As the Super Bowl approaches, I’m nostalgic about my five years at the National Football League. With a Ph.D. in English Literature and a career spanning media startups and satellite TV, I was the obvious choice to work at the NFL.

That’s obvious in the same way that letting Andy Reid design your wedding dress would be obvious.

I joined the League for the same reason anyone with zero football knowledge might: it seemed absurd enough to be interesting. I had never watched a game. I knew nothing about the rules. Talk to me about George Eliot, not about Jumbo or Ezekiel Eliot. But I was intrigued by how people’s eyes lit up at the mere mention of football, like children discovering there’s a second Christmas.

Culture shock hit early. At my first owners’ meeting, Don Shula – yes, that Don Shula – shoved an ice bucket into my stomach and grunted, “Fill this.” Looking back, it was the perfect orientation: Welcome to the NFL, Dr. Kirschner.

What followed were five years of lessons in how being the ultimate outsider – or as I liked to put it, working for the Vatican while not being Catholic – could actually be a secret weapon. When you don’t view something as sacred, you’re more likely to spot opportunities for growth and innovation. You also discover that intelligence comes wrapped in unexpected packages.

Take Troy Aikman, the Cowboys’ quarterback. You might expect a three-time Super Bowl champion to be all muscle and playbook memory. But when we launched the NFL’s first-ever online chat, I sat ready to transcribe his responses – until he practically hip-checked me out of my chair. Turns out the star quarterback was also Oklahoma’s reigning speed-typing champion. There went another stereotype, deleted at 85 words per minute.

My outsider status proved particularly useful in the early days of the Internet. After a visit to MTV, where VJ Adam Curry showed me something called a “mosaic browser,” I burst into the next League staff meeting to announce “I’ve seen the future.” Commissioner Paul Tagliabue and his team, always open to new ways to engage fans, gave us the green light to launch NFL.com in 1995, making us the first major sports league to venture online.

Sometimes innovation comes gift-wrapped in audacity. When we caught Mark Cuban pirating NFL games for his online radio startup, his response to our cease-and-desist letter was pure Cuban: “Aw shucks.” Instead of a legal battle, we turned it into a partnership for the NFL’s first international Super Bowl livestream. Sometimes the best innovators are the ones who don’t know they’re supposed to ask permission.

The NFL didn’t just reshape my career – it transformed my personal horizons. Surrounded by elite athletes, I found myself wondering: if these guys can run the length of a football field, maybe I can run a few miles? Those few miles became a marathon, and today my finisher’s medal sits proudly between my Ph.D. diploma and my first Super Bowl all-access badge. Not bad for someone who once thought a quarterback sneak involved cutting lines at the movies.

The NFL taught me about navigating complex power structures where everyone thinks they’re in charge – the players, the owners, the networks, each with legitimate claims to the throne. These lessons proved invaluable years later when I became a college president and had to balance the competing demands of faculty, donors, and students.

But perhaps the most meaningful lesson came from watching how sports transcends boundaries. Taking my parents to the Super Bowl – my dad a World War II veteran, my mom a Holocaust survivor – remains one of my most treasured memories. It did start badly, though. My famously frugal father spotted scalpers waving thousands of dollars for his ticket. “Annie will get in trouble!” my brother warned, practically frog-marching our dad into the stadium.

Now, as I prepare for another Super Bowl Sunday, I marvel at how this chapter still pays dividends. Facing a tough crowd? Tech demo crashing? I’ve found that nothing warms up a cold room quite like an NFL war story. Who knew that I’d still be talking about how I shoved the ice bucket back at Don Shula?

I do still occasionally dream in X’s and O’s, though these days I interpret them as a combination of binary code and literary theory.

But you’ll have to excuse me now – I’ve got hot dogs to warm up and a game to watch.