The city of New York was introduced to professional football on the same day that the city was introduced to the New York Giants. It was a clear, sunny October afternoon in 1925 when the Giants took the field to play against the Frankford Yellow Jackets. The Giants lost their home debut by the score of 14-0, but more importantly, the New York Giants and professional football had arrived. Harry Carson had just arrived in Honolulu Saturday night after a long journey from New Jersey when a youngster approached him and said, “Congratulations.” “I thought he was pulling my leg,” Carson said this morning. “I thought it was another one of those crank things.” Almost immediately, five or six other people approached Carson to offer their best wishes. So he turned on his cell phone and learned what his family, friends, fans and supporters had known for hours: Carson had been elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.Listed below are the Giants' offensive statistics,
Costa Rica tourism final scores, starting rosters and yearly results throughout the history of the franchise. Each year includes an in-depth showing of the Giants' offensive statistics recorded by the team and each player during that particular season. Quarter-by-quarter scoring is also provided. The National Football League (NFL) is the largest and most prestigious professional American football league, consisting of thirty-two teams from American cities and regions. The league's 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, labeled North, South, East, and West. During the league's regular season, each team plays sixteen games over a seventeen-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 twelve-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. Two weeks later, selected all-star players from both the AFC and NFC meet in the Pro Bowl, currently held in Honolulu, Hawaii. The NFL was formed in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association and adopted the name National Football League in 1922. The NFL is one of the most popular sports leagues in the United States, and has the highest per-game attendance of any domestic professional sports league in the world, drawing over 67,000 spectators per game for its most recently completed season in 2006The American Professional Football Association was founded in 1920 at a Hupmobile dealership in Canton, Ohio. Legendary athlete Jim Thorpe was elected president. It was the first league of American Football in the United States for which players were paid a salary to participate. The group of eleven 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 1920s. Teams entered and left the league frequently. Franchises included such colorful representatives as the Providence Steam Rollers, the Decatur Staleys, and the LaRue, Ohio 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 its popularity. By 1934 all of the small-town teams, with the exception of the Green Bay Packers, had moved to or been replaced by teams in big cities. One factor in the league's rising popularity was the institution of an annual championship game in 1933.
Main article: Black players in American professional football1933 was also the year that black players disappeared from the NFL, just after the acceptance into the league of Boston Braves owner George Preston Marshall,
Costa Rica real estatewho effectively dissuaded other NFL owners from employing black players until the mid-forties, and who kept blacks off his team (which eventually became the Washington Redskins) until he was forced to integrate by the Kennedy administration in 1962.[3]
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 second big-league sports franchise on the West Coast (second to the Seattle Metropolitans in the PCHA). In 1950, the NFL accepted three teams from the defunct All-America Football Conference, expanding to thirteen 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, Otto Graham, and Johnny Unitas. The 1958 NFL championship played in Yankee Stadium but blacked out by league policy in New York 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-1960s, it had surpassed baseball as Americans' favorite spectator sport in some surveys. When the NFL turned down Lamar Hunt's request to purchase either an existing or expansion NFL franchise, he formed the rival American Football League (AFL), in 1960. He encouraged, wheedled, and cajoled seven other like-minded men to form this new league. The group of the eight founders of the AFL teams was referred to as the "Foolish Club." One of them, fellow Texan Bud Adams of Houston, had likewise tried but failed to be granted an NFL franchise. Hunt's goal was to bring professional football to Texas and to acquire an NFL team for the Hunt family. The AFL filed an anti-trust lawsuit against the NFL in 1960, but this was dismissed in 1962.
The AFL introduced features that the NFL did not have, such as wider-open passing offenses, 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 of all of its games. While the NFL virtually ignored small and historically black colleges as a source of player talent, the AFL actively recruited from such schools and AFL teams installed blacks at positions from which they were tacitly excluded in the NFL, such as quarterback[1] and middle linebacker[2].
One of the seminal civil-rights actions of the 1960s was the boycott by AFL players of the 1964 (January 1965) AFL All-Star Game scheduled for New Orleans, after black players were refused service from cabbies and hotel staff there. The game was successfully moved to Houston. Even though they were AFL players who had accomplished this action, at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, there is a small exhibit detailing the integration of professional football. A brief video clip addresses the boycott and credits the players (and implicitly the National Football League, although at the time it had no involvement with the players) with changing two racial laws in New Orleans.
The AFL also forced the NFL to expand: The Dallas Cowboys were created to counter Hunt's AFL Dallas Texans franchise. The Texans moved the franchise to Kansas City as the Chiefs in 1963; 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.
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 thirteen 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.