Professional Football Researchers Association

• 1. Introduction

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  The Professional Football Researchers Association was founded on the 22nd of June, 1979, in Canton, Ohio, the same city that would later become home to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Writer and historian Bob Carroll gathered six fellow researchers that day, and together they created an organization built around a single conviction: that the full story of professional American football had not yet been told, and that telling it would take serious, sustained work.

  Who were these early heroes of the game who never made it into any hall? What records existed only on crumbling paper, in forgotten filing cabinets, in the memories of aging players? And what would it take to reconstruct a sport's history from the ground up, decade by decade, game by game? Those questions have driven the PFRA ever since that founding meeting in Canton.

• 2. The Coffin Corner

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  Six times a year, the PFRA sends its members a magazine called The Coffin Corner, a bimonthly publication entirely devoted to topics in professional football history. What sets it apart from a typical academic journal is its open-door policy for contributors. PFRA members publish their findings regardless of prior writing experience, and editors step in anonymously to help first-time contributors shape their narratives for print.

  The annual membership fee of $35.00 covers a subscription to all six issues, along with access to a members-only section of the PFRA website that houses detailed research across a wide range of professional football subjects. For that price, a new member gains entry not just to a magazine, but to a community of researchers who are actively filling in the gaps of the historical record.

• 3. Books and McFarland

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  In partnership with the publisher McFarland and Company, the PFRA has built a book series called "Great Teams in Pro Football History," edited by the organization's president George Bozeka. Individual members volunteer to write each chapter, covering players, coaching staff, the preseason, regular season, postseason, and other dimensions of a team's complete season. The 1966 Green Bay Packers: Profiles of Vince Lombardi's Super Bowl I Champions appeared in 2016, profiling the team that won the first-ever Super Bowl under coach Vince Lombardi.

  The 1958 Baltimore Colts: Profiles of the NFL's First Sudden Death Champions followed in 2018, examining the team whose dramatic overtime championship game is often credited with turning professional football into a national phenomenon. A book about the 1951 Los Angeles Rams season was released in 2022, and a fourth volume covering the 1964 Buffalo Bills season was planned to follow in 2024.

• 4. Committees at Work

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  Behind the publications lies a network of committees that conduct the actual research, each chaired by a named PFRA member and each targeting a specific layer of football's historical record. The Linescore Committee, chaired by Gary Selby, is working to compile linescores for every professional game played since 1920. The Gamebooks Committee, co-chaired by Giovanni Malaty and Rupert Patrick, is trying to collect play-by-play accounts for every game in NFL history, a project the organization describes as arduous given how difficult it is to track down surviving documents.

  The Pre-NFL Pro Football Committee reaches even further back, researching all professional play before 1920, including leagues like the Ohio League, the Western Pennsylvania Professional Football Circuit, the Chicago and Philadelphia circuits, and the New York Pro Football League. The Biography Committee, co-chaired by Greg Tranter, Jeffrey J. Miller, and George Bozeka, is tasked with writing biographies of every NFL player. The Education Committee, chaired by Neal Golden, collects problems involving football mathematics and strategy for use in schools.

• 5. The Hall of Very Good

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  Since 2003, the PFRA has published an annual list it calls the Hall of Very Good, identifying players, coaches, and contributors whom the organization judges to be among the best in professional football history who have not yet been inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton. An asterisk beside a name signals that the player has since been inducted. The 2003 class included Gino Cappelletti, Pat Fischer, and Al Wistert, alongside several names who would eventually receive the Canton call, among them Carl Eller, Benny Friedman, Gene Hickerson, Jerry Kramer, Johnny Robinson, Mac Speedie, and Mick Tingelhoff.

  The list functions as an ongoing argument about football's historical memory, a running record of omissions that the sport's official institutions have not yet addressed. By 2025 the Hall of Very Good had recognized hundreds of figures across more than two decades of annual selections, from Lyle Alzado in 2018 to Wilber Marshall and Nate Newton in 2025. Each asterisk that appears beside a name represents a case the PFRA considers closed, a gap in the official record that has finally been filled.

• 6. Awards for Research

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  The PFRA gives out two major awards each year. The Ralph Hay Award, named after the Canton Bulldogs owner whose Hupmobile automobile showroom hosted the NFL's very first organizational meeting, goes to a researcher for lifetime achievement in pro football historiography. The first Ralph Hay Award on record was given in 1988 to David Neft, and the organization's founder Bob Carroll received the award in 2009, thirty years after he helped start the organization.

  The Nelson Ross Award honors outstanding achievement in a specific work of football research or writing. Past winners span books covering everything from the early professional game in Ohio to the 1987 NFL players' strike, from the life of Jim Thorpe to the birth of the AFL. The 2022 Nelson Ross Award went to Lee Elder for the book Coach George Allen: A Football Life, while the same year the Ralph Hay Award was presented to George Bozeka, the current president who also edits the "Great Teams" book series.