Is NFL America's New Pastime?

Jan. 26 -- Has the NFL supplanted Major League Baseball as America's new favorite pastime, or is it just a more efficient business?

The average NFL ticket price is $50.02, more than double the price ($18.30) to attend a Major League Baseball game, so bang for the buck (although the NFL has a lot more big hits) may not be a reason.

The NFL's total revenues for 2002 were $4.8 billion, $1.3 billion more than the next major professional sport (baseball, by the way), and it had very little to do with tickets and jerseys.

It starts at the top, with NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue, the 62-year old Georgetown grad who has been at the helm for 14 years and leads a shrewd group.

Lucrative TV Deals, No Strikes

That group is responsible for signing billion-dollar television deals and maintaining harmony between players and owners — while baseball barely averted a strike at the start of the 2002 season, and a lockout shortened the NBA's 1998-'99 season.

"I don't think the NFL has ever been this successful or popular," said Tom Lowry, media editor at Business Week. "Essentially, it's a media empire in the making."

Most importantly, according to Business Week, every NFL team is making a profit. (By way of comparison, the NHL's Buffalo Sabres and Ottawa Senators recently filed for bankruptcy).

Tagliabue realizes his league has made some fumbles along the way, yet still manages to persevere.

"We had our own controversies, we had our own strikes," he told ABCNEWS in a rare interview. "And I'd like to think we learned from that and created a partnership where we try to share a vision of the future, try to grow the revenue, try to be the best there is in sports — out-compete everybody else but not fight with each other."

To understand how the league tackles its competition so well, just take a look at this season. To start the season, the NFL convinced New York City to host a kickoff party during rush hour in Times Square, where half a million people showed up.