|
The history of the National Football League dates to 1920, when the league was founded as the American Professional Football Association with ten teams from four states, all of whom existed in some form as participants of regional leagues in their respective territories; it took on its current name in 1922. The NFL was the first professional football league to successfully establish a nationwide presence, after several decades of failed attempts. Only two teams currently in the NFL, the Decatur Staleys (now the Chicago Bears) and the Chicago Cardinals (now the Arizona Cardinals), are founding members.〔The history of the Indianapolis Colts traces to a charter NFL franchise, the Dayton Triangles; however, the NFL officially considers the Colts to be a separate franchise founded in Baltimore in 1953.〕 The Green Bay Packers, founded 1919 (joined the NFL in 1921), is the oldest NFL franchise in continuous operation with the same name in the same location.〔History of the Green Bay Packers#Founding.〕 League membership gradually stabilized throughout the 1920s and 1930s as the league adopted progressively more formal organization. The first official championship game was held in 1933. The NFL stopped signing black players in 1927 but reintegrated in 1946 following World War II. Other changes followed after the war; the office of league President evolved into the more powerful Commissioner post, mirroring a similar move in Major League Baseball. Teams became more financially viable, the last team folding in 1952 and the league absorbing teams from the briefly more successful All-America Football Conference in 1950, two of which survive to the present day. By 1958, when that season's NFL championship game became known as "The Greatest Game Ever Played", the NFL was on its way to becoming one of the most popular sports leagues in the United States. The rival American Football League was founded in 1960. It was very successful, and forced a merger with the older NFL that resulted in a greatly expanded league and the creation of the Super Bowl, which has become the most-watched annual sporting event in the United States. The league continued to expand to its current size of 32 teams. A series of labor agreements during the 1990s and increasingly large television contracts has helped keep the league one of the most profitable in the U.S., and the only major league in the U.S. since 1990 to avoid a work stoppage that resulted in the loss of regular-season games. ==Beginnings== Football was first professionalized in 1892, when William Heffelfinger and Ben "Sport" Donnelly each received a large sum of cash to play for the Allegheny Athletic Association of the Western Pennsylvania Senior Independent Football Conference. Through the 1890s and the early part of the 20th century, professional football was primarily a regional sport, with most informal circuits centered around a single state or region with only limited play outside state lines. There were no national leagues or tournaments for the professional game, despite numerous attempts: an earlier National Football League (backed by what would become Major League Baseball) was unable to expand beyond Pennsylvania in 1902, the New York City-based World Series of Pro Football tournament disbanded after two seasons and lack of fan interest, and other attempts to either combine existing circuits or create new ones from scratch never materialized. By the late 1910s, the regional circuits had coalesced into more or less leagues of varying degrees of organization. One of the most prominent at the time was the Ohio League, which boasted the services of legendary Native American athlete Jim Thorpe, among other stars. Another was the somewhat lower-caliber, but better-organized, New York Pro Championship; two of the New York circuit's best teams, the Rochester Jeffersons and the Buffalo All-Stars, went on a barnstorming tour of Ohio in 1917. After the Jeffersons played, and lost badly to, Thorpe's Canton Bulldogs in a 1917 match, Jeffersons owner Leo Lyons (believing that the foundation of a league could build a sport that rivaled baseball, which then held an effective monopoly on professional sport, in popularity) suggested to Thorpe that a league be formed.〔Carroll, Bob. (THE CITY THAT HATED PRO FOOTBALL ). Professional Football Researchers Association ''Coffin Corner''. 1981.〕 Lyons' vision of a national league of existing football clubs (which, at the time, was competing with another proposed league, again backed by baseball) was cut short by the United States' entry into World War I and further hampered by a flu pandemic in 1918, which forced most of the Ohio League teams to suspend operations due to either travel restrictions or loss of players to the war effort. New York's teams, although they were forced to reduce their schedules, continued and (along with the few other remaining teams that survived the suspension, including the OL's Dayton Triangles and Michigan's Detroit Heralds) picked up many of the stars that remained stateside. This had the effect of spreading out the talent across a broader geographic area. Over the course of 1919, as professional football had increased in parity, teams began reaching out and participating in more barnstorming tours. By then, two informal but distinct interstate circuits had developed: one around the Eastern Seaboard (particularly New York City, New Jersey and Philadelphia) that played mostly on Saturdays due to blue laws, and another centered around the Midwestern region (Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ohio, and upstate New York) that played on Sundays. It was the latter that formed the basis of what would eventually become the modern National Football League. Ohio's teams went along with the idea in the face of escalating costs: several bidding wars in the early 1900s, both in Pennsylvania and Ohio, had damaged the sport significantly, and another bidding war was about to erupt if something was not done. By forming a national league, teams reasoned that it would eliminate the practices of looting other teams' rosters and concentrating top talent in only a few teams, thus distributing talent more evenly and efficiently thereby reducing costs for each individual team while still keeping a top-level product on the field. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「History of the National Football League」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|