Congressional approval in 1966) and the Super Bowl would become a national obsession and holiday.

Old guard NFL owners never planned any of this. They had no idea that their rinky-dink product, which operated just six months a year, could grow into the most powerful sports entity ever. Teams are now worth over a billion dollars.

But none of this explains what makes the NFL so great in 2006.Is it the game or is it something else?

The answer is something else. The game is the reason people have interest, but its just part of an experience that includes point spreads, over and unders, cheerleaders, weekend parties, beer, ribs, and charcoal grills in parking lots, and bonding with the guys in the stadium or on the couch in an effort to “support the team.” And for those who really like the game of football, there is an opportunity to watch a game.

That’s why the NFL is so great.