National Football League

The National Football League (NFL) is an American professional football league. It consists of 32 teams that are organized as franchises in the National Football Conference (NFC) and the American Football Conference (AFC). Both conferences, which essentially consist of the 1970 united competing leagues NFL and AFL, are in turn divided into four divisions.

The season begins after a preseason of several weeks, in which only test matches are played. During the eighteen-week regular season, each team plays 17 games, after which the best teams play in the play-offs for the championship title. The four division winners and the three other best teams (the so-called wildcard teams) of each conference take part in the play-offs. The resulting AFC and NFC champions meet in the Super Bowl, which has been held on the first Sunday in February for several years.

The reigning champions are the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who beat the Kansas City Chiefs 31-9 in Super Bowl LV.

With annual revenue of approximately $13 billion (2016), the NFL is the highest revenue sports league in the world.

History

Early phase (until 1960)

American football was able to establish itself as a professional sport relatively late, although or rather because football was already very popular at universities before 1900 and attracted six-figure crowds. There was little demand for additional games, especially since college football is traditionally played in the fall and finals like the Rose Bowl are played at the turn of the year. Professional baseball dominated the summer months. In this American pastime, each team plays over 100 games in good weather, generating corresponding spectator revenue and paying full-time professionals. Football, on the other hand, requires many more players per team, while revenue from a few games in the fall was much lower and in no way sufficient to pay a team even during the long non-playing season.

Thus, for decades, the game only functioned reliably at universities. College football was and is popular, the best student teams were considered first class. All other footballers were amateurs and had to make a living through normal work. There were individual teams after World War I that roamed around with stars like Jim Thorpe in the manner of a traveling circus, playing games against local teams made up largely of factory workers and players from comparable social backgrounds. The Green Bay Packers (named after the Indian Packing Company) are still a reminder of this today. They are the only NFL team that is not owned by an owner, but can still be considered a club.

This developed into the American Professional Football Association, which was founded in Canton, Ohio, on August 20, 1920. The first champions of this new league were the Akron Pros. It was not until 1922 that the APFA was renamed the National Football League. Playing in the 1920s continued to be sporadic. New teams kept joining, only to disappear a short time later. Of the founding teams, only the Chicago Cardinals (today: Arizona Cardinals) and the Chicago Bears (then: Decatur Staleys) have survived.

In the first years, the NFL played according to the rules of college football. The very defensive style of play at the time and the correspondingly low results had a very negative effect on spectator interest and revenues. With the 1933 season, the NFL therefore introduced its own rules to promote offensive play and higher scores. Goalposts were moved from the end line to the goal line to allow for more field goals. Passes were newly allowed from anywhere behind the scrimmage. So-called hashmarks, marks ten yards from the sideline, were introduced to facilitate the play of the offense. On plays that ended outside the hashmarks, the spot for the next down was moved to the hashmark. As a result, players could use the entire width of the field without fearing major disadvantages on the following snap if they were stopped directly on the sideline.

While there were definitely some colored players and officials like Fritz Pollard in the league in the early years, team owners made an agreement in the early 1930s to stop signing colored players. This gentlemen's agreement excluded blacks from the league for well over a decade; no black player was active in the league between 1933 and 1945; only a few minor professional leagues and league-independent black teams like the Brown Bombers of Harlem were open to them. Only after the war was there a slow departure from this principle; the last team to sign its first player of color was the Washington Redskins in 1962.

Starting in 1933, the league was divided into two divisions, making it a final between the two division winners. A very important step in 1936 was the decision by teams to agree among themselves on player negotiations and especially not to outbid each other on salary offers to players who had made a name for themselves on university teams. In this draft, each year the last-place team was given the right to negotiate first with a rookie player of their choice, after which the second-to-last team could name a rookie, and so on in rank order. Although the very first person selected in the first NFL Draft on February 8, 1936, college player Jay Berwanger, had turned down pro football in favor of a normal professional career, this system became a success. It guaranteed athletic balance, thus exciting seasons, and prevented rich teams from dominating or poor ones from ruining themselves.

After the Cleveland Rams moved to Los Angeles in 1945, the NFL was also represented on the far-flung West Coast for the first time and was thus no longer entirely based in its nucleus in the northeastern United States. It also faced serious competition for the first time from 1946 to 1949, when the All-America Football Conference (AAFC) was active. The AAFC was disbanded in 1950, but the more athletically and economically successful teams were absorbed into the NFL. In addition to the Cleveland Browns and the Baltimore Colts, a second team from the western states, the San Francisco 49ers, was integrated into the league.

NFL and AFL (1960-1969)

The advent of television in the late 1950s provided additional sources of revenue that made professional play possible in less populous cities. At that time, professional football could for the first time become nearly as popular as only college football and professional baseball had been before. However, team owners in the NFL were still hesitant to let additional teams compete with them. Some rich businessmen, who had tried in vain to acquire an NFL team, then founded a new league, the American Football League (AFL), for the 1960 season with the support of the TV station ABC. With its modern style of play and many innovations, the AFL quickly became a serious competitor to the long-established NFL. The fan community was divided into two camps, and a ruinous competition between the two leagues was also sparked. Not only did the NFL react to the re-establishment of the AFL with the long-overdue expansion, which brought new teams into contested markets such as Dallas and Minneapolis-St. Paul (already in August 1959, i.e. during the preparations for the establishment of the AFL, the NFL had announced the expansion by two teams), but also a fierce battle for the best young players arose, which was accompanied by significant salary increases for the professionals. Later, the NFL announced two more startups in Atlanta and New Orleans at the beginning of the 1966 season, which were countered by two expansions of the AFL from an initial eight teams to a final ten. Sooner or later, cooperation between the two leagues thus became inevitable. On June 8, 1966, after lengthy negotiations, the two leagues issued a joint press release announcing the merger for the 1970 season. In the interim, in addition to a joint draft, it was agreed that an additional final game would be played to determine a "true" national champion between the two league champions. However, the game, whose first edition in January 1967 was met with relatively little interest, was quickly recognized as a new season highlight under the name Super Bowl and was retained after the merger. In the then 26-team NFL, 13 of the "old" teams formed the National Football Conference (NFC), while the American Football Conference (AFC) was formed from three former NFL clubs and the ten AFL teams. The conferences were divided into West, Central and East divisions, each with four or five teams.

In terms of sports, it quickly became apparent that the two leagues had played at a similar level. Although the Green Bay Packers under head coach Vince Lombardi clearly won the first two Super Bowls against the Kansas City Chiefs and the Oakland Raiders, two victories of former AFL teams followed in the 1969 and 1970 finals. Especially the victory of the New York Jets with star quarterback Joe Namath over the highly favored Baltimore Colts in the third Super Bowl made it clear that the AFL was quite equal to the older league.

The modern NFL (since 1970)

Under the leadership of NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle, the league became the most important sports brand in the United States in the 1970s. In 1970, the NFL signed a deal with ABC to broadcast a Monday Night Football game live across the country. This marked the first time in its history that the league had regular primetime television coverage; previously, games had been played exclusively on Sunday afternoons, with television stations offering different live games depending on the region, as they still do today. In 1976, the league expanded for the last time for nearly twenty years (after the formation of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Seattle Seahawks, the NFL thus numbered 28 teams), and a year later the season was extended from 14 to 16 game days. In addition, a wild-card game between two teams was introduced in each conference, so that the winners of the divisions had a weekend off before the actual play-offs. Since 1977, there has also been the principle of game day scheduling, which is still in place today, whereby to ensure league balance, a portion of a team's games are played against those teams in the same conference that finished the previous season in the same place in their divisions. However, due to a 57-day players' strike, the 1982 season had to be shortened to nine game days.

In 1973, fixed jersey numbers were introduced. Buffalo Bills running back O.J. Simpson ran for over 2,000 yards that season. In 1975, referees got radio microphones, making it easier for spectators to understand the nature of various rule violations since then. On August 17, 1976, the first game was overseas. In Tokyo, the then St. Louis Cardinals took on the San Diego Chargers in a preseason game. In 1986, the American Bowl was played for the first time, and these were also preseason games played overseas. The American Bowl also took place several times in Germany from 1990 onwards, with the venue in each case being the Olympiastadion Berlin. The NFL officials made the experience that there was definitely interest in NFL football abroad. They founded the World League in 1991, which later became known as NFL Europe. This experiment was terminated in 2007 due to a lack of spectator and sponsor interest. Instead, regular regular season games will be played overseas in the future. The first of these was in October 2007, when the Miami Dolphins and the New York Giants played at Wembley Stadium in London. This match went down in history as the second NFL game to be played outside the USA, having been preceded in 2005 by a game between the Arizona Cardinals and the San Francisco 49ers in Mexico City.

In 1999, the Cleveland Browns became the 31st team to enter the NFL (the Cleveland Browns played in the NFL from 1950 to 1995) and then in 2002, the Houston Texans followed as the 32nd team.

Cheerleader at the Pro Bowl 2006


An NFL game between the Tennessee Titans and the Houston Texans, 2005.

Teams

In the first season in 1920, 14 teams played. Over the next ten years, between 22 and ten teams played for the championship each year. The composition of the league was subject to constant changes of teams. The low point, partly due to the economic effects of the Great Depression, was reached in 1932 with eight teams. Of the franchises that participated in 1932, six are still represented in today's NFL.

From this point on, the number and venues of participating teams stabilized. From 1933 onwards, two divisions were played, usually with five teams. After the AAFC took over, twelve teams played in two Conferences from 1951. In 1959/60, competition from the AFL prompted the number of franchises to be expanded by two (Dallas, Minnesota). In 1966/67, Atlanta and New Orleans were added as two more teams. In 1967 the two conferences were divided into two divisions with four teams each.

The merger with the AFL in 1970 increased the number of teams to 26, and since then the two conferences have been the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National Football Conference (NFC). From 1970 onwards, there were three divisions, with 5 and 4 teams respectively. In 1976, the Seattle Seahawks and Tampa Bay Buccaneers were added as two more franchises as agreed upon in the NFL-AFL merger. The next expansion of the league occurred in 1995 with the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Carolina Panthers.

Due to the Cleveland Browns relocation controversy, a new franchise was granted to the Baltimore Ravens. Due to the Browns' break from playing from 1996 to 1998, the number of teams playing continued to be 30 and finally 31 from 1999.

In order to have an even number of teams in the championship again, the last franchise to date was awarded to the Houston Texans in 2002. In this context, the league was re-divided. Since that time, the two conferences have each included four divisions, each with four teams. According to the NFL, this division is considered the "final" composition.

Division	Team	Venue	Stadium	Founded	Joined the NFL	Head Coach	Owner
American Football Conference
AFC East	Buffalo Bills	Orchard Park, NY	Highmark Stadium	28 Oct 1959 (AFL)	1970	Sean McDermott	Terrence Pegula
	Miami Dolphins	Miami Gardens, FL	Hard Rock Stadium	16 Aug. 1965 (AFL)	1970	Brian Flores	Stephen M. Ross
	New England Patriots	Foxborough, MA	Gillette Stadium	22 Nov. 1959 (AFL)	1970	Bill Belichick	Robert Kraft
	New York Jets	East Rutherford, NJ	MetLife Stadium	Aug. 14, 1959 (AFL)	1970	Robert Saleh	Woody Johnson
AFC North	Baltimore Ravens	Baltimore, MD	M&T Bank Stadium	9 Feb. 1996	1996 1	John Harbaugh	Steve Bisciotti
	Cincinnati Bengals	Cincinnati, OH	Paul Brown Stadium	23 May 1967 (AFL)	1970	Zac Taylor	Mike Brown
	Cleveland Browns	Cleveland, OH	FirstEnergy Stadium	June 4, 1944 (AAFC)	1950 1	Kevin Stefanski	Jimmy Haslam
	Pittsburgh Steelers	Pittsburgh, PA	Heinz Field	July 8, 1933	1933	Mike Tomlin	Dan Rooney
AFC South	Houston Texans	Houston, TX	NRG Stadium	6 Oct. 1999	2002	David Culley	Janice McNair
	Indianapolis Colts *	Indianapolis, IN	Lucas Oil Stadium	23 Jan. 1953	1953	Frank Reich	Jim Irsay
	Jacksonville Jaguars	Jacksonville, FL	TIAA Bank Field	Nov. 30, 1993	1995	Urban Meyer	Shahid Khan
	Tennessee Titans *	Nashville, TN	Nissan Stadium	Aug. 14, 1959 (AFL)	1970	Mike Vrabel	Amy Adams Strunk
AFC West	Denver Broncos	Denver, CO	Empower Field at Mile High	Aug. 14, 1959 (AFL)	1970	Vic Fangio	Pat Bowlen
	Kansas City Chiefs *	Kansas City, MO	Arrowhead Stadium	Aug. 14, 1959 (AFL)	1970	Andy Reid	Clark Hunt et al.
	LasVegas Raiders *	Paradise, NV	Allegiant Stadium	30 Jan. 1960 (AFL)	1970	Jon Gruden	Mark Davis et al.
	Los Angeles Chargers *	Costa Mesa, CA	SoFi Stadium	Aug. 14, 1959 (AFL)	1970	Brandon Staley	Dean Spanos
National Football Conference
NFC East	Dallas Cowboys	Arlington, TX	AT&T Stadium	Jan. 28, 1960	1960	Mike McCarthy	Jerry Jones
	New York Giants	East Rutherford, NJ	MetLife Stadium	Aug. 1, 1925	1925	Joe Judge	John Mara & Steve Tisch
	Philadelphia Eagles	Philadelphia, PA	Lincoln Financial Field	July 8, 1933	1933	Nick Sirianni	Jeffrey Lurie
	Washington football team *	Landover, MD	FedEx Field	July 9, 1932	1932	Ron Rivera	Daniel Snyder
NFC North	Chicago Bears *	Chicago, IL	soldier field	17 Sept. 1920 2	1920	Matt Nagy	Virginia Halas McCaskey
	Detroit Lions *	Detroit, MI	Ford Field	1929	1930	Dan Campbell	Sheila Ford Hamp
	Green Bay Packers	Green Bay, WI	Lambeau Field	Aug. 11, 1919	1921	Matt LaFleur	Green Bay Packers, Inc.
	Minnesota Vikings	Minneapolis, MN	U.S. Bank Stadium	Jan. 28, 1960	1961	Mike Zimmer	Zygi Wilf
NFC South	Atlanta Falcons	Atlanta, GA	Mercedes-Benz Stadium	30 June 1965	1966	Arthur Smith	Arthur Blank
	Carolina Panthers	Charlotte, NC	Bank of America Stadium	26 Oct. 1993	1995	Matt Rhule	David Tepper
	New Orleans Saints	New Orleans, LA	Mercedes-Benz Superdome	Nov. 1, 1966	1967	Sean Payton	Gayle Benson
	Tampa Bay Buccaneers	Tampa, FL	Raymond James Stadium	April 24, 1974	1976	Bruce Arians	Malcolm Glazer
NFC West	Arizona Cardinals *	Glendale, AZ	State Farm Stadium	1898	1920	Kingsbury cliff	Michael Bidwill
	Los Angeles Rams *	Los Angeles, CA	SoFi Stadium	1936 (AFL II)	1937	Sean McVay	Stan Kroenke
	San Francisco 49ers	Santa Clara, CA	Levi's Stadium	June 4, 1944 (AAFC)	1950	Kyle Shanahan	Jed York
	Seattle Seahawks	Seattle, WA	Lumen Field	June 4, 1974	1976	Pete Carroll	Paul Allen

An asterisk (*) indicates that the football club has changed franchises, i.e. that the city in which the home games are played has been changed. More information can be found in the articles of the football clubs.

• 1. during the Cleveland Browns' 1996 relocation controversy, the NFL suspended the Cleveland Browns' play. In 1996, the Cleveland Browns moved to Baltimore. Cleveland and Baltimore agreed that the Baltimore Ravens joined the NFL as a new team in 1996, and the Cleveland Browns were a franchise founded in 1946 that ceased play between 1996 and 1998 and returned to active NFL play in 1999.
• 2 Although the football club was originally founded in 1919 as a corporate team by A. E. Staley, George Halas is mentioned as the founder, as he was charged with establishing the team and took it over in 1920.

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see also: NFL team owners