The National Football League (NFL) is the largest professional American football league, consisting of thirty-two teams from American cities and regions. The league was formed in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association, which adopted the name "National Football League" in 1922. The NFL is one of the major professional sports leagues of North America.
Prior to the 1960s, the most popular version of American football was played collegiately. After the 1958 NFL Championship Game (which went into overtime), the NFL's greatest spurt in popularity came in the 1960s and 1970s with the merger of the rival American Football League, or AFL (1960-1969).
Currently, the league's 32 teams are divided into two conferences: the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National Football Conference (NFC). Each conference is then further divided into four divisions consisting of four teams each. The divisions are labeled East, West, North, and South; the teams do not consistently follow geographic boundaries as the NFL wanted to keep certain rivalries intact.
During the league's regular season, each team plays 16 games over a 17-week period generally from September to December. At the end of each regular season, six teams from each conference play in the NFL playoffs, a 12-team single-elimination tournament that culminates with the NFL championship, the Super Bowl. This game is held at a pre-selected site which is usually a city that hosts an NFL team or a popular college stadium. One week later, selected all-star players from both the AFC and NFC meet in the Pro Bowl, currently held in Hawaii.
Season structure
Exhibition season
Summers see most NFL teams playing four "pre-season" exhibition games from early August through early September. Two "featured" exhibition games, the Pro Football Hall of Fame Game and American Bowl, do not count toward the normal allottment of four games, so the four teams playing in those games each end up playing five exhibition games.
The exhibition games are unpopular with many season ticket holders who point out that regular-season prices are charged for meaningless games, in which teams seldom play their stars and starters for more than a quarter of each game. Such complaints have gone all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, but have failed to change the policy. A judgment in 1974[1] stated: "No fewer than five lawsuits have been instituted from Dallas to New England, each claiming that the respective National Football League (NFL) team had violated the Sherman Act by requiring an individual who wishes to purchase a season ticket for all regular season games to buy, in addition, tickets for one or more exhibition or preseason games."
Pro football is so popular that fans pay the price of the exhibition games for the right to have a guaranteed seat during the season. The NFL publicity machine has relentlessly called the exhibition games "pre-season" games, to the point where most media have jumped on board and use the same expression. This is especially true of the television networks, which now telecast many exhibition games nationally.
Regular season
The NFL season begins the weekend after Labor Day. Each team plays 16 games during a 17-week period. Traditionally, every game is played on Sunday afternoon with the exception of one game per week being played in Sunday night, and another game being played on Monday night. In recent years, the league has started scheduling a nationally telecast regular season game on the Thursday night prior to the first Sunday of NFL games to "kickoff" the season. In addition, the Dallas Cowboys and the Detroit Lions each host a game on Thanksgiving Day. For the last three weeks or so of the regular season, after the end of the college football season, the league typically schedules two or three nationally televised games on Saturday afternoons or evenings. In 2005, with Christmas falling on a Sunday, the NFL has flipped their normal schedule for that weekend, having the normal slate (less the Sunday night contest) of Sunday games on Saturday (Christmas Eve day), with two nationally televised games on Sunday (Christmas Day), similar to what the NFL did in 1994 with the afternoon games on Saturday, and the primetime games the following two days (Detroit at Miami on Sunday, San Francisco at Minnesota on Monday).
Currently, each team's regular season schedule is set using a pre-determined formula: [2]
* Each team plays every other team in their division twice: once at home, and once on the road (six games).
* Each team plays once the four teams from another division within its conference on a rotating three-year cycle: two at home, and two on the road (four games).
* Each team plays once the four teams from a division in the other conference on a rotating four-year cycle: two at home, and two on the road (four games).
* Each team plays two games versus two teams within its conference based on the prior year's standings. These games match a first-place team against the first-place teams in the two same-conference divisions the team is not scheduled to play that season. The second-place, third-place, and fourth-place teams in a conference are matched in the same way each year: one at home, and one on the road.
This formula has been regarded as very successful, rekindling old rivalries while starting new ones, as teams will play in each other's stadiums eventually, which makes for a more consistent and attractive schedule each year.
History
Like the Amerian college football game from whch it sprung, NFL football is a descendant of the sport nowadays called soccer in the United States. English Association Football or "soccer" developed into rugby, which was imported to the U.S. from Canada in 1874, and then transformed into American college football. Professional football in the United States dates at least to 1892, when an athletic club in Pittsburgh paid William "Pudge" Heffelfinger $500 to take part in a game. Over the next few decades, while most attention was paid to football at elite colleges on the East Coast, the professional game spread widely in the Midwest.
The American Professional Football Association was founded in 1920 at a Hupmobile dealership in Canton, Ohio. Legendary athlete Jim Thorpe was elected president. The group of 11 teams, all but one in the Midwest, was originally less a league than an agreement not to rob other teams' players. In the early years, APFA members continued to play non-APFA teams.
In 1921, the APFA began releasing official standings, and the following year, the group changed its name to the National Football League. However, the NFL was hardly a major league in the '20s. Teams entered and left the league frequently. Franchises included such colorful representatives as the Oorang Indians, an all-Native American outfit that also put on a performing dog show.
Yet as former college stars like Red Grange and Benny Friedman began to test the professional waters, the pro game slowly began to increase in popularity. By 1934 all of the small-town teams, with the exception of the Green Bay Packers, had moved to or been replaced by big cities. One factor in the league's rising popularity was the institution of an annual championship game in 1933.
By the end of World War II, pro football began to rival the college game for fans' attention. The spread of the T formation led to a faster-paced, higher-scoring game that attracted record numbers of fans. In 1945, the Cleveland Rams moved to Los Angeles, becoming the first big-league sports franchise on the West Coast. In 1950, the NFL accepted three teams from the defunct All-America Football Conference, expanding to 13 clubs.
In the 1950s, pro football finally earned its place as a major sport. The NFL embraced television, giving Americans nationwide a chance to follow stars like Bobby Layne, Paul Hornung and Johnny Unitas. The 1958 NFL championship in New York -- considered by many to be the most-important game in the rise of the NFL -- drew record TV viewership and made national celebrities out of Unitas and his Baltimore Colts teammates.
The rise of professional football was so fast that by the mid-'60s, it had surpassed baseball as Americans' favorite spectator sport in some surveys. As more people wanted to cash in on this surge of popularity than the NFL could accommodate, a rival league, the American Football League (AFL), was founded in 1960.
The AFL introduced features that the NFL did not have, such as wider-open passing offenses, flashier uniforms with players' names on their jerseys, and an official clock visible to fans so that they knew the time remaining in a period (the NFL kept time by a game referee's watch, and only periodically announced the actual time). The newer league also secured itself financially after it established the precedents for gate and television revenue sharing between all of its teams, and network television broadcasts all of its games.
The AFL also forced the NFL to expand in order to compete: The Dallas Cowboys were created to drive the AFL's Dallas Texans out of business; the Minnesota Vikings were the NFL franchise given to Max Winter for abandoning the AFL; and the Atlanta Falcons franchise went to Rankin Smith to dissuade him from purchasing the AFL's Miami Dolphins. It is most likely that if the AFL had never existed, neither would have the Cowboys, the Vikings, or the Falcons.
The ensuing costly war for players between the NFL and AFL almost derailed the sport's ascent. By 1966, the leagues agreed to merge as of the 1970 season. The ten AFL teams joined three existing NFL teams to form the NFL's American Football Conference. The remaining 13 NFL teams became the National Football Conference. Another result of the merger was the creation of an AFL-NFL Championship game that for four years determined the so-called "World Championship of Professional Football". After the merger, the then-renamed Super Bowl became the NFL's championship game.
In the 1970s and '80s, the NFL solidified its dominance as America's top spectator sport and its important role in American culture. The Super Bowl became an unofficial national holiday and the top-rated TV program most years. Monday Night Football, which first aired in 1970 brought in high ratings by mixing sports and entertainment. Rules changes in the late '70s ensured a fast-paced game with lots of passing to attract the casual fan.
The founding of the United States Football League in the early '80s was the biggest challenge to the NFL in the post-merger era. The USFL was a well-financed competitor with big-name players and a national television contract. However, the USFL failed to make money and folded after three years.
In recent years, the NFL has expanded into new markets and ventures. In 1991, the league formed the World League of American Football, (now NFL Europe), a developmental league now with teams in Germany and the Netherlands. The league played a regular-season NFL game in Mexico City in 2005 and intends to play more such games in other countries. In 2003, the NFL lauched its own cable-television channel, the NFL Network. |
