By Lynn Zinser | The New York Times

When Tracy Perlman started working for the N.F.L. the day after graduating from Hofstra in 1992, she could hardly have imagined what she sees now as she winds her way to her office: Midtown’s streets clogged with redirected traffic as banners and video boards pay homage to this year’s big game, the first outdoor cold-weather Super Bowl.

Now the league’s vice president for marketing and entertainment, Perlman beams at all of these things — except, perhaps, the traffic — because her figurative fingerprints can be found all over them. She turned her love of athletics into a career and became a member of a very small club of women in positions of power in major professional sports. And hers is not just any professional sport, but the most popular one in the United States.

This week, she has been bouncing from Super Bowl concerts that she and her staff organized and booked, to a taping of a Rachael Ray show in which three players prepared tailgating fare, to a youth clinic at Chelsea Piers run by the former player Anthony Munoz.

“It’s just so far beyond the field now,” Perlman said. “We really have taken what is so amazing from our players and extended it into entertainment.”

Perlman, who helps organize and promote the Super Bowl halftime show and other league-sponsored concerts, is ranked in the top 20 of Billboard magazine’s recent list of the most powerful women in music. She and Sarah Moll, the league’s entertainment and television programming director, together cracked the list of 100 most powerful people in music.

Perlman, 43, is keenly aware of the research showing that 40 percent to 45 percent of N.F.L. fans are women, yet few women reach the league’s top ranks. She insists that being a woman has not held her back at the N.F.L., and names several other senior vice presidents who are women, but she also attends a lot of meetings where she is the only woman.

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