National Football League: Overview
By Morgan Dawies (8/16/2006)
The National Football League (NFL) is a major
U.S. professional sports organization that was started in Canton, Ohio in 1920.
When it first started it was called the American Professional Football
Association. The first president of this organization was Jim Thorpe who began
as a player in the league. In 1922 the name was changed to National Football
League.
When the league first began to play it was made up of five teams from the Ohio
area, four from Illinois, two from Indiana, two from New York and one team from
Michigan. To this day only two of these original teams remain: the Cardinals
which changed from Chicago to St. Louis in 1959 after the season ended and then
to Arizona in 1988; the Decatur Staleys started in Chicago and a year later in
1921 changed their name to the Bears.
For many years the NFL faced opposition from other organizations that were
attempting to become national football leagues. However, the NFL managed to
survive and has become the strongest professional football league in the nation.
The strongest competition came from the American Football League (AFL) in the
sixties. In the seventies both the NFL and AFL merged to create a circuit of
twenty-six teams under the NFL name. Since the seventies the NFL has expanded a
total of four times adding a total of six new teams. As of the 2002 season the
NFL is comprised of thirty-two teams total.
The end of the NFL season climaxes with a yearly twelve team playoff that leads
up to the championship game, the Super Bowl. The NFL headquarters are currently
in New York City and the Pro Football Hall of Fame was established in Canton,
Ohio in 1963.
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