The NFL: The History Of The NFL

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Over 114 million people watched the championship game of the NFL, also known as the Super Bowl, in 2015, but very few probably know how football itself began (Breech). American football is one of the oldest sports in the United States and began being played in 1869 (Pro Football Hall of Fame). I have played the game for about 10 years of my life, and am currently playing at Central Michigan University. With all my knowledge of the game, I still did not have the greatest knowledge about the history and startup of football. After researching, I found this topic to be extremely interesting and I believe it would be very interesting to anybody interested in sports. Football is an extremely fast and exciting game. There are eleven players on each …show more content…

The first game was believed to be a modified version of rugby and soccer that was played in 1869 between Rutgers and Princeton. Walter Camp was the first to person write the rules while at the Massasoit convention in 1876. Due to the increasingly popularity of the game, many local athletic clubs picked up the game and began playing it competitively against one another. From 1892 to 1895 the clubs began to pay and write contracts with players, which led to the first professional team being put together in 1896. Once teams began to form, a professional football league became established along with the first World Series in 1902. In 1903, while many college teams were playing the sport, Harvard became the first university to build a stadium designed for football. After being very popular in the Pennsylvania area, the popularity shifted towards Ohio, who at the time had seven pro teams. These seven teams formed their own league, which had created their own universal rules, and played for an Ohio League Championship. Organizations faced problems with the difference in salaries and the constant change of teams for the most popular players. In 1920, the teams came to a conclusion on the repeating problems that were occurring. This led to the start of the APFA, American Professional Football Conference, and by 1922, football had become a more established game with 18 active football teams, mostly in states throughout the Midwest. The name was also changed in this year to the name everybody now knows today, the National Football League or NFL. The NFL began to get more national attention when more star collegiate players started signing contracts with NFL organizations. In 1925, a reported 36,000 fans were in attendance of the Chicago Bears game against the Chicago Cardinals. The popularity of football began to take off and in the same year, there

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