nfl football

The National Football League (NFL) is the largest professional American football league in the world. It is an unincorporated 501(c)(6) association controlled by its members.[1] It was formed by eleven teams in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association (the league changed the name to American Professional Football League in 1921 and then settled on its current name in 1922). The league currently consists of thirty-two teams from American cities and regions, divided evenly into two conferences — the American Football Conference (AFC) and National Football Conference (NFC) — of four four-team divisions.
The regular season is a seventeen-week schedule during which each team has one bye week and plays sixteen games. This schedule includes six games against a team's divisional rivals, as well as several inter-division and inter-conference games. The season currently starts on the Thursday night in the first full week of September (the Thursday after Labor Day) and runs weekly to late December or early January.
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 championship game, known as the Super Bowl. This game is held at a pre-selected site which is usually a city that hosts an NFL team. The following week, selected all-star players from both the AFC and NFC meet in the Pro Bowl, held in Honolulu, Hawaii.
While baseball is known as America's "national pastime," football is the most popular sport in the United States. According to the Harris Poll, professional football moved ahead of baseball as the fans' favorite in 1965 and has remained America's favorite sport ever since. In a Harris sports poll done in 2008, the NFL was the favorite sport of nearly as many people (30 percent) as the combined total of the next four professional sports – baseball (fifteen percent), auto racing (ten percent), hockey (five percent) and men’s pro basketball (four percent), [2] Additionally, Football's American TV viewership ratings now surpass those of other sports.[3]
The NFL has the highest per-game attendance of any domestic professional sports league in the world, drawing over 67,000 spectators per game for each of its two most recently completed seasons, 2006[4] and 2007.[5] However, the NFL's overall attendance is only approximately 20% of that of Major League Baseball, due to MLB's much longer schedule (about 162+ gamesThe National Football League is a loose coalition of technically independent football teams from across the state of Ohio that had existed in some form since the 1890s. An unofficial "championship" was contested since 1903. "League" powerhouses included the Canton Bulldogs and the Massillon Tigers.
The American Professional Football Association was founded in 1920 at a Hupmobile dealership in Canton, Ohio. The eleven founding teams initially struck an agreement over player poaching and the declaration of an end-of-season champion. Legendary athlete Jim Thorpe of the Canton Bulldogs was elected president. Only four of the founding teams finished the 1920 schedule and the undefeated Akron Pros claimed the first championship. Membership of the league increased to 22 teams in 1921, but throughout the 1920s the membership was unstable and the league was not a major national sport.
Two charter members, the Chicago Cardinals (now the Arizona Cardinals) and the Decatur Staleys (now the Chicago Bears), are still in existence. The Green Bay Packers franchise (founded in 1919) is the oldest team not to change locations, but did not begin league play until 1921. The Indianapolis Colts franchise traces its history through several predecessors, including one of the league's founding teams (the Dayton Triangles), but is considered a separate franchise from those teams and was founded as the Baltimore Colts in 1953.
Early championships were awarded to the team with the best won-lost record, initially rather haphazardly, as some teams played more or fewer games than others, or scheduled games against non-league, amateur or collegiate teams. It was not until 1933 that an annual championship game was instituted. 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. An annual draft of college players was first held in 1936. It was during this era, however, that the NFL became segregated: there were no Black players in American professional football between 1933 and 1945. One prominent franchise, George Preston Marshall's Washington Redskins, remained all-white until forced to integrate by the Kennedy administration in 1962.[7]
College football was the bigger attraction, but by the end of World War II, pro football began to rival the college game for fans' attention. Rule changes and innovations such as the T formation led to a faster-paced, higher-scoring game. The league also expanded out of its eastern and midwestern cradle; in 1945, the Cleveland Rams moved to Los Angeles, becoming the first big-league sports franchise on the West Coast (not counting the various teams in ice hockey's PCHA, which was a rival to the NHL in the 1910s and 1920s). In 1950, the NFL accepted three teams from the defunct All-America Football Conference, expanding to thirteen clubs. In the 1950s, with the league broadcast on national television, pro football finally earned its place as a major sport.
In 1960, after being refused entry to the NFL as an owner, Lamar Hunt led seven other men (including another snubbed by the NFL, Bud Adams) to establish a rival major Professional Football league, the American Football League. Although other rival leagues had come and gone in the early years of Professional Football, the new AFL was able to capitalize on the ever-rising popularity of the sport. Hunt's initial goal was to bring major-league Professional Football to Texas, which was home to two of the new teams. The AFL secured a television contract with ABC and filed an anti-trust lawsuit against the NFL in 1960, but this was dismissed in 1962. While the NFL had no league-wide television profit-sharing, and home teams kept all gate receipts, the American Football League led the way in sharing of television and gate revenues across its franchises, thus securing itself financially.
A number of innovations distinguished the AFL and helped it maintain its legitimate rivalry to the NFL. A stadium game clock for the spectators (the NFL relied only on time announcements from the officials on the field), players' names on their jerseys, and a playing style geared to the attractive and flashy passing game. The AFL was inclusive of black players and actively recruited from colleges with black players historically shunned by the NFL. AFL teams further installed blacks at positions from which they were tacitly excluded in the NFL, such as quarterback[8] and middle linebacker.[9] In January 1965 there was a player boycott of the 1964 AFL All-Star Game in New Orleans, over discrimination of black players by some of the hotels and businesses in the city. This was a seminal civil-rights action and is commemorated at the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
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.
By the middle of the 1960s, competition for players, including separate college drafts, was driving up player salaries. In 1965, in the most high profile such contest and a major boost to the AFL, University of Alabama quarterback Joe Namath signed with the New York Jets in preference to the NFL's St. Louis Cardinals for a then-record $427,000. In 1966, the AFL Commissioner Al Davis embarked on a campaign to sign players away from the NFL, especially quarterbacks, but behind the scenes a number of team owners began action to end the detrimental rivalry.
In an agreement brokered by AFL founder Lamar Hunt and Dallas Cowboys General Manager Tex Schramm, the two leagues announced their merger deal on 8 June 1966. The leagues would henceforth hold a combined draft and an end-of-season title game between the two league champions (later known as the Super Bowl). Still another city received an NFL frachise thanks to the AFL, as New Orleans was awarded an NFL team after Louisiana's federal Congressmen pushed for the passage of Public Law 89-800, which permitted the merger and exempted the action from Anti-Trust restrictions. The monopoly that would be created needed to be legitimized by an act of Congress. In 1970, the leagues fully merged under the name National Football League and divided into two conferences of an equal number of teams. There was also a financial settlement, with the AFL paying $18 million over 20 years.
In the 1970s and 1980s, 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. Rule changes in the late 1970s 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 1980s 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. The USFL filed a successful anti-trust lawsuit against the NFL, but the remedies were minimal, and mismanagement (most notably, a planned move of its niche spring football season to a head-to-head competition in the fall) led to the league's collapse. However, like the AFL before it, the success of the USFL led directly to new NFL teams in Baltimore, Jacksonville, and Phoenix as well as the return of the Los Angeles Raiders to their original home city of Oakland.
In recent years, the NFL has expanded into new markets and ventures. In 1986, the league began holding a series of pre-season exhibition games, called American Bowls, held at international sites outside the United States. Then in 1991, the league formed the World League of American Football, later known as NFL Europe and still later as NFL Europa, a developmental league that had teams in Germany and the Netherlands when the NFL shut it down in June 2007. 2001 saw the rise of the XFL, an attempt by Vince McMahon and NBC, which had lost the NFL broadcast rights for that year, to compete with the league; the XFL folded after just one season. In 2003, the NFL launched its own cable-television channel, NFL Network.
The league played a regular-season NFL game in Mexico City in 2005. On October 28, 2007, a regular season game between the Miami Dolphins and the New York Giants was held outside of North America in Wembley Stadium, a 90,000-seat stadium in London. It was a financial success with nearly 40,000 tickets sold within 90 minutes of the start of sales,[10] and a game-day attendance of over 80,000. On October 26, 2008 the New Orleans Saints and San Diego Chargers will mark the NFL's return to Wembley Stadium.[11] Starting from the 2008-09 season , the Buffalo Bills will play an annual home game in Toronto's Rogers Centre[12].
On August 31, 2007, a story in USA Today unveiled the first changes to the league's shield logo since 1970, which will take effect with the 2008 season.[13] The redesign reduces the number of stars in the logo from 25 (which were found not to have a meaning beyond decorative) to eight (for each of the league's divisions), the logo's football repositioned in the manner of the Vince Lombardi Trophy, and the NFL letters in a straight serifed font (which resembles the current typeface used in other NFL logos). The redesign was created with television and digital media, along with clothing, in mind. The shield logo dates to the 1940s.