Professional gridiron football
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In the United States and Canada, the term professional football includes the professional forms of American and Canadian gridiron football. In common usage, it refers to former and existing major football leagues in either country. Currently, there are multiple professional football leagues in North America: the two longest-running leagues are the National Football League (NFL) in the U.S, and the Canadian Football League (CFL) in Canada. American football leagues have existed in Europe since the late 1970s, with competitive leagues all over Europe hiring American Imports to strengthen rosters. The Austrian Football League and German Football League top division are known as the best leagues in Europe. The Japan X-League is also a strong league that has a long history since 1971. The NFL has existed continuously since being so named in 1922.
The best American football players are among the highest paid athletes in the world, with the highest salaries reaching tens of millions of dollars per year.[1][2]
Organization
Compared to the other
In North America, the top level of professional football is the National Football League, with the Canadian Football League second to the NFL in prominence and pay grade. Despite the much lower level of pay, the CFL has greater popularity in Canada because of its long history in the country, the NFL's limited presence in Canada, and a general environment of Canadian cultural protectionism.
Up until the 1970s, semiprofessional and minor football leagues would often develop lower end players into professional prospects. Though there are still numerous teams at the semi-pro level in both the United States and Canada, they have mostly dropped to regional amateur status, and they no longer develop professional prospects, in part due to the rise of indoor football.
Though Japan (X-League) and Europe (Austrian Football League and German Football League) have professional football leagues composed primarily of national citizens along with a limited number of American Imports, these leagues are generally of a lower level of play than the Western Hemisphere counterparts and have only recently begun contributing players to the NFL on a regular basis.
Player development
Professional football is considered the highest level of competition in gridiron football. Whereas most of the other major sports leagues draw their players from the minor leagues, the NFL currently draws almost all of its players directly from
The college football development system is a unique feature in the professional football system, stemming from the fact that the game of 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 (more than enough time to pursue a bachelor's degree), room and board for their time. As a result of the college system, first-time players (rookies) 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, the restrictions were much tighter in that the person also had to be resident in Canada since childhood). As such,
The NFL has, over the course of its history, recruited rugby union, association football and Australian rules football players from other countries (particularly those who are retired from competition in their home countries) to play in the league, almost always as kickers and punters.
Broadcasting
Broadcasting is an integral part of professional football. Not only does it provide the sport with exposure to an audience wider than just the audience attending at the stadium, but it can also provide revenue in the form of rights fees.
The NFL relies on television for nearly half of its revenue; this is in part because the league only plays one game each week, leaving fewer opportunities for ticket sales than the other professional sports (in turn, however, NFL stadiums have among the highest per-game attendance thanks to large stadium capacities, figures only exceeded or matched by some of the major college football teams and by the
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, to carry all of the league's games. The CFL on TSN exclusive contract began in 2008; previously, like the NFL, it split its broadcasts up between two providers.
Other leagues have found it much more difficult to find an outlet on American television, much less one that pays a rights fee large enough to make it worthwhile. One of the reasons for the
Virtually all professional football teams broadcast at least some of their games on local radio.
Rules
The
U.S. professional football history
The first professional football player
Professional football evolved from amateur "club" football, played by general interest
The first record of an American football player receiving "pay for play" came in 1892 with Pudge Heffelfinger's $500 contract to play in a game for the Allegheny Athletic Association against the Pittsburgh Athletic Club, with the second being Ben "Sport" Donnelly's $250 contract to play for the same team the next week; the sums were very large by the standards of the day, and like most payment arrangements, both players denied any payment ever took place for much of their lives. For several years afterwards, individual players and sometimes entire teams received compensation to play in "barnstorming" type games without rigid schedules and against a variety of opponents. John Brallier became the first open professional after accepting $10 to play for the Latrobe Athletic Association; Latrobe became the first all-professional club soon after. William Chase Temple would become the first man to directly bankroll a football team himself when he assumed "ownership" of the Duquesne Country and Athletic Club in either 1898 or 1899. Throughout the 1890s, the Western Pennsylvania Professional Football Circuit would act as the de facto major league (and, in fact, the only professional circuit) for football in the United States; it, like many of its successors, was not a "league" in the modern sense of a formalized organization, but rather an informal group of teams in free association with each other and any other team willing to play them.
The oldest existing professional football club is the Arizona Cardinals, a current member of the National Football League. The Cardinals organization, which was originally based on Racine Street in Chicago, has operated near-continuously since 1913, but counts an earlier team that played from 1898 to 1906 as part of its history. The Watertown Red & Black is the oldest semi-professional club that is still in operation, tracing its history to 1896.[3]
Early leagues: 1902–1919
While the practice of professional and semi-pro teams playing college and amateur teams was common in the 1890s, the
The next step in pro football stemmed from an unusual source: baseball. Teams from each championship city (Pittsburgh and Philadelphia), three in all, received support from baseball teams in their cities and formed the
An agreement between the baseball leagues to form modern
Another bidding war was sparked in 1915, when a revived Bulldogs signed multi-sport athletic superstar
American Professional Football Association: 1920–1921
A year after the Buffalo Prospects won the first Professional Football championship game, teams from the Ohio League organized to form the new American Professional Football Conference; two months later, adding teams from the other regional circuits surrounding Ohio, the league changed its name to the
National Football League: 1922–1932
In 1922, the APFA changed its name to the National Football League. While the Ohio League mostly ceased to exist after the foundation of the NFL (other than a few independent teams such as the Ironton Tanks and the pre-NFL Portsmouth Spartans), the other regional leagues continued. The New York league continued throughout the 1920s, outlasting many of the teams that it had contributed to the NFL, albeit without championships. Western Pennsylvania's league lasted until 1940. 1924 saw the foundation of eastern Pennsylvania's Anthracite League, the last regional "major league." The Anthracite League was won by the Pottsville Maroons, who, after one year (and winning the league title), jumped to the NFL. The Anthracite League remanifested itself as the Eastern League of Professional Football, an explicitly minor league, in 1926 and 1927.
From 1922 through 1932, the NFL still declared as champions the team with the best record. There were no set schedules, and each team did not play the same number of games: some teams played against college or other amateur teams. The confusion reached a peak in 1925, when the aforementioned Maroons were hailed as the NFL champions by several newspapers after Pottsville defeated the Chicago Cardinals on December 6, even though there were still two weeks left in the season. This led to other teams scrambling to add extra games, including the
First American Football League: 1926
In 1926, teams from nine cities ranging from the
National Football League: 1933–1945
In 1933, the league divided into the Eastern and Western divisions, and finally instituted a championship game between the division winners. Each team played from 10 to 13 games per season during this period, and by 1945, the league had two five-team divisions, with each team playing a 10-game regular season schedule. In 1936, to select and assign graduating college players to particular Pro teams, the first Professional Football '
In 1939, NBC broadcast the first-ever televised Professional Football game from Ebbets Field, an October 22 contest between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Eagles. There were two fixed monochrome iconoscope cameras and a single play-by-play commentator, Skip Walz.
Although the NFL as a whole continued to play through World War II, the schedule was reduced, rosters were seriously impacted, and the Steelers were forced to merge operations with other NFL teams in 1943 and 1944, while the Cleveland Rams were forced to suspend operations in 1943.
Second American Football League: 1936–1937
In 1936, a second
Also in 1936, the
Third American Football League: 1940–1941
Still another try at an American Football League was made in 1940, with five franchises, including a third New York Yankees team. The league was the first major Professional Football league to complete a double round robin schedule, in which each team played each other twice. The onset of World War II and the resultant draft dried up the source of players for professional football and the new league did not have enough resources to continue.
Also forming in 1940 was the
All-America Football Conference: 1946–1949
A year after World War II, another new Professional Football league was formed – the
Paul Brown made many innovations to the game on and off the field, including year-round coaching staffs, precision pass patterns, face masks, and the use of "messenger guards". He was the first coach to film the opposition and break down those game films in a classroom setting, also attributed to him. While the NFL was still segregated, the AAFC's Browns became the first modern Professional Football team to sign black players.
Although many of its teams outdrew NFL teams, by 1949 the AAFC's costs had risen so steeply that the league agreed to a 'merger' with the NFL. It was more of a 'swallowing' of the AAFC, with only the Browns, 49ers, and Colts being admitted to the established league, even though the Buffalo Bills drew good crowds and raised funds from citizens to back the franchise. Players from the Bills and the other AAFC teams not 'merged' were distributed among the NFL teams. Motley, Graham, Groza, Hirsch and Tittle all starred in the NFL after the 'merger'.
Of the three AAFC teams that joined the NFL:
- The Colts lasted only one year in the NFL; the second Baltimore Colts were officially a new franchise launched in 1953, though tracing their history through a series of teams dating back to 1919, before the formation of the NFL.
- The Browns remained in Cleveland until their controversial move to Baltimore, becoming the Baltimore Ravens, for the 1996 season. The controversy was ultimately settled by granting Cleveland a new franchise, which began play in 1999, that took the Browns name and official lineage.
- The 49ers have remained in the NFL and San Francisco since their admission to the league. They moved within the a new stadium in the Silicon Valley community of Santa Clarain 2014.
National Football League: 1946–1959
Following five years of what the league perceived to be weak leadership on behalf of commissioner
After twelve years without black players in the NFL, the Los Angeles Rams added them in 1946, as they were required by their stadium lease to integrate the team. The league had two five-team divisions, each team playing an unwieldy 11-game schedule, with some teams playing more home games than others. They increased to twelve games the following year, partly because of the success of the rival AAFC's 14-game format. After the AAFC folded, the NFL added three of its teams, for a total of thirteen, but maintained the 14-game format. The first year after admitting the Cleveland Browns, the NFL was humbled by having the Browns, a team from what it had ridiculed as an inferior league, win its championship. The Browns went on to be NFL champions in three of their first six years in the league. In 1958, the Baltimore Colts defeated the New York Giants 23–17 in professional football's first sudden-death championship game,[clarification needed] and repeated the victory against the same team in the 1959 NFL title game, this time by a score of 31–16. The Colts had folded after the 1950 season and from 1951 through 1959 the NFL had twelve teams, six each in the East and West conferences. The league during this period featured not only star players absorbed from the AAFC 'merger' but others such as halfback Frank Gifford (New York Giants); the Philadelphia Eagles' quarterback Norm Van Brocklin and receiver Tommy McDonald; and the Colts' quarterback Johnny Unitas and running back Lenny Moore. Television coverage of the league was spotty, with some teams starting in 1950 to have 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 (the Browns, for instance, held out and syndicated games themselves until the early 1960s when a league-wide contract was imposed).
Fourth American Football League: 1960–1969
By the start of the 1960s, the NFL was complacent in its dominance of the market for Professional Football fans, and had little incentive to expand that market. The AAFC was history, and the NFL had chosen not to capitalize on the boost it had received from the 1958 Colts-Giants sudden-death game. It was content with a 12-team league playing a 12-game schedule and featured "ball-control" football. When Texas oilmen
The AFL was similar to the AAFC in that it offered innovations, like a return to the double round robin schedule introduced by the earlier league and had eight teams in two divisions like the AAFC. The AFL also introduced official scoreboard clocks, player names on jerseys, the two-point PAT conversion and important off-the field elements such as gate and TV revenue-sharing and national TV contracts. The AFL developed the first ever cooperative television plan for professional football, in which the proceeds of the contract were divided equally among member clubs. ABC and the AFL also introduced moving, on-field cameras (as opposed to the fixed midfield cameras of CBS and the NFL), and were the first to have players "miked" during broadcast games.
But the American Football League was different from the AAFC in its overall competitive balance. While the Browns-dominated AAFC had had the same champion every year, six out of the Original Eight AFL teams won at least one AFL championship, and all but one (the lone exception being the Denver Broncos) played in at least one post-season game. In addition to traditional eastern cities, it placed teams in Texas, in the West with the Broncos, Oakland Raiders and the Chargers, and eventually in the Midwest Kansas City and the deep South Miami. The league forced a merger with its rival, and made possible the Super Bowl at the end of the 1966 season. Although it lost the first two, by its demise it had beaten two NFL teams proclaimed as "the best in history" to win the final two World Championship games between two Professional Football league champions. The decade ended with the AFL retaining its original franchises, plus two expansion teams, and those ten teams represented the first time a major sports league had merged with another without losing a franchise.
The legacy of the American Football League is that virtually every aspect of today's wildly popular professional football, on and off the field, can be traced to innovations developed by the AFL and adopted by the NFL.
National Football League: 1960–1969
After the sudden death of commissioner Bert Bell in 1959, Los Angeles Rams general manager Pete Rozelle was named his replacement after a contentious, eight-day, 23-ballot stalemated election in which the league's favored candidate, Marshall Leahy, repeatedly fell one vote short of the supermajority of votes necessary to be elected commissioner. Whereas his predecessors generally put their league offices in the city of the teams they previously represented (the key issue that prevented Leahy from becoming Commissioner, as he was previously an employee of the San Francisco 49ers and was planning to move league offices to the West Coast), Rozelle instead agreed to establish a permanent office in New York City, where the league remains to this day.
The 1960 NFL had ten teams, only two south of Washington, D.C. and/or west of Chicago (the Los Angeles Rams and San Francisco 49ers), and none in the
Tired of raids on players and escalating salaries, in the mid-1960s, certain NFL owners secretly approached AFL principals, seeking a merger of the two leagues. The merger was agreed to in 1966, with a championship game to be played between the league titlists, and a merged schedule beginning with the 1970 season, when existing TV contracts could be re-worked. The decade was dominated in the NFL by the Packers, who won four NFL titles, and by the mid-to late 1960s their head coach Vince Lombardi had fashioned a team that, with its ball-control style, would overpower the NFL and carry on to defeat AFL opponents in the first two AFL-NFL Championship Games after the 1966 and 1967 Professional Football seasons. The NFL champions in 1968, the Colts, and in 1969 the Minnesota Vikings, were each in turn considered to be "the best team in the history of the NFL." By 1969, the NFL had grown to 16 teams, with four teams directly attributable to the existence of the AFL: the Vikings, Cowboys, and Falcons, added to compete with the AFL, and the New Orleans Saints, who were added as a reward to Louisiana federal legislators for their support of PL 89-800, which permitted the merger. Likewise, the AFL-NFL wars brought two teams to Missouri (one in each league), marking the first time NFL teams had played in the state since the 1930s.
Minor Leagues: 1961–1973
Concurrently with the AFL and NFL rivalry, several minor leagues thrived in this era as well. The
National Football League: 1970–1975
In 1970, the NFL realigned into two conferences, with the Browns, Steelers and Colts joining the ten former American Football League teams in the American Football Conference and the remaining NFL teams forming the National Football Conference. The AFL's official scoreboard clock and jersey-back player names were adopted by the merged league, but the two-point conversion was not adopted until 1994.
The AFL–NFL merger also led to the creation of a weekly showcase game: Monday Night Football. Originally broadcast on ABC beginning with the 1970 season, it moved to ESPN in 2006.
All of the American Football League records and statistics were accepted by the merged league as equivalent to pre-merger NFL records and statistics. Thus, a yard gained in the AFL in 1960 is as valid as a yard gained in the NFL in 1960.
In 1974, the rival World Football League successfully lured several NFL stars to its upstart league, but collapsed midway through the 1975 season due to financial problems. The Memphis Southmen made an unsuccessful bid to join the NFL, even going as far as taking deposits for season tickets and going to court to file a lawsuit to attempt to force this, and the Birmingham Vulcans collected petition signatures to attempt to show a similar high level of support, but never got as far as Memphis. Neither city has ever gotten an NFL franchise (though the Tennessee Oilers did later play one season in Memphis).
Also in 1974, the NFL, after over four decades of having its goal posts on the goal line (as Canadian football still does), finally moved its goalposts back to the end line, as is the norm in high school and college football in the United States, in an effort to decrease the number of field goal attempts, and moved the kickoff back to the 35-yard line.
National Football League: 1976–1994
In 1976, the NFL added the Seattle Seahawks and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to the NFL. To accommodate the larger league, the schedule expanded from 14 games to 16 games in 1978. The playoff field was likewise expanded to ten teams, then again to twelve teams in 1990, where it remained until 2020.[4]
The NFL began experiencing problems in the 1980s. Labor stoppages in 1982 (which led to the NFL season being cut in half) and 1987 (resulting in the league using replacement players for three games), combined with Al Davis winning a lawsuit to allow his team, the Raiders, to move from Oakland to Los Angeles against league wishes, forced NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle into retirement. Paul Tagliabue was named his replacement.
The NFL backed the minor-league
United States Football League: 1983–1985
The United States Football League was the most significant challenger to the NFL since the American Football League, and the last of any significance to date. The USFL's gimmick was to avoid direct head-to-head competition with the NFL and college ball, and play in the spring. Originally intended as a minor league, this ended when several deep pocketed owners began luring top talent such as Herschel Walker to the USFL with high salaries.
The groundwork for what eventually led to the demise of the USFL was set mainly by Donald Trump, owner of the New Jersey Generals and a vocal opponent of the league's spring football concept, who led a coalition that sought to take the NFL on head-to-head with a fall schedule and later force a merger. This was a major problem for several teams, who were ill-prepared to face the NFL juggernaut, and fans quickly walked away from these lame-duck franchises when it became clear the USFL was done with spring football. The USFL pinned its hopes on an anti-trust lawsuit against the NFL; though the USFL won the case, it was a Pyrrhic victory, as the jury only awarded damages of US$3.
The USFL's biggest legacy was the fact that it helped develop some of the best quarterbacks in professional football during the 1990s. Many members of the prolific draft classes of 1983 through 1985 played in the USFL and went on to have strong careers in the NFL and CFL, including
Arena Football League: 1987–2019
Immediately after the USFL suspended operations in 1986, USFL executive
The success of arena football led to a revival of interest in
National Football League: 1995–2001
The USFL's impact was not limited to players, however. The USFL apparently established Oakland, Baltimore, Jacksonville and Arizona as viable markets for professional football. As such, the St. Louis Cardinals moved to Phoenix, Arizona to become the Arizona Cardinals in 1988, while the Houston Oilers very nearly moved to Jacksonville in 1987 before deciding to stay, for the short term, in Houston.
In 1993, the NFL began exploring expansion, eyeing five proposals (
It was not until after the 1995 season, after Baltimore's CFL team won the Grey Cup, that Baltimore got a second look, this time from Art Modell, who took the core of his Cleveland Browns team to Baltimore to found the expansion Baltimore Ravens. The effort effectively killed the CFL's American expansion. The Browns returned, restocked with new players and with new ownership, in 1999. Meanwhile, the Oilers left Houston for Tennessee after the 1996 season; initially beginning what was planned to be a two-year stint in Memphis, disastrous attendance levels prompted the team to cut that experiment short after a single year and move to its permanent home in Nashville in 1998, eventually rebranding as the Tennessee Titans.
Also borrowed from the USFL was the two-point conversion, which the NFL adopted in 1994, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' color scheme, which was loosely based on that of the Tampa Bay Bandits.
The NFL revived the World League in 1995, this time headquartered solely in Europe, eventually changing the name of the league to the NFL Europe League (known as either NFL Europe or, in its last season, as NFL Europa, to avoid RAS syndrome). Originally having its teams spread across several countries including Spain, England, Scotland, the Netherlands and Germany, by the end of the league's run in 2007, only the Netherlands and Germany (the latter of which had five of the league's six teams) were still in the league.
Strained relations between the NFL and its players' union quieted down significantly in the 1990s, and the development of
Several short-lived professional leagues arose in the wake of the
National Football League: 2002–present
The Houston Texans were added to the league in 2002 to replace the Oilers, bringing the league to an even 32 teams. Roger Goodell took over as commissioner from the retiring Paul Tagliabue in 2006.
Also during this era, the league began expanding its influence overseas. Fútbol Americano, a one-off game in Mexico City, was the first regular-season game held outside the United States in 2005; it was followed by the NFL International Series, an annual game held in London in the last week of October since 2007. In an unrelated move, the Buffalo Bills began their Bills Toronto Series, playing an annual December game in Canada, in 2008. The Toronto series will run through 2012.
In 2003, the NFL launched its own in-house network, NFL Network. Beginning in 2006, at the end of the previous broadcast contract, the NFL launched an eight-game late-season package specifically for the network. The 2006 television contract expanded total annual broadcast rights to over US$3,000,000,000, and the 2011 renewal of those rights pushed the annual total to nearly US$5,000,000,000. Between 2006 and 2022, the networks will have paid the NFL nearly US$70,000,000,000—a total greater than the resale value of all thirty-two NFL teams combined.
The labor peace in the NFL came to a halt in 2010, when a group of NFL owners invoked an out clause in the league's collective bargaining agreement with the players' union, subsequently imposing a lockout in 2011. The players' association responded by disbanding and having its players sue the league for antitrust violations. The two sides came to an agreement in late July 2011, after one preseason game, that year's Pro Football Hall of Fame Game, was lost due to the lockout. The current collective bargaining agreement, which has no opt-outs, lasts through 2021.
Alternate leagues: 2009–2015, 2019–future
The
The
In 2018, the two leading figures behind the original XFL announced their re-entry into the professional football market with rival leagues: former NBC head
Canadian professional football history
Canadian football had similar origins to its American counterparts. Several Canadian professional teams are older than the oldest existing American teams, because they began as amateur rugby organizations. The Canadian game evolved parallel to the American game, but several years behind: the
Canadian football was, prior to the 1950s, dominated by three amateur organizations: the
The CFL has been, at various times in its history, competitive with the NFL in terms of being able to acquire talent, though the league's self-imposed rule changes have hampered that in recent years (for instance, the marquee player exemption to the salary cap that once allowed CFL teams to sign one top-level player is no longer there, and the league has banned signing suspended NFL players). It has not been competitive on a team level with the NFL, as evidenced by the fact that 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, the best team in the IRFU at the time, 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
The two teams based in
In the long term, the CFL has shown significantly more stability than the American leagues. The league has, for all but three years of its history, had either eight or nine teams, all based in the same nine markets. The league has resisted expanding beyond its current nine teams and has, to date, never moved a Canadian team from one city to another. One particular market that has been a persistent topic of discussion has been the
Canada has historically been sheltered from the rival leagues that the NFL faced for most of its first century of existence.
Professional football has yet to be played in two provinces: Prince Edward Island (which is likely too small to accommodate any professional game) and Newfoundland and Labrador.
Injuries
According to 2017 study on brains of deceased gridiron football players, 99% of tested brains of
Other common injuries include, injuries of legs, arms and lower back.[6][7][8][9]
See also
Further reading
- March, Harry. Pro Football: Its Ups and Downs. J. B. Lyon Co. 1934.
References
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- ^ "The making of Patrick Mahomes, the highest-paid man in sports history | NFL News | Sky Sports".
- ^ "History". www.watertownredandblack.com. Retrieved 2020-08-12.
- ^ "How will expanded NFL playoffs work? Here's what you need to know". ESPN.com. 2020-03-31. Retrieved 2022-10-12.
- ^ "BU Researchers Find CTE in 99% of Former NFL Players Studied | The Brink | Boston University".
- S2CID 21829142.
- ^ "The Common Types of Football Injuries".
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