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The National Football League (NFL) is an unincorporated association of separately owned and operated football teams that collectively produce an annual season of over 250 interrelated football games. In the past, the National Football League granted headwear licenses to a number of different vendors simultaneously; one of those vendors was American Needle, which held an NFL headwear license for over 20 years. However, in 2000, the NFL teams authorized the NFL to solicit bids from the vendors for an exclusive headwear license. Reebok won the bidding war, and in 2001 the NFL granted an exclusive license to Reebok for 10 years. As a result of the exclusive licensing of headwear, American Needle Inc. sued the NFL, its member football teams, and Reebok International, alleging that the teams’ exclusive licensing agreement with Reebok violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. As American Needle saw it, because each of the individual teams separately owned its team logos and trademarks, the teams’ collective agreement to authorize NFL Properties to award the exclusive headwear license to Reebok was, in fact, a conspiracy to restrict other vendors’ ability to obtain licenses for the teams’ intellectual property. American Needle also contended that, by authorizing the NFL to award the license to Reebok, the NFL teams monopolized the NFL team licensing and product wholesale markets in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The NFL claims that it is not in violation of the Sherman Act because the sum of all the NFL teams constitutes one single entity (the NFL) when licensing intellectual property. Was the NHL in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act? Would any additional information help you make your decision?