Bert Bell - Legacy and Honors

Legacy and Honors

Bell was inducted into the Professional Football Hall of Fame, the Penn Athletics Hall of Fame, the Philadelphia Sports Hall of Fame, and Haverford's Athletic Hall of Fame. The Maxwell Football Club, which he founded in 1937, has presented the best NFL player of the year with the Bert Bell Award since 1959. The Bert Bell Benefit Bowl was exhibited in his honor from 1960 through 1969.

Bell was "a man of buoyant joviality, with a rough and ready wit, laughter and genuine humility and honesty, clearly innocent of pretense and ." Though his career spanned the desegregation and reintegration of the NFL, as an owner, he never had an African American on any of his teams, but Bert Jr. believed the mere discussion of whether his father was prejudiced was absurd. Bell's ability to mediate disputes was unparalleled in in the history of the NFL. One of the best things the owners ever did was to designate Bell with the responsibility to construct the league schedule. Bell's handling of the merger with the AAFC was acclaimed as a personal triumph. Although he did not have the wherewithal to prevent the wholesale betting on games, he was proactive in ensuring games were not tampered with by gamblers, and he created the foundation of the contemporary NFL anti-gambling policy.

Bell was criticized as being too strict with his refusal to let sold-out games to be televised locally. Nevertheless, his balancing of television broadcasts against protecting game attendance made the NFL the "healthiest professional sport in America", and he was the "leading protagonist in pro football's evolution into America's major sport." He had understood that the league needed a cooperative television contract with revenue-sharing, but he failed to overcome the obstacles to achieve it. He was portrayed by sportswriters as ensuring the owners treated the players fairly, and his decision to recognize the NFLPA in the face of adversity from owners was a "master stroke" in thwarting Congressional intervention. After he initiated terms for a pension plan with the players in 1959, little progress was made with the NFLPA, however, the first players' pension plan-the Bert Bell National Football League Retirement Plan, was approved in 1962.

Bell's implementation of the draft did not show immediate results, but it was "the single greatest contributor to the 's prosperity" in its first eighty-four years. His original version of the draft was later ruled unconstitutional, but his anchoring of the success of the league to competitive balance has been "hailed by contemporaries and sports historians". Bell had often said, "n any given Sunday, any team in the NFL can beat any other team."