Professional gridiron football

• 1. Origins And Early Leagues

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  In 1892, Pudge Heffelfinger signed a contract for $500 to play for the Allegheny Athletic Association against the Pittsburgh Athletic Club. This payment marked the first recorded instance of an American football player receiving pay for playing. The sum was enormous by the standards of that era, yet both players denied any money ever changed hands for decades afterward. A week later, Ben "Sport" Donnelly accepted a $250 contract with the same team. These early payments were often under-the-table arrangements designed to cover expenses while maintaining the appearance of amateur status. John Brallier became the first open professional when he took $10 to play for the Latrobe Athletic Association. Latrobe soon became the first all-professional club in existence. William Chase Temple assumed ownership of the Duquesne Country and Athletic Club around 1898 or 1899, becoming the first man to directly bankroll a football team himself. Throughout the 1890s, the Western Pennsylvania Professional Football Circuit operated as the de facto major league for football in the United States. It functioned not as a formal organization but as an informal group of teams willing to play one another. The oldest existing professional football club is the Arizona Cardinals, which has operated near-continuously since 1913. Their history traces back to a team that played from 1898 to 1906 on Racine Street in Chicago. The Watertown Red & Black remains the oldest semi-professional club still in operation, tracing its roots to 1896.

• 2. The NFL Formation Era

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  In 1920, teams from the Ohio League organized to form the American Professional Football Conference. Two months later, they added teams from other regional circuits and renamed it the American Professional Football Association. A showcase game between Canton and Buffalo took place at the Polo Grounds in New York City in December 1920. The Akron Pros held the best record in 1920, while the Chicago Staleys were named champions in 1921 despite controversy. In 1922, the APFA changed its name to the National Football League. The league declared champions based solely on having the best record through 1932. No set schedules existed during this period, and teams played varying numbers of games against college or amateur opponents. Confusion peaked in 1925 when newspapers hailed the Pottsville Maroons as champions after defeating the Chicago Cardinals on December 6. The league suspended the Maroons franchise amid a scramble by other teams to add extra games. Smaller cities abandoned top-level pro football while larger markets like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia saw teams take root. George Preston Marshall owned the Boston Braves and would exert major positive and negative influences on the league. He moved his franchise to Washington, D.C., renaming them the Redskins in 1936. Marshall introduced the marching band and team songs to professional football but also refused to have black players on his team. His influence resulted in the entire NFL excluding blacks after 1934. NBC broadcast the first-ever televised professional football game from Ebbets Field on the 22nd of October 1939. Two fixed monochrome iconoscope cameras captured the contest between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Eagles with a single play-by-play commentator named Skip Walz.

• 3. Rivalries And Mergers

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  In 1926, teams from nine cities formed the first American Football League to compete directly with the NFL. Red Grange of the Yankees served as the major attraction for this new league. It folded after just one year, with the Yankees being absorbed into the NFL. A second American Football League emerged in 1936 with six teams including another New York Yankees squad. The Cleveland Rams joined this league before jumping to the NFL in its second year. They were replaced by the Los Angeles Bulldogs, which featured stars like quarterback Harry Newman and end Bill Moore. This league folded after the 1937 season. In 1940, a third attempt at an American Football League occurred with five franchises. The onset of World War II dried up player sources, causing the new league to collapse. The Pacific Coast Professional Football League began operation in 1940 as the first professional league on the West Coast. It operated continuously through World War II and embraced black talent that had been blacklisted from the NFL since the 1930s. The PCPFL folded in 1948 following declining attendance and the arrival of the NFL in Los Angeles. An All-America Football Conference formed in 1946 and posed a serious challenge to the NFL. Paul Brown coached the Cleveland Browns, who won the league's championship every year of its existence. Marion Motley, Otto Graham, Lou Groza, Elroy "Crazylegs" Hirsch, and Y. A. Tittle starred for these teams. The AAFC became the first modern professional football team to sign black players while the NFL remained segregated. By 1949, rising costs forced the league to agree to a merger with the NFL. Only the Browns, 49ers, and Colts were admitted to the established league. The Buffalo Bills drew good crowds but their franchise was distributed among other NFL teams after the merger. In 1958, the Baltimore Colts defeated the New York Giants 23, 17 in professional football's first sudden-death championship game. They repeated this victory against the same team in 1959 by a score of 31, 16. By the start of the 1960s, Texas oilmen Lamar Hunt and Bud Adams formed the fourth American Football League. The AFL started by signing half of the NFL's 1960 first-round draft choices including Billy Cannon of the Houston Oilers. Hank Stram, Sid Gillman, and Lou Saban served as future Hall of Fame coaches within the new league. The AFL introduced official scoreboard clocks, player names on jerseys, and the two-point PAT conversion. ABC and the AFL introduced moving on-field cameras and were the first to have players miked during broadcast games. Tired of raids on players and escalating salaries, certain NFL owners secretly approached AFL principals seeking a merger in the mid-1960s. The merger was agreed to in 1966 with a championship game to be played between league titlists. A merged schedule began with the 1970 season when existing TV contracts could be reworked.

• 4. Minor League Experiments

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  The United Football League lasted from 1961 to 1964 and was concentrated in the Midwest. In 1962 it was eclipsed by the Atlantic Coast Football League run by the Rosentover family. When the UFL folded, two new leagues formed: the Professional Football League of America running from 1965 to 1967 and the Continental Football League operating from 1965 to 1969. The ContFL had major-league aspirations while the ACFL functioned as a developmental league allowing teams to become farm teams for the AFL and NFL. The Hartford Knights served as a farm team to the Buffalo Bills within the ACFL. Ken Stabler, Don Jonas, Johnnie Walton, and Sam Wyche went on to NFL and CFL stardom after playing in the ContFL. The ACFL produced significant talent including Marvin Hubbard, Jim Corcoran, and Patricia Palinkas, who became the first female professional football player. The World Football League successfully lured several NFL stars to its upstart league in 1974 but collapsed midway through the 1975 season due to financial problems. The Memphis Southmen made an unsuccessful bid to join the NFL and took deposits for season tickets before filing lawsuits. The Birmingham Vulcans collected petition signatures to show support but never advanced further than Memphis. In 1983, the United States Football League emerged as the most significant challenger to the NFL since the American Football League. The USFL played in the spring to avoid direct competition with the NFL and college ball. Deep-pocketed owners began luring top talent like Herschel Walker to the USFL with high salaries. Donald Trump owned the New Jersey Generals and led a coalition that sought to take the NFL head-to-head with a fall schedule. The USFL pinned hopes on an anti-trust lawsuit against the NFL which it won but received only $3 in damages. Many members of prolific draft classes from 1983 through 1985 played in the USFL and went on to have strong careers in the NFL and CFL. Steve Young, Jim Kelly, Doug Williams, Bobby Hebert, and Doug Flutie are examples of players who developed through this league. Immediately after the USFL suspended operations in 1986, James F. "Jim" Foster launched the Arena Football League in 1987. The AFL began its 24th season in 2011 and was the second longest running professional football league ever in the United States. A minor league called AF2 ran for 10 seasons from 2000 to 2009. The current version of the Arena Football League is technically the second iteration; the first collapsed under bankruptcy after the 2008 season. From a high of 18 teams in 2011, the second Arena Football League steadily shrunk until bottoming out at four teams in 2018 before folding again after its 2019 season.

• 5. Broadcasting And Revenue Models

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  Television coverage of the league was spotty during the 1950s with some teams starting individual arrangements with the Dumont Network and NBC. CBS began to televise selected NFL regular season games in 1956 but there was no league-wide national television contract. In 1962, the NFL emulated the junior league by arranging its own league-wide national television contract with CBS. Late in the sixties, the NFL began recognizing the wide talent pool the AFL had tapped in small and predominantly black colleges. Tired of raids on players and escalating salaries, certain NFL owners secretly approached AFL principals seeking a merger in the mid-1960s. The merger was agreed to in 1966 with a championship game to be played between league titlists. A merged schedule began with the 1970 season when existing TV contracts could be reworked. Monday Night Football originally broadcast on ABC beginning with the 1970 season moved to ESPN in 2006. All American Football League records and statistics were accepted by the merged league as equivalent to pre-merger NFL records. In 1994, Fox Broadcasting Company set the tone for broadcast rights to the NFL when it outbid CBS for the right to air NFC games with an unheard-of bid of US$395,000,000. This brought total broadcast rights fees for the league to over US$1,000,000,000. In 1998, when CBS outbid NBC for the rights to the AFC, the total rights fees doubled to over US$2,000,000,000. The 2006 television contract expanded total annual broadcast rights to over US$3,000,000,000. The 2011 renewal of those rights pushed the annual total to nearly US$5,000,000,000. Between 2006 and 2022, networks paid the NFL nearly US$70,000,000,000, a total greater than the resale value of all thirty-two NFL teams combined. The NFL relies on television for nearly half of its revenue because the league only plays one game each week leaving fewer opportunities for ticket sales. NFL stadiums have among the highest per-game attendance thanks to large stadium capacities. Figures are exceeded or matched by some major college football teams and by the NASCAR Sprint Cup both of which are also weekly events. The expense of the game makes the cost highly prohibitive as it has the largest rosters of any professional sport. In Canada where the threat of competing sports leagues is far less the CFL opts instead for an exclusive contract with TSN available only by subscription to a cable or satellite service. The CFL on TSN exclusive contract began in 2008; previously like the NFL it split its broadcasts up between two providers.

• 6. Canadian Football Development

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  The Burnside Rules were adopted in 1905 while the forward pass was adopted in 1929 after significant pressure from American coaches. The touchdown remained worth five points until 1956 when it changed mainly due to Canadian pro football holding an American TV contract. Several relics of old rules remain including goal posts on the goal line, a 110-yard field, more liberal rules for use of the drop kick, and only three downs. By 1954 the IRFU and WIFU had gone professional thanks to an American television contract from NBC that paid the Big Four more than DuMont offered the NFL. This year marked the moment that began the modern era of Canadian professional football. The WIFU and IRFU incrementally merged into one league over the next several years creating the Canadian Football Council in 1956. They jointly separated from the Canadian Rugby Union in 1958 and began inter-union play in 1961. The CFL currently recognizes the 1958 season as its starting point. In a series of interleague matchups between the IRFU and the NFL in the 1950s and 1960s the NFL won all six matches. The Hamilton Tiger-Cats did win one game against an American pro team in 1961 but it was an American Football League team not an NFL team. The league attempted an American expansion in 1993 initially starting with the Sacramento Gold Miners who jumped more or less intact from the WLAF. By 1995 the CFL had five U.S. teams mostly based in the southern and western United States. Lack of respect from established Canadian teams poor attendance in most markets and inability to secure a television contract led to tens of millions of dollars in financial losses. The end of the American experiment came after the 1995 season. The Baltimore Stallions were the only American team to be both an on-field and off-field success and are the only U.S.-based team to ever win the Grey Cup. The current Alouettes arrived in Montréal in 1996 absorbing histories of two previous teams but disowning that of the team that formed its basis. The Ottawa Rough Riders folded in 1996 while the Ottawa Renegades existed from 2002 to 2005 before folding again. In 2014 the new Ottawa Redblacks began play at a drastically refurbished Frank Clair Stadium returning the league back to traditional nine teams. The league has resisted expanding beyond its current nine teams and has never moved a Canadian team from one city to another.

• 7. Player Recruitment Systems

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  The NFL currently draws almost all of its players directly from college football rather than minor leagues. College football recruits players from high school football with most potential stars receiving athletic scholarships to play. The source for the vast majority of professional football players is the Division I Bowl Subdivision. Most come from the five conferences with automatic bids into the College Football Playoff bowl games. Under current regulations players must be at least three years removed from high school graduation to qualify to play in the NFL. Because of these barriers to entry players who do not play college football have very few options for breaking into the league. The college football development system stems from the fact that American football originated at the college level unlike other sports that were products of independent clubs. Although ostensibly amateurs college athletes are compensated with five years of free undergraduate college education room and board for their time. First-time players enter professional football older more mature and more prepared for the professional game than players in other sports. The Canadian Football League has a special requirement that a minimum of half of each team's roster be composed of persons who were Canadian citizens at the time they first joined the league. Prior to 2014 restrictions were much tighter requiring the person also to be resident in Canada since childhood. Canadian Interuniversity Sport feeds players to the CFL to meet these quotas much as the NCAA does in the United States. The remaining half of the roster may be filled by either Canadians or by internationals formerly imports typically American players who play in the CFL. The NFL has recruited rugby union association football and Australian rules football players from other countries particularly those retired from competition in their home countries almost always as kickers and punters.