User:11plus/sandboxNFL
186s–1920: Before the NFL
[edit]Foundation of the game and college football
[edit]American football traces it's origins to rugby football and association football
Professionalims and early leagues
[edit]In the late 1890s, american college football became a more widely spectated sport. At the time, paying players was regarded as unsporting and dishonorable. Nonetheless, the Allegheny Athletic Association of the Western Pennsylvania Professional Football Circuit hired former Yale All-American guard Pudge Heffelfinger and payed him $500 on november 12, 1892, in a game against the Pittsburgh Athletic Club.
1920-1950: Foundation of the NFL
[edit]
The league was formally founded on August 20, 1920, at a Hupmobile dealership in Canton, Ohio, as the American Professional Football Conference (APFC). It's four founding members were drawn from the Ohio League. The Akron Pros, Dayton Triangles, Canton Bulldogs and Cleveland Tigers agreed on a six-game schedule to play each other at home-and-away. A second meeting was held on September 17, electing Jim Thorpe as its first president and renaming itself to the American Professional Football Association. The league expanded to fourteen teams, the four Ohio based franchises and a fifth from the state, the Columbus Panhandles. Four teams from Illinois (Chicago Cardinals and Chicago Tigers, Decatur Staleys, and Rock Island Independents), two from Indiana (Hammond Pros and Muncie Flyers), two from New York (Buffalo All-Americans and Rochester Jeffersons), and the Detroit Heralds from Michigan.
Scheduling was left up to each team. Teams regurlarly played against non APFA teams and no records were kept. The leagues first season began on September 20, 1920, with the non-APFA team, the St. Paul Ideals suffering a blowout against the Rock Island Independents, suffering a 48–0 loss. The first game between league members was played on October 3, when the Dayton Triangles beat the Columbus Panhandles 14–0. Championship games were not established until 1932, instead the league members met and voted for a winner. Since the Akron Pros, won all games against league members, they were awarded the Brunswick-Balke-Collender Cup on April 30, 1921. Following the vote, the league reorganized. Joseph Carr of the Columbus Panhandles became president and its headquarters were moved to Columbus, Ohio. The league drafted a constitution
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 New York Football Giants (now known as New York Giants) joined in 1925, followed by the Portsmouth Spartans in 1930, who relocated to Detroit in 1934 to become the Lions.[1] The heritage of the Indianapolis Colts includes several predecessors, including one of the league's founding teams, the Dayton Triangles. However, both the Colts and the NFL recognize the Colts as a separate franchise which was founded as the Baltimore Colts in 1953. Although the original NFL teams representing Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago and Detroit no longer exist, replacement franchises have since been established for those cities.
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; this led to the title being decided on a tiebreaker in 1921, a disputed title in 1925, and the scheduling of an impromptu indoor playoff game in 1932. The lack of a firm league structure meant that numerous teams regularly were added and removed from the league each year; a franchise owner might trade in his franchise in one city for one in another (as was the case with the Canton Bulldogs, Cleveland Bulldogs and Detroit Wolverines), and if a larger-market or more established team wanted a player on a smaller-market upstart, it could buy out the team outright and fold it to gain rights to that player, as the New York Giants did to the Wolverines in 1928 to get Benny Friedman.
In league meetings prior to the 1933 season, three new teams, the Pirates, the Cincinnati Reds, and the Eagles, were admitted to the NFL.[2][3] Ten teams were then in the NFL and, at George Preston Marshall's urging, with Halas' support, the NFL was reorganized into an Eastern Division and a Western Division. In the Eastern Division were the Philadelphia Eagles, Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Giants, Boston Redskins (now the Washington Commanders), and the Pittsburgh Pirates (now the Pittsburgh Steelers). In the Western Division were the Chicago Bears, Portsmouth Spartans, Chicago Cardinals, Green Bay Packers, and the Cincinnati Reds. Furthermore, the two owners convinced the league to have the two division winners meet in an NFL Championship Game.[4]
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, and even Green Bay had begun to play a portion of its home schedule in much larger Milwaukee for more support (a practice they continued well into the 1990s). In 1941, the corporate headquarters moved from Columbus, Ohio, to Chicago. During the early years of the league, rather than coming up with original team names, many NFL teams simply chose the name of the Major League Baseball team in the same city. Thus, the Pittsburgh Steelers were the "Pittsburgh Pirates" for the first seven years of existence and other teams such as the Brooklyn Dodgers, Cleveland Indians, Cincinnati Reds, Detroit Tigers, New York Yankees, Washington Senators, and Buffalo Bisons all represented the NFL at one time or another,[5] with the NFL's New York Giants even outlasting their baseball counterpart in New York City, as the baseball Giants moved to San Francisco following the 1957 season. The NFL's Boston Braves (est. 1932) moved from Braves Field to Fenway Park in 1933, where they changed their name to the Boston Redskins to echo that of their Fenway landlords, the Red Sox, while retaining an American Indian theme.
Since 2006: Roger Godell
[edit]American businessman Roger Godell
References
[edit]- ^ Footballresearch Archived October 13, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Note: Willis writes their entrance was approved on July 8, 1933. Willis, 2010, p. 310–311.
- ^ Coenen, 2005, p. 237.
- ^ Lyons, 2010 pg. 50
- ^ "From humble beginnings grew traditional powers". StarTribune.com. 2011-01-30. Retrieved 2017-08-23.