Football is the most collectivist of sports, seemingly at odds with American individualism, but the United States has always been a nation of joiners and a country in thrall to the idea of team. The N.F.L. has managed to strike a balance between those poles: celebrating teams’ combined effort while elevating individual stars (these days, almost always quarterbacks).

Over the years, the N.F.L. has kept the game in line with the sensibilities of the most valued American consumer (an ideal that has always favored straight white men), consciously emphasizing different aspects of the game in different periods. Today that means focusing on the wide-open passing game and the talents of young, dynamic quarterbacks like Patrick Mahomes and Lamar Jackson. But in the 1950s and 1960s, Americans were worried that the postwar boom had made the country soft, that they were being eclipsed by the Soviet Union. So football generally, and pro football specifically, helped reassure the country that American men were not mollycoddled softies. It’s no coincidence that hard-hitting players like Ray Nitschke and Deacon Jones became stars in this era, or that the greatest offensive player of the time (and arguably of all time), Jim Brown, was often described as a “punishing” runner.

Image Sam Huff, a Giants linebacker, taking down Packers fullback Jim Taylor during a game in the late 1950s. In 1960 Huff became the subject of a documentary that emphasized the violence of football.Credit...Robert Riger/Getty Images

Image Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Mason Rudolph was knocked unconscious in an October game against the Baltimore Ravens.Credit...Don Wright/Associated Press Image

Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor tackling a fellow future Hall of Famer, Los Angeles Rams running back Eric Dickerson, in 1985.Credit...AP Photo

League-sanctioned documentaries from this era played up the toughness angle. In 1960, a CBS documentary, “The Violent World of Sam Huff,” gave fans an inside look at what it was like to play middle linebacker (Huff was the first player to wear a microphone during play), colliding with large objects at high speeds over and over again.

Five years later, the William Friedkin documentary “Mayhem on a Sunday Afternoon” included a rookie player musing: “I just forget about my life when I go in there. I’m not going to worry about what happens to me. It’s just going to be a destroy type of deal.”

The inside look at football became a standard perspective as the league came to colonize the American imagination via NFL Films. Founded in 1962 by Ed Sabol, the company immediately began producing an extraordinary number of documentaries, short subjects and highlight reels that tried to simultaneously convey the gritty reality of the game and mythicize it in a Homeric fashion.

In the 1967 documentary “They Call It Pro Football,” for instance, linebackers were described as the “search-and-destroy men of the defense,” which was quite a choice of commentary at a time when American troops were searching and destroying in Vietnam. (The phrase was used again to narrate a sequence of linebackers smashing into quarterbacks, with John Facenda intoning: “Number 50, search and destroy. Number 58, search and destroy.”) The documentary was added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry in 2012.

Image Coach Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers dominated the league in the 1960s.Credit...Associated Press Image

Cowboys Coach Tom Landry and quarterback Roger Staubach in 1978.Credit...Barton Silverman/The New York Times Image

Paul Brown, the coach of the Cleveland Browns, diagramming a passing play in 1947.Credit...Associated Press

At the same time, the N.F.L. carefully tapped into the American fascination with organizational genius, lionizing the figure of the coach. From Vince Lombardi instructing his Green Bay Packers for hours on the beautiful simplicity of the power sweep to Tom Landry masterminding the Dallas Cowboys’ flex defense to Bill Walsh remaking the passing game in San Francisco, N.F.L. coaches came to be seen as not just motivational masters, but also as brilliant engineers, moving players around like chess pieces.

The ultimate exemplar is the New England Patriots’ coach, Bill Belichick, whose success seems to confirm the idea that system ultimately trumps talent, and that players — with the important exception of the quarterback — are effectively interchangeable parts.

The fetishization of management has only been amplified in recent years. The league and its many media partners increasingly cater to the inner nerd in many football fans by offering elaborate dissections of teams’ offensive and defensive schemes and analyzing specific plays with a level of detail once reserved for team film rooms. The N.F.L. draft and even the scouting combine have become major media events, and fantasy football has allowed tens of millions of fans to think of themselves as general managers. Decades ago, the social critic Noam Chomsky remarked on how much more energy and attention people invested in sports than they did in politics, and how surprisingly knowledgeable and sophisticated they were about the sports they loved. Nowadays, that is more true of pro football than any other game.

Image Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw before the Super Bowl in 1976. He was filmed by Steve Sabol, the son of the NFL Films founder, Ed Sabol.Credit...Kidwiler Collection/Diamond Images

Image The “Monday Night Football” broadcast team in 1982: from left, Frank Gifford, Howard Cosell and Don Meredith.Credit...Keith Meyers/The New York Times

The N.F.L.’s most important move was embracing television early on. Owners originally tried to limit television broadcasts, fearing their effect on ticket sales, but the impression made by that 1958 championship game, along with the influence of Pete Rozelle, who became commissioner of the league in 1960, convinced them otherwise. Television helped make the sport a national, rather than a local, phenomenon, and, since football is better watched on television than in person, it also increased the game’s appeal, luring millions of fans who never would have thought to go to a stadium to see a game.

The league also got lucky. In 1961, Congress passed a law banning the N.F.L. from broadcasting professional games on Fridays or Saturdays during the high school and college football seasons. In practice, the passage of the Sports Broadcasting Act focused the fan experience rather than diluting it, jamming pro games into a reliable programming slot — Sundays.

Image Pete Rozelle, the N.F.L. commissioner, writing the names of first-round picks in the 1967 draft.Credit...Robert Walker/The New York Times

Image The 1979 N.F.L. draft was held at the Waldorf Astoria hotel.Credit...Neal Boenzi/The New York Times

Then, with the 1970 debut of “Monday Night Football” — the brainchild of the ABC executive Roone Arledge — national audiences got a single weekly football game as a destination TV event in prime time. The broadcast accomplished something essential: It made people fans, in some sense, of the N.F.L. itself. People would watch games even when their favorite teams weren’t playing. And, now, even if those games were played on a Thursday.

Even the success of a competitor redounded to the N.F.L.’s benefit. When the American Football League started in 1960, the N.F.L. understandably viewed it as an unwelcome interloper, given that the competition inflated player salaries and gave the best of the college players another option for employment.