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.
