The League

Ever wonder who stole Tom Brady’s irreplaceable Super Bowl jersey, and how he got it back? What Bruce Lee’s protégé taught the Dallas Cowboys that led to a Super Bowl victory? How the first ever female broadcaster broke through the NFL’s glass ceiling in 1974?

The League is a docu-series about the most bizarre, inspirational, and unlikely stories connected to America’s favorite sport. Go beyond the game and dive deep into the vaults of professional football’s incredibly colorful history.

Thursday Night Football commentators, Super Bowl champion and legendary smack talker Richard Sherman and sports broadcaster and rising star Taylor Rooks co-host. From Joy Road Entertainment, The League promises unrivaled and untold stories that offer equal parts history, entertainment, and social commentary, spanning all the way from the ’40s to the present.

In 1977, the Dallas Cowboys brought in Bruce Lee protege, Dan Inosanto, to teach their defense martial arts, paving the way for a championship season for America’s Team and ushering in a new approach in the way the rest of the league trained.

When Tom Brady’s jersey went missing in the wake of the Patriots epic comeback victory in Super Bowl LI, it triggered one of the most furious investigations in recent history. Beneath the investigation’s many plot-twists that eventually would locate the jersey and the culprit, a little-known fact was revealed – the stolen jersey was classified as a “work of art” by the F.B.I.

No professional sports league in the world is more inextricably linked to television than NFL football. This episode tells the story of how the NFL changed sports forever with its foray into primetime television with its signature program, Monday Night Football, and how it is changing the game again with its recent entry into the world of streaming on Thursday nights.

Imagine if six of the best players in the NFL today teamed up in the offseason to film a Hollywood blockbuster. Well, the truth is it once happened when, in 1972, Hollywood produced The Black Six. The film starred six of the most accomplished players in the league at that time and marked the first time Hollywood had ever invested in a movie built entirely around a cast of NFL stars…and it would also be the last.

Long before the ground-breaking legislation of Title IX and the powerful marches on Washington, there were young women with dreams from all over the country who had the love of sports, the talent to write, and the ambition to pave a trail that would change the relationship between sports-journalism, gender, and football forever.

The NFL Draft has become the league’s third biggest attraction, right behind the Super Bowl and opening week. Given the spectacle and draw of the event, it’s hard to believe that the draft was an afterthought for league officials for almost 50 years. That changed in early 1980, when a small cable company, just months old and with no budget, decided to broadcast the event from their offices in Bristol, Connecticut.

There was once a time in the league’s history when the NFL was referred to as the “No Female League”. Those days are long gone. Today’s NFL has six female owners, more than any of the other major professional leagues combined. The NFL has also seen an explosion of female leadership from the boardroom to the sidelines, beginning with Susan Tose Spencer, the first female General Manager in football. With “Girls Love Football”, we’ll get to meet some of the dynamic women who are the real muscle behind the league.

On Saturdays and Sundays in bars and barber shops across the US, you might come across the start of an age old debate – “What would happen if the best college team squared off against the worst pro team?” We polled some of football’s brightest minds, including former players, front office execs, a football analytics guru, sports handicappers, and even an Ivy League professor to get the answer.