By all accounts, the NFL has never been more popular, including even those teams like the Lions and Bears that are either perennial losers or otherwise disappointing to their 2009 fans.

This season, another one out of every five people watched “Monday Night Football” on ESPN compared to last season, and Monday’s Bears overtime win over the dreaded Vikings didn’t hurt either.

The NFL Network has gotten strong games despite some pitiable match-ups, and anybody with DirecTV’S NFL Sunday Ticket and new Super Fan App can tell you that streaming out-of-town games to your iPhone is about as good as it gets.

DirecTV, CBS, NBC, FOX and ESPN pay the NFL a combined $3.735 billion (with a B) to televise the NFL every season, and that doesn’t even account for another billion or so in asset value that the NFL Network represents. When you count it up, that’s more money than Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, National Hockey League and NASCAR get – combined.

Add in another $12 million from Sprint, plus $60 million more from EA Sports ands its NFL videogame licenses, and another $60 million-plus from Sirius XM and Westwood One Radio. Then mix Apple’s iTunes, Yahoo, Sling Box, Univision and still other partners, and the NFL’s got it going on across very media  -- new and old – that you can imagine.

This weekend, we’re all celebrating another New Year not to mention another decade. But the NFL can really thank the Bears, the Lions and Thanksgiving of 1934 for setting it all into motion.

That’s because a local radio executive named George Richards had just bought the best team nobody was seeing – the Portsmouth (Ohio) Spartans -- and moved them into the Motor City. Portsmouth/Detroit’s not-so-secret weapons were running backs Earl “Dutch” Clark and “Crashing Chris” Frank Christiansen, yet Richard’s real challenge was cultivating a new Detroit fan base.

He turned to what he knew best – media and promotion – and the NFL never looked back.

Sunday Mass and the NFL went hand in hand from the early days of the league, and no one had ever played on Thursdays until Richards struck upon the idea of having his Detroit Lions host the Monsters of the Midway, Chicago Bears on Thanksgiving Day, 1934.

The Lions came into the game with a 10-1 record and hadn’t even given up a touchdown until the eighth game of the season. The Bears were even better, riding an 11-0 streak of their own. If the Lions won on Thanksgiving, they’d tie the Bears for the top spot in the NFL’s Western Division with one game still to play – a showdown between the same two teams in Chicago to be held three days later.

By playing alone on Thanksgiving, the Lions generated so much local interest that the game sold out more than two weeks in advance – something unthinkable for the times – and demand was so high that locals estimated they could have filled University of Detroit’s 26,000 seats more than twice over.

With the gate receipts already set and the City of Detroit in his pocket, Richards set his mind to broader pastures – a national radio syndicate to help publicize his burgeoning Lions and put them in the same league as the perennial power Bears. Together with NBC Radio, Richards set up a 94-station network to broadcasting the Lions-Bears showdown, with the famous announcing team of Graham McNamee and Don Wilson calling the action.

It would become the first national broadcast of an NFL game.

Sports broadcasting had begun in earnest on radio the prior decade, but the announcers were typically newspaper writers who gave factual accounts that proved rather boring. Wilson had gained some fame as an announcer for the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, but later became better known for his work on “The Jack Benny Program” that ran from 1932 through 1955 on the NBC and CBS radio networks, respectively. Wilson followed Benny into the emerging medium of television from 1950 through 1965.

Graham McNamee was hired to help bring the sights and sounds of the games into early radio owners’ homes, and so in joining Wilson to announce the Bears and Lions game on Thanksgiving, he became the medium’s first “color” commentator.

In those early 1930s, radio was fast becoming the medium of choice for not only sports but also politics, and sometimes the two combined in interesting ways. President Franklin Roosevelt was delivering his “fireside chats” to the new electronic hearth in everyone’s home, while across the Atlantic, no less than Reichsminister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels was beginning to use radio to help propel the despised Nazi party between 1933 and 1945. Goebbels’ looked to the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin as an opportunity to prove the Aryan Nation’s superiority, but American Jesse Owens helped to dispel all of that. Still, Goebbels’ radio telecasts heavily censored the results to the Germans’ favor.

On Thanksgiving, 1934, the first television broadcast of an NFL game was still five years away, and radio was the “new” media darling and aspiring partner to the league. All George Richards wanted to do was focus the ears of Detroit on his Portsmouth Spartans to help cultivate a fragile fan base, and anything he could get out of the national publicity surrounding the broadcast was just gravy.

Neither the Lions or Bears or the game between the two would disappoint.

Stopping the running of Lions quarterback "Dutch" Clark was one of the Bears' challenges in their 1934 Thanksgiving Day matchup.

With “Dutch” Clark and “Crashing Chris” Christiansen carrying the ball, the Lions out-rushed the Bear’s famed backfield of Beattie Feathers, Bronko Nagurski and Red Grange nearly two to one, gaining a total of 201 rushing yards to the Bears’ 116. The Bears out-passed the Lions 77 yards to 37, but it was hardly the stuff of Peyton Manning by any stretch of the imagination.

In the end, the Bears won where it counted – on the scoreboard – edging the Lions 19-16 to clinch the NFL Western Division crown. The Bears won the rematch three days later back in Chicago by an equally close 10-7 margin to finish off the NFL’s first-ever undefeated and untied regular season. Beattie Feathers would also become the NFL’s first 1,000-yard rusher, gaining 1,004 in that season.

Only a week later, however, the Bears’ backfield was held to 89 yards, and the New York Giants broke their unbeaten streak to win the NFL title 30-13. Cue the Indianapolis Colts who might have taken notice last week of the Bears going unbeaten but losing the NFL championship after back-to-back battles against the Lions in only four days.

The Lions gained their own measure of revenge, coming back to win the NFL title the following season. It was their first of four, and they’ve never been back since 1957.

The true lesson that Richards took from the game and passed along to league headquarters, however, was the latent promotional power that media partners might impart to the NFL. What Goebbels or Roosevelt was doing in the political sphere in the mid 1930s and early 1940s (one for good and one for bad) held similar potential for a burgeoning confederation of professional football franchises.

What each of today’s media partners provide the NFL in pure dollars – upward of $4 billion per annum – they more than eclipse by exponential margins in promotional inventory on their wholly owned networks, web sites, portals and other turnstiles.

Together, these carriers create a wall-to-wall, everywhere-and-anywhere deus ex machina capable of saturation bombing, pinpoint delivery or some manner of both at the same time. Their payload is whatever the NFL needs to deliver and the result is perpetual motion behind the promise of the NFL as the Eighth Wonder of the Modern World.

This weekend, the final playoff spots will go to teams with nearly as many losses as wins, and yet to the average fan, the competition and the league have never been better.

Players migrate from one team to the next every season, and even the greatest sports heroes in one team’s history don rival colors that would otherwise make their former hometown supporters sick.

Editors Note: ESPN’s October telecast of Favre’s return to Green Bay this season was the most-watched program in ESPN history with 22 million viewers and, for only the second time in history, a cable program surpassed everything else offered by the major broadcast networks.

It used to be that teams full of colorful characters and coaches became accustomed to all as they made the long, slow climb from mediocrity to dynasty, staying atop the NFL pinnacle like Senators for six-year terms. Individual teams built “brands” around styles of football or fan expectations predicated upon decades of mind-melded football philosophy.

Say “Bears” or “Packers” or even “Steelers” to some, and you’re still likely to conjure images of smoky breath on a frozen afternoon and bloody tape-wrapped fingers of the unsung linemen. Say “Chargers” and “Raiders” and even “Dolphins” and you’re more likely to imagine footballs raining softly from the skies, only to fall into the waiting hands of wild stallion wide receivers bolting down the sidelines.

The NFL of old was born of this team-by-team imagery and local fan expectation.

The NFL of today is more akin to a stock portfolio. The teams change year by year with each free agent signing or departure, but so long as the gains to one offset the losses to another, the league can play a zero sum game.

And then there’s always that promotional colossus behind the curtain if things ever get out of hand.

But for today at least, the Old Guard is still content reminiscing about Hall of Fame careers and long-ago heroes, while the New Money is content to follow the worst-to-first (Bengals) and rent-a-title (Vikings) storylines that make their teams most immediately relevant.

The fundamental truth to every medium is the same as upon the football field. The heart of every good story is conflict. Today’s NFL might indeed prove a bit dipolar, but its fans remain constant – and growing – and its media sprawl now reaches most every peer-to-peer connection wherever, whenever and however they might want it.

When the NFL gives thanks for that, it can certainly look to the Lions and Bears and Thanksgiving of 1934.

-- THOMAS TYRER