National Football League (NFL)

Widely regarded as the most successful trade association in the history of American labor organizations and the most powerful sports league in a country obsessed with sports, the National Football League (NFL) currently oversees, directs, and controls thirty-two professional football teams divided evenly into two conferences—the National Football Conference and the American Football Conference—that play a grueling seventeen-week season in the fall plus a six-week eight-team post-season tournament designed to bring the two top teams in each league together. The Super Bowl is played annually on the first Sunday in February to determine the league championship.

Brief History

After World War I, the sports environment of the American Midwest focused almost exclusively on the heroics of collegiate football, a golden era of gridiron play, penned into legend by hyperbolic sportswriters, focused largely on the rise to prominence of the University of Notre Dame under larger-than-life coach Knute Rockne (1888–1931) and the Big Ten teams. Although there were small professional leagues, sponsored by local businesses, located most prominently in Ohio and Indiana, those leagues did not operate under a shared system of rules, had no championship format, and often cannibalized each other in an effort to secure the most popular college athletes after graduation as a way to ensure ticket sales.

The NFL had its beginnings in 1920 in an auto dealership in Canton, Ohio, when a cabal of small business owners, largely under the direction of the charismatic George Halas (1895–1983), a sales representative for a factory that produced ironing starch in Illinois, agreed to draw up a framework for a regional football league. Convinced that there would be a regional market for an organized league of post-collegiate football, they structured a fourteen-team league, grandly christened the American Professional Football Association, made up of teams in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and New York. Savvy to the idea that their new league needed instant credibility, they named Jim Thorpe (1888–1953), then thirty-two and perhaps the most famous and accomplished collegiate athlete of the era, as its first commissioner. Although the league struggled in its first decade to codify game rules and was slow to work out a format for a championship, the games found an immediate market throughout the Midwest. The name was changed to the National Football League in 1922. By 1933, league officials, largely team owners and their representatives, worked out a format that provided for the champions of an eastern and a western division to meet in a title game.

In the boom era that followed World War II, the NFL found a niche in American sports culture. Unlike baseball, perceived by many to be more radio friendly, football, with its inherent violence and aggressive play, was ready-made for television coverage. In 1960, that popularity engendered what would become the NFL’s only significant challenge to what has essentially been a monopoly of professional football—the American Football League (AFL). The AFL was the marketing brainchild of hip entrepreneurs who not only aggressively pursued lucrative television contracts but also secured high-profile college and professional players to ensure its audience appeal. In 1966, however, the NFL owners, led by iconic commissioner Pete Rozell (1926–96), recognizing the potential for a union of the two leagues, negotiated a merger with the AFL that was in place by the 1970 season.

Impact

Professional football has become the dominant sport in American culture. The average attendance at games is more than 67,000. Super Bowl championships account for a large percentage of the most-watched television programs in the history of the medium. The league oversees an empire of licensed product lines from each franchise as well as a $10 billion television rights deal with CBS, Fox, NBC, Amazon, and ESPN. Broadcast games dominate Sunday programming as well as Monday and Thursday night programing, with the 2021 regular season drawing in an average of more than seventeen million viewers per game. As of 2021 estimates, each franchise team alone, on average, is worth approximately $3.48 billion.

In addition to directing league play and maintaining a consistent body of rules to govern the game, the NFL regulates broadcast rights and directs the annual draft of college players into the league. Post-season, the NFL sponsors a range of awards recognizing outstanding individual play and innovative coaching. In the off season, the league directs outreach programs in which players and coaches participate in regional charity work.

Although the success of the NFL is evident, questions have arisen over whether the league is simply too big to monitor itself. Under the often controversial tenure of Commissioner Roger Goodell (2006–) the league has struggled with how best to handle players’ off-the-field behavior, most often involving incidents of domestic abuse, sexual assault, and drug use. Given the financial clout of the game itself, league officials have been perceived to be slow to respond to the public condemnation of this behavior. More problematically, league officials have wrestled with how best to define cheating and secure the integrity of the game against incursion by new technologies that create the possibility of hacking into team’s records and even play books.

Beginning in 2016, greater attention was brought to how the league should regulate players' actions and behavior when San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began kneeling and sitting during the performance of the national anthem at the beginning of games as a form of protest against racial and social injustice. While the controversy increased as other players began to protest in a similar manner and the league as well as Commissioner Goodell grappled with how to handle the situation, the protesting became even more widespread when President Donald Trump declared in September 2017 that all players choosing not to stand during the national anthem should be fired. By October, players had reportedly met with team owners to discuss the issue, and though Goodell announced that he believed all players should stand for the anthem, he also reported that no disciplinary actions had been introduced; he maintained that he did not want the league or the game of football to become political.

Most disturbing, however, has been the growing concern over player safety. As early as 1995, accumulating medical evidence suggested the potential effects of concussions on players and the need to address helmet design, regulate play more carefully, and even shorten the season as ways to help players avoid long-term debilitating injuries. Handling these thorny issues will most certainly determine the continued success of the NFL. By 2017, greater research continued to support a connection between long-term football playing and the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Several neuropathologists, after examining the brains of a large selection of deceased NFL players, concluded that the disease was undoubtedly prevalent in football players—particularly those who had been playing for many years. Because of the increased concern, some researchers were working to develop a method for detecting CTE in living players.

American football is a sport that commands a national audience of such dimension there have been calls to declare the Monday after the Super Bowl a national holiday to allow sufficient recovery from the emotional drain of the game. Beginning in the early 2000s, NFL games were staged in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Mexico, testifying to the sport’s international appeal and forecasting potential expansion into a global sport much like soccer. In 2022, amidst the rise of television streaming services, the NFL announced NFL+, an exclusive streaming service that allows fans to stream NFL games on their television and mobile device regardless of which market they are in. (Traditionally, the geographic location of the viewer has determined which games are available to watch as certain games have exclusive broadcasting rights.)

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