The National Football League NFL

The Most Popular Sport in the United States!  

The National Football League (NFL) was originally based on the example of the Ohio League, a small group of town and city football teams that had existed in the Ohio since the late 1800s.  The two best teams in Ohio were the Massillon Tigers and the Canton Bulldogs.

In 1920, the American Professional Football Association was founded by a union of eleven teams, and Jim Thorpe, one of the most famous players of the Canton Bulldogs, was elected president.  Among the problems the Association tried to address were player poaching, where players were constantly being offered more money to move to another team, and the problem of college players joining professional teams while still in school.  In 1920, the Akron Pros were the first championship team but by the end of the season only four of the original founding teams remained. 

The 1920s were not a great decade for the growth of American football.  Although the league had as many as twenty-two teams in 1921, it remained unsteady and football was not a popular sport. Of the original teams there at the beginning, only the Arizona Cardinals and the Chicago Bears (known as the Decatur Staleys) are still alive.  The Green Bay Packers joined the league in 1921 and are the oldest team still around who has not moved to another city.  Other smaller town teams disappeared. In 1922 the American Professional Football Association changed its name to the National Football League.  There were a total of eighteen teams. 

The 1930s saw a couple of major developments when an annual championship game and the college draft were instated.  The decade of the 30s also brought discrimination, when from 1933 to 1945 there was not a single black player in the NFL. The disappearance of black players is attributed to the arrival George Preston Marshall in the league with his Washington Redskins team.  He did not allow black players on his Boston Braves baseball team nor on the Redskins team and he allegedly pressured other NFL teams to do likewise. In fact, Preston’s Washington Redskins did not integrate until 1962, when forced to do so by the Kennedy administration.  

The popularity of American football started to increase for good after soldiers returned home from World War II.  The Cleveland Rams moved to Los Angeles in 1946 and now football teams were spread across the country.  The advent of television in the 1950s was the final ingredient needed to popularize football across the nation. 

In the 1960s, the NFL got its strongest and most worrisome competition when the American Football League (AFL) was born.  Texas businessman Lemar Hunt and seven other investors were active in developing the AFL, which actively recruited college players and offered higher salaries to induce many NFL players away from their current teams.  This continued, until at its height in 1965, Joe Namath signed with the AFC’s New York Jets.  Only one year later in 1966, the AFL would begin to merge with the NFL and there would be a new combined draft and a championship game called the “Superbowl.”  The total merger was accomplished in 1970 and the NFL was divided into two conferences. 

Today the NFL has a total of 32 teams and just about all of the major American cities have a franchise.  The football season has continued to grow in length throughout the fall and now the Superbowl is played in February of the following year.  The popularity of the NFL and American football has never been greater.