NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue has led the NFL to unprecedented prosperity. Chris Graythen/Getty Images

By Karl Taro Greenfeld

While I understand that Sportsman of the Year should never be a career achievement award -- I also don't like it when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gives those special Oscars to notables who never won it for any particular film -- I do feel that we should give some love to NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue, who has engineered perhaps the most successful run of any sports league in history.

The NFL today is such a powerful commercial, cultural and entertainment force that it is hard to remember how far the league has come from its late '80s nadir. When Tagliabue succeeded Pete Rozelle as comish in 1989, the NFL was hardly the $6 billion-a-year money machine it is today. In 1988, football network television revenue, for the first time since the 1950s, had actually decreased. Owners, worried about further dividing their TV revenue, had not allowed any expansion teams since 1976.

Even worse, the league was concluding a decade marred by two work stoppages capped by the embarrassment of scab football. And NFL owners were proving less than faithful to their franchises' traditional homes -- the Raiders and Colts were the first in a wave of teams hitting the road in search of newer stadiums and bigger markets.

As remarkable as it now seems, the NBA, then still in its Magic-Larry-Michael golden age, appeared to be displacing the NFL among younger sports fans. Tagliabue, from his years as the general council to the NFL, came into office with a pretty good idea of what was paralyzing the NFL. And he had some radical plans on how to fix them. (Old school owners like Jack Kent Cooke called him "even crazier than I thought" when hearing some of his proposals.)

Yet over the years, he has rebuilt labor relations with Gene Upshaw and the NFL Players Association, while all the other sports leagues have lost games --and even a World Series and an entire hockey season -- to work stoppages. He imposed the most effective drug testing program of the big three U.S. sports leagues. His G3 stadium financing program has made it possible for small market teams to build state-of-the-art stadiums and remain competitive with the biggest market teams, and this year resulted in getting a deal done to finance a new stadium in New York for the Jets and Giants. (No NFL team has relocated since 1996.)

The revenue sharing that he has aggressively convinced owners is in their own best interest -- as well as the salary cap he helped to negotiate with the NFLPA -- allows for each team's fans to look forward to every season with a realistic hope that their club will be competitive. And he has continued to ensure the NFL remains a powerful charitable institution, raising more than $21 million for Hurricane Katrina relief, more than the other leagues combined.

His success has made the NFL into a seamless, slick conglomerate that delivers first-rate entertainment with such metronomic regularity that fans have come to take him for granted. But without Tags at the top of the league, the shape and state of professional football would be very different. And if you still don't believe that a commissioner is important, I've got two words for you: Bud Selig.