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2008 NFL Football History
The Super Bowl has grown so enormous in popularity that some 90% of fans yearly are newbies. To NFL football enthusiasts, life is hardly imaginable without the Super Bowl. But none of this mattered over a century ago, when professional football first took root in America. Back in the late 1800s, the Super Bowl was anything but popular: it did not exist. NFL pro football, as we know it now, was obscure and unknown.
Pro Football History
Professional football began in 1892 but its roots really date back to a couple of decades earlier, in the 1860s. In those days, soccer and rugby were the sports to watch, having enjoyed long-time popularity in many nations of the world. From those two sports, especially rugby, stemmed the earliest game of modern American football. On November 6, 1869, Rutgers and Princeton played the first ever college soccer football game, using modified rules of the London Football Association.
Following that 1869 landmark American football game, Walter Camp wrote the very first rules for American football at the Massasoit convention in 1876. Walter Camp came to be known as the father of American football.
November 12, 1892 marks the official birth of pro football. It was an era in which American football was a major attraction at local athletic clubs. The intense football competition then was between Pittsburgh-based clubs Allegheny Athletic Association and Pittsburgh Athletic Club. You could already sense what was to become the fierce SuperBowl games when one of the clubs decided to pay somebody to play for its team and thus gain more headway. Former Yale All-America guard William ‘Pudge' Heffelfinger was that person. He was paid $500 by the AAA to play in a football game in 1892, becoming the first professional football player. The AAA won the game 4-0 against the PAC.
Retracing the footsteps of Pudge Heffelfinger was John Brallier in 1895, the first football player to openly turn pro, accepting $10 and expenses to play for the Latrobe YMCA against the Jeannette Athletic Club. In 1904, halfback Charles Follis became the first known black pro football player. In 1897, the Latrobe Athletic Association football team became the first football team to play a full season with professionals only. The Morgan Athletic Club, formed in 1899 and finally renamed the Arizona Cardinals, remains the oldest continuing operation in pro football.
National Football League History
In the beginning of the 20th century, the first attempt at an American pro football league took place. In 1902, baseball's Philadelphia Athletics and the Philadelphia Phillies formed pro football teams, joining the Pittsburgh Stars in what was named the National Football League. The Athletics won the first night football game ever played, 39-0 over Kanaweola AC, at Elmira, New York on November 21. The Pittsburgh Stars were named overall league champion.
The 1920s found pro football in a state of confusion. Pro football players, on top of having dramatically rising salaries, kept jumping from one team to another, following the highest offer made to them. The use of college football players also presented a problem obviously because these guys were still in school. The solution: a pro football league in which members would all follow the same rules. An organizational meeting held in Canton, Ohio in 1920 led to the creation of the American Professional Football Conference. The league was renamed the American Professional Football Association, and finally, on June 24, 1922, changed its name to the National Football League. This, at last, is the NFL of modern football we know and love today.
Then the college draft happened. The National Football League player draft began in Philadelphia in 1936. The first player ever drafted decided against playing pro football, not uncommon at the time. But the college draft would set the stage for today's competitive spirit in the NFL games and the Super Bowl.
An NFL game was televised for the first time in 1939. NBC broadcast the Brooklyn Dodgers – Philadelphia Eagles game from Ebbets Field to approximately 1,000 sets in New York. Pro football was not only invading football arenas but also started to figure in mass media via television.
Super Bowl History
The NFL football competitions got increasingly popular in the mid-20th century. By the 1960s, the college football draft had become the battleground for rivals National Football League and American Football League. The two held separate drafts through 1966 before holding joint drafts from 1967 to 1969. When the two leagues merged at the end of the decade, the draft rivalry was over. The NFL now drafted as one unified league, and a new rivalry had begun: the Super Bowl.
Why the name Super Bowl? It all started with Lamar Hunt, AFL architect and owner of the Kansas City Chiefs. He came across his daughter's Super Ball and got the inspiration for the name of the championship game between the upstart American Football League and the old-guard National Football League. Lamar Hunt wondered, “Why not call our championship game the Super Bowl?” The name immediately caught on. In 1967, the NFL changed the name of its championship game to the Super Bowl. A great new American tradition was born. And the rest, as they say, is Super Bowl history.
