Everything about the NFL is hulking. The players, the stadiums, the TV deals and, most importantly, the business. But the league wasn’t always the behemoth it is now. A generation ago, the sport, while certainly not inconsequential, was still trying to feel its way forward.

As recently as 1985, seven teams lost money and it was projected that half the league would be in the red in 1986. The rest of the decade looked bleak. Jack Donlan, the then-executive director of the NFL Management Council, told the Los Angeles Times in March of 1986 that he didn’t want to be “a prophet of gloom and doom” while sounding the alarm. It wasn’t at crisis levels, he noted, “but we must get a better handle on costs, because I don’t see any important new sources of revenue.”

The NFL is now a $10 billion a year industry.

Not even labor strife can derail the league’s relentless march toward total dominance over the American sports landscape. The strike of 1987 and the lockout of 2011 had minimal effect on the perception of the sport — and, unlike the NHL, which lost legions of fans after going dark in 1994-’95, 2004-’05, and again in 2012-’13, and Major League Baseball, which sold its soul during 1998's steroid-inflated home run chase to win back fans after its 1994 work stoppage — the NFL has only grown in popularity.

Veteran AP reporter Barry Wilner, who has covered the the league for 30 years (he was on the New York Jets beat from 1985 through 2003), recently sat down to share his thoughts on just how much the game has changed — from the players to the league itself, and also how the media covers same — and where he thinks the NFL is headed.

The League

According to Wilner, the biggest difference between the NFL now and then is how much more focused it has become on the bottom line. Under Roger Goodell, the league has put an emphasis on monetizing everything it touches — something former commissioner Paul Tagliabue wasn’t as concerned about after Pete Rozelle had already achieved his primary mission: making the National Football League the nation’s number one sport.

“That’s been true since the early 90s,” Wilner said. “When you think about it, there’s been very few disappointments with this league over last 30 years. One thing I would say that was disappointing is what happened in Los Angeles, and they haven’t been able to solve that.”

Wilner, of course, is referring to Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest city, having two(ish) baseball teams, two basketball teams, two(ish) hockey teams, two (!) MLS teams … and no football team. (Both the Raiders and Rams called L.A. home before each bolted by 1995.) Many believe that the league doesn’t actually want a team in L.A. —reserving the market as a “placeholder” allows owners without new stadiums to use the threat of moving west as leverage to force their current cities to pony up tax dollars to keep their teams. In reality, the Los Angeles television market is a strong one for league despite the absence of a local team, so the NFL has little motivation to address the issue.

L.A. aside, the league has planted its flag in every corner of the nation. And beyond expansion, many teams — from the Eagles to the Giants and Jets, from the Vikings to the Falcons — have gotten new stadiums. Publicly-funded stadiums.

Much like any other vampire-squid business, it’s all about the Benjamins. The NFL is as astute an enterprise as any Blue Chip company, and it often manages to get the public to pay for its most expensive projects — triply in most cases with taxes that build the stadiums; ticket and merchandise sales that line the league’s coffers; and the countless advertising revenue generated by fans paying attention to anything and everything that happens in the league. (It is estimated that NFL ad deals bring in a whopping $2 billion a year.)

“The NFL has proven that what it wants, it’s going to get,” Wilner said. “Even if it involves municipalities getting involved, money-wise. And that’s a strength no other sport has.”

Today’s NFL even manages to exploit cancer — cancer! — of all things. Each October, teams add a generous dash of pink to their uniforms, accessories, fields and merchandise. It’s part of the NFL’s “A Crucial Catch” program, that is purportedly intended to raises breast cancer awareness.

In 2013, Sports on Earth called B.S. on the whole thing, arguing that the league’s “ulterior motives” are as obvious as they are self-interested:

• “The NFL wants to attract and cultivate new female fans, and to enhance its image.”
• “The NFL’s partners in this campaign — including Pepsi, Ticketmaster and Barclays — want to enhance their images as well.”
• “ACS hopes to engender support for its breast cancer awareness programs, instead of those supported by foundations with different ideas about how to counter the disease.”

Additionally, per Digiday: “In the four years of the campaign through 2012, the league contributed just $4.5 million. Last year, that figured dropped to $1.5 million, just .01 percent of the $9 billion made by the NFL in 2013. Business Insider claims that for every $100 in pink sales, a mere $3.54 goes toward breast cancer research. The league keeps $45.00”

In the end, fans care more about touchdowns than charitable endeavors, so the commercialization of philanthropy gets ignored. That is the strength of the NFL, a league coated in Teflon, impervious to the slings and arrows of those of us with a conscience.

That strength, Wilner believes, is based in large part on the NFL’s strategic decision to frame the league as a non-stop carousel of excitement. The season used to be training camp, regular season, and playoffs. Now, at a minimum, the league operates on a 10-month cycle, driving news and keeping itself in the conversation on a virtually year-round basis. Take, for example, June and July. Historically, no one cared about the NFL during the summer months. Those days have passed.

From the start of NFL training camps in August, though, all bets are off. Consider this: 15 million viewers tuned into Game One of the 2013 World Series. Impressive until you acknowledge that a regular-season Sunday Night Football game can draw 27 million people. The ante ups considerably, of course, in January and February when the playoffs and Super Bowl air. Quite simply, no other sport can match the NFL’s drawing power. Not even close.

That popularity, is fueled in part, by betting — even though the NFL supposedly frowns upon same. (Side note: ESPN, which has a pretty sweet contract with the NFL, actually has a webpage dedicated to odds — NFL Daily Lines.) America’s sugar daddy of gambling events, the Super Bowl, can see nine figures trade hands. During the 2014 Super Bowl, fans bet $119 million at Nevada casinos alone.

And then there’s everyone’s favorite form of legalized gambling: fantasy football. More than 30 million Americans participate in some form or another, making it a $40 to $70 billion market, according to Forbes. Sure, the league doesn’t see that money directly, but they do rake in a ton of dough by licensing their content to fantasy football providers.

The proliferation of the league as a gambling vehicle — including, in no small measure, the explosion of fantasy football — has driven enormous interest, which, in turn, has left network and cable television no choice but to pay ridiculous sums to broadcast the league’s games.

Flat circles, indeed.

The Players

“Things are so much different than they used to be,” says Wilner. “Back when I started covering [the league], the running back was as important a position as any — including quarterback — on offense. Now, it’s disposable unless you get a guy like Adrian Peterson or Emmitt Smith.”

There’s something to that. While the great teams of that era had their Joe Montanas and Jim Kellys, they also had dominant running backs. That’s completely changed now. If Lawrence Taylor were coming out of college now, he’d undoubtedly be in the mix to be drafted number one overall, whereas George Rogers — who was the first overall pick in 1981, just ahead of LT — might be chosen at the end of the first round. (Some of this, of course, has to do with changes to the NFL’s rules. By design, the league has become pass-heavy, but still.)

Protecting players has also taken center stage for the league of late. It is undeniable that professional football is a violent game, but only recently has light been shed on just how frightening the effects upon the players really are.

And the NFL pays a lot of lip service to safety. In fact, it has spent millions on messaging, running “the evolution of safety” ads throughout prime time and the playoffs. But the fact of the matter is, football players are weapons and in order to make the game safer, structural changes in how the game is played need to change. That’s unlikely, for now, though Wilner believes the NFL will continue to “tinker with the rules” to address these safety issues.

It should be noted that efforts are also being made at the youth level — through USA Football’s “Heads Up” tackling program. The idea is that in order for the NFL to change, how football is played at all lower levels needs to change. Kids need to be taught — and older kids retaught — that launching head-first is dangerous, and that late hits are unnecessary.

The NFL, for its part, has made it a mission to change the way its players tackle, much to the chagrin of linebackers and safeties. But in a game where today’s players are bigger, stronger, faster and fiercer than ever before, it is clear that the league cannot turn a blind eye to the status quo.

For now, though, the status quo seems to be holding — after all, the NFL ignored player safety for decades. Indeed, “League of Denial”, a 2013 documentary from PBS (based off a book by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru) highlighted the league’s negligence and malfeasance when it came to concussions and brain injuries suffered by the league’s players. Notably, ESPN, a partner to PBS on the documentary, decided it was in their best interests to back out of the collaboration. The Worldwide Leader in Sports said it was because they lost editorial control, but there’s also that multi-year, multi-billion dollar deal with the league.

The Reporting

It’s become cliché, but the importance of social media in journalism today cannot be overstated, especially when it comes to covering the NFL. Wilner makes no bones about his take on the state of affairs: “Social media has ruined journalism.” Really, it’s the hyperactive, high-speed metabolism that irks the longtime print man, mostly because he feels that today’s scribes ignore facts in favor of supposedly in-depth reports on why the developments occurred.

“All these different outlets want to be first; they don’t care if they’re right,” he says.

ESPN, according to Wilner, has made “tweet first, confirm later” an art form, often presenting sources’ opinion as a facts:

“ESPN will report stuff that is totally wrong and totally absurd, and then just stop reporting when they find out [they’re] wrong. While they’re doing that, other media outlets are chasing the story to see if there’s truth to it.”

Another change in covering the NFL is how teams now prefer to announce much of their news via their own websites. By doing so, they can control the message, often conveniently failing to publish stories that shine a negative light on their club, coaches or players.

Similarly, the NFL and its teams have also changed the ways in which it actually grants media access. Historically, reporters could rely upon what they saw and heard before, during and after practices, but nowadays, very few teams allow access to their facilities beyond what the league office dictates as the bare minimum. Though teams push the idea that granting access to the media puts them at a competitive disadvantage, Wilner isn’t buying it:

“Now, when [reporters] watch a team play, we’re seeing things for the first time, too, just like the fans. Our job is to explain how those plays came about; why this guy is starting, or why they changed from a 3-4 to 4-3 defense in the middle of the season — without access to practices. [Before], we would know what was going to happen and then explain why it was happening. That’s gone out the window with closed practices.”