🏈 The NFL Turns 100 Years Old Today
On this day 100 years ago, the NFL was founded inside an Ohio car showroom. Take a stroll through the ups and downs of the most successful league in U.S. sports history.
Hello! Welcome to a special edition of Inside The Newsroom where today we’ll explore 100 years of the NFL! On this day 100 years ago, a deal was signed to form a professional football league of which would later become the National Football League, a brand that would become the most popular and successful ever created. We’ll explore every decade and all the ups and downs in between, starting with a famous meeting inside an Ohio car showroom on September 17, 1920… Enjoy 💯
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1920s
On September 17, 1920, 14 men gathered inside the Jordan and Hupmobile auto showroom in downtown Canton, Ohio, determined to strike a deal. By evening’s end, the group would form the American Professional Football Association, whose name would be changed to the National Football League two years later. At a time when college football reigned supreme, and the likes of Harvard and Princeton dominated its amateur competition, professional football was far from guaranteed to be a success. As owners of mostly Midwestern teams, the men sought to expand their reach.
The 14 original teams were the:
Akron Professionals (OH), Canton Bulldogs (OH), Cleveland Tigers (OH), Columbus Panhandles (OH), Dayton Triangles (OH), Chicago Tigers (IL), Decatur Staleys (IL), Racine Cardinals (IL — the Cardinals were based in Chicago but took the name of a local street), Rock Island Independents (IL), Hammond Pros (IN), Muncie Flyers (IN), Detroit Heralds (MI), Buffalo All-Americans (NY), Rochester Jeffersons (NY).
Only two of the original teams remain today: The Decatur Staleys moved to Chicago in 1921 and changed their name to the Bears a year later; the Cardinals left Chicago for St. Louis in 1959 and then relocated in Arizona in 1988.
1930s and 1940s
Initial excitement meant the number of teams ballooned to 22, but the financially weaker teams were soon eliminated, leaving just 10 teams heading into the new decade. In 1934, another decision was made that would be sewn into the league’s DNA forever: Black players were banned suddenly in an unwritten agreement of segregation between team owners, one that wouldn’t be fully broken until 1962. The ‘30s also saw the Boston Braves change their name to the Redskins, and then relocate to D.C. According to the book The Racist Redskins, owner George Marshall instigated the league’s segregation policy. When he died in 1969, he demanded his estate be used to found the Redskins Foundation, which was barred from spending money on “any purpose which supports or employs the principle of racial integration in any form”. A statue honoring Marshall outside RFK Stadium was removed two months ago.
As the NFL celebrated its 20th anniversary, it was clear it was here to stay, and helped morph football into one of America’s most popular sports. The increased attention led to players being required to wear helmets in 1943 (another topic that would come back to haunt the league). Until that point, helmets had merely been soft leather skull caps, but by the time they were mandatory, John T. Riddell had manufactured the first plastic helmet, the basis of what’s used by today’s players.
1950s
The 1950s was another busy decade that included the beginning of a decades-old battle between the league and its fans over the television blackout rule, which prevented games from being broadcast in the home team’s market as a way to protect stadium ticket revenue. A federal judge upheld the policy in 1953, but Congress passed a law in 1973 amending the rule to only black out games that hadn’t been sold out 72 hours in advance of kickoff. Since 2015, the NFL has dropped the policy on a year-by-year basis after a group of senators pushed for its suspension.
Also taking place at this time was the founding of the NFL Players Association, which would finally give players a say on issues such as pay and working conditions. The process of negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement every few years would lead to several strikes and a bitter relationship between players and owners that still exists. In 1957 the Cleveland Browns drafted Syracuse running back Jim Brown sixth overall, who would go onto have a memorable career on and off the field, ranking 11th overall in rushing yards while also becoming a leading activist. Brown founded the Negro Industrial and Economic Union, later called the Black Economic Union, but was dogged throughout his career by domestic abuse and assault accusations.
1960s and 1970s
As the NFL’s popularity continued to rise, another upstart league formed in direct competition to it, only this time, it would become part of the NFL for good. The American Football League launched in 1960 with eight teams: the Boston Patriots, Buffalo Bills, Houston Oilers, Titans of New York, Dallas Texans, Denver Broncos, Los Angeles Chargers and Oakland Raiders. Just 10 years later, the NFL and AFL merged into a single league, paving the way for the modern-day American and National Football Conferences.
Meanwhile the league’s segregationist era ended when wide receiver Bobby Mitchell signed with Washington to become the first black player on the last all-white team. Mitchell died earlier this year at the age of 84, and it wouldn’t be the last time the team from Washington would be at the centre of race relations. Elsewhere the first NFL game played on Christmas Day took place between Miami and Kansas City, a tradition that would later be taken over by the NBA. And a season later, the Dolphins went 17-0, the only perfect regular and postseason record in NFL history.
Bobby Mitchell, the first black football player for Washington
1980s and 1990s
The 1980s were dominated by more strikes after the labor stoppages of 1968, 1970 and 1974. Further deterioration of the relationship between players and owners took place in 1982 and 1987, but it would be 24 years before the next lockout, when the league stopped for 136 days in 2011, the longest in its history. More off-field headaches for the NFL came courtesy of another upstart, this time in the form of the United States Football League, but it would last just three seasons. In its final days, the USFL unsuccessfully sued the NFL on claims that the latter had established a monopoly of television broadcasting rights, which was led by none other than Donald Trump.
The ‘90s saw the launch of NFL Europe as a way to keep pace with the international presence of the NBA, NHL and MLB, three leagues whose sports were played around the world. The NFL’s international league would cease operations in 2007 after it generated a reported $30 million in annual losses and failed to produce a consistent pipeline of players. In 1994, the NFL implemented one of its most controversial decisions to date: the salary cap. To this day, the lack of guaranteed contracts in the NFL — multiple loopholes allow NFL teams to cut players without fulfilling contracts in their entirety — remains a contentious issue, especially for such a violent sport that’s been proven to cause brain damage, and especially when the rest of the big four leagues mostly guarantee players the full amount of money they sign for.
2000s
The new millennium saw the NFL usher in its most successful push for an audience outside of the U.S. In 2005, the first regular season game was held on foreign soil between Arizona and San Francisco in front of 103,000 fans in Mexico City. The NFL quickly expanded further ashore two seasons later, this time in London, ironically the same year its NFL Europe folded. The London project has been so successful that four games were scheduled this season before being cancelled due to Covid-19.
The NFL’s recent expansion has been overseen by commissioner Roger Goodell, who took over from Paul Tagliabue in 2006. Goodell’s tenure has been plagued with endless controversy involving player health, domestic violence and social injustice that will forever alter the game’s image. Elsewhere in the decade were another two upstart leagues, this time in the form of the United Football League and the XFL, the latter being founded by WWE owner Vince McMahon, but folded after a single season due to a reported $35 million loss. McMahon and the XFL returned in 2020, but this time lasted just five weeks, in part because of Covid-19, and filed for bankruptcy, perhaps for the last time.
Roger Goodell 👇
2010s
Goodell’s first full decade in charge started terribly. A failure to reach a new CBA with the NFLPA meant the 2010 season had no salary cap, which led to a 136-day strike the following year. Arguably the heaviest bombshell to rock the NFL in its 100-year history came in 2012 when Nigerian pathologist Bennet Omalu discovered what he coined Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) in dozens of deceased NFL players — CTE is a degenerative brain disease found in athletes, military veterans, and others with a history of repetitive brain trauma. Initially ignored by the NFL, the entire world took note in 2013 when ESPN journalists and brothers Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru published the book League of Denial, which documented the long history of NFL players sustaining concussions and the league burying evidence linking football with long-term brain damage. The book was adapted into the Concussion movie starring Will Smith in 2015.
League of Denial PBS Documentary
While the CTE fire raged, another blaze started in 2014 when former Baltimore Ravens star running back Ray Rice knocked his then-fiancée out cold in an Atlantic City hotel elevator. Despite Rice telling Goodell what happened and multiple sources saying Goodell saw the security footage, Goodell suspended Rice just two games, and it was only after the video was made public that he banned Rice indefinitely. As I reported for The Guardian, the NFL has consistently punished players more harshly for taking performance-enhancing drugs than for domestic violence.
Ray Rice Knocks Out His Fiancée
Somehow Goodell, who reportedly requested a $50 million annual salary from the NFL, continued on into 2016 where things turned further south. During a preseason game on August 26, former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat for the national anthem to protest police brutality, and then knelt a week later. Kaepernick’s actions caused uproar within the game, but he was elevated to an unthinkable status the following season when newly-elected President Trump waded into the storm and tweeted that any player who failed to stand for the anthem would be fired. The New York Times made an excellent timeline of events, so we’ll head into our final section where the social and racial injustices Kaepernick first raised more than four years ago appear to be only just getting started…
2020 and Beyond
Like for most sports leagues, the NFL’s future has taken a huge hit this year due to Covid-19. The new season got underway on time last weekend, but the lack of fans in stadiums will create a massive financial hole going forward. Then there’s the ongoing efforts to eliminate racial injustice from society, one that the NFL has repeatedly fallen on the wrong side of history, and has only just begun to move to the middle. After ‘blackballing’ Kaepernick since 2016, the NFL had the audacity to include him in their latest promo video claiming it supports his cause. Meanwhile current owner of the team from Washington Dan Snyder, who bought the team in 1999, has finally accepted his team’s nickname is racist, and has agreed to change it, and is also facing a slew of sexual abuse claims from within his own organization.
Then there’s perhaps the largest thorn in the NFL’s side going forward: Between 2008 and 2019, the number of youths playing tackle football aged 6 to 18 fell by a quarter to less than 1.9 million, in large part due to parents realizing the dangers of the game. Sooner rather than later, if it has not done so already, the NFL will need to fix the CTE problem once and for all, otherwise it might not even exist in another 100 years.
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