The National Football League (NFL) that we know today is a product of a path-dependent process that featured innovation, competition, and pure luck. David George Surdam's book is an economic history of the NFL's postwar rise to prominence during the 1950s, when it successfully fended off competition from the All-American Football Conference (AAFC) and the American Football League (AFL). Surdam tells the story of the NFL that has received little empirical analysis to date—while the economics of sports is more popular than ever, there is little historical analysis of its development. Being one of the few economic histories of a sport that attempts to stress the institutional features as opposed to the personalities, this book makes a novel contribution to both fields.

Run to Glory and Profits begins with a discussion of the NFL's first competing league, the AAFC. Surdam concludes that the NFL survived due to missteps by the AAFC, particularly their poor competitive balance. The next three chapters describe the NFL's profitability, popularity, and ownership conflicts in the 1950s. The next chapter deals with the peculiar antitrust issues in sports, which have both monopoly and monopsony powers in the leagues. While the NFL does not have the formal antitrust exemption afforded to Major League Baseball, Surdam documents how owners were able to successfully defend themselves and set themselves up for antitrust exemption for the lucrative television contracts that are now the largest in professional sports.

The next set of chapters deals with issues more central to the core of sports economics, including competitive balance, the draft, revenue sharing, labor relations and television contracts. Surdam shows that the NFL's competitive balance was actually more due to churning at the top than equalized winning percentages. The reverse order draft had little effect on this competitive balance. The revenue sharing plan worked to a certain extent, but because the most popular teams tended to have the most popular players, the effect was somewhat muted. Players achieved only modest gains, even in the face of competition from other leagues where they could sell their services. The exemption to antitrust for the television contract did not stop competition—the AFL was able to secure a lucrative television contract that kept the competing league viable until the two merged.

The last chapters describe the NFL's integration and innovation. Surdam shows that the NFL, then as now, constantly changed rules to lengthen players’ careers, to keep the game exciting, and to modernize the sport. Indeed, some innovations were deliberately aimed at television audiences. While rules for player substitution may seem boring to a lay person, Surdam shows that these changes were deliberate attempts to improve the product on the field. The chapter on integration is actually a discussion of reintegration. The NFL is one of the rare examples of a sport that was integrated and then deliberately segregated in the 1930s, only to integrate again more than a decade later. While integration may have served a social goal, Surdam notes that it had little, if any, effect on the bottom line of the NFL.

Overall, the book provides an interesting sampling of how the NFL survived and thrived in the decade before it became a national force. The book, however, has several limitations. First, Surdam provides little context for his area of study. He essentially assumes that readers are fans of the sport and will understand his references, wit, and jargon. While this is somewhat common in sports economics, it limits the book's accessibility to those outside the immediate field. Second, the book uses economic reasoning but does not provide much in the way of quantitative evidence. The book's analytical narrative should do more to establish principles and agents that are standard in this technique.

The final limitation may as well be a suggestion for the next book. Surdam provides a solid base from which to start a more integrative analysis of the NFL with the rise of leisure and changes in racial relations. Historians, sociologists, and (increasingly) economists now see sports as a tool to understand larger issues. Football may be a sport, but the current literature and hold of the public imagination shows that it is anything but leisure activity. Our economic understanding of an era known for its conformity has recently been reinterpreted as a period of substantial social, political, and economic change. The history of how those forces changed the NFL and American social and economic development should be written.