Former NFL Commissioner Voted Finalist for PFHOF Class Of 2017

When former NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue was notified of the good news by members of the Contributor Committee that he was a finalist for the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s 2017 class, Tagliabue couldn’t have been more moved and appreciative of the vote of confidence from a committee of his peers (Listen to the conversation below).

Tagliabue, a Jersey City, New Jersey native is the third of four sons of Charles and May Tagliabue.  A scholarship student athlete, Tagliabue soared above the rim at Georgetown University. Hailing as captain of the basketball team, Tagliabue was not only a star collegiate athlete, but also the president of his senior class and graduated a Rhodes Scholar finalist and a Dean’s List graduate.
 
After graduation, he attended New York University School of Law where Tagliabue received his law degree. Shortly after law school he didn’t waste any time and began his career as a law clerk in the U.S. Claims Court in 1965.
 
But in 1969 Tagliabue joined the prestige Covington & Burling LLP where he started to take on more of the firm’s business concerning the NFL. Ranked among the top 20 firms on the American Lawyer’s A-list, Tagliabue was a mainstay.
 
In the 1980s, Tagliabue was on the fast track and became a managing partner at the firm and was named lead attorney on all matters regarding the National Football League.
 
That decade, the league experienced major changes in which Tagliabue became a close advisor to the then NFL’s commissioner Pete Rozelle. Working under the strict tutelage of Rozelle, Tagliabue was deemed to be Rozelle’s successor after his retirement in 1989.
 
Believed as a man that was forward thinking and his ideas can take the NFL into the next century, Tagliabue grew the league leaps and bounds over his 17-year tenure.
 
Among those accomplishments was the league grew from 28 to 32 teams, operated under successive long-term labor agreements with the NFL Players Association and the NFL Network secured the largest television deals in entertainment history, including a TV package negotiated for 2006-2011 valued at $25 billion.
 
Also the presences of the NFL were global, the league established operations in overseas markets including the NFL Europe League.
 
However, it would be September 11, 2001 when America was at its weakest moment that Tagliabue stepped in and cancelled the games after the World Trade Center and U.S. Pentagon were under attack.
 
Tagliabue would go onto commission to postpone the games, eliminate the wild-card round of the playoffs and reschedule the Week 2 games for Week 16. Years later, he would state that, “The day, when a commercial airline was converted into an intercontinental ballistic missile. The day everything changed.”
 
Not only is Tagliabue respected as a great commissioner but a man as well and with all of the accomplishments throughout his amazing career, Tagliabue can now say he is a finalist for the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s 2017 Class and he waits for the final chapter of his football life to be written and forever enshrined in Canton, Ohio.