ROUND · every league

RUND NFL

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History

NFL · FOUNDED 1920

Professional football began in the American Midwest as a loose circuit of company and town teams. What turned it into the biggest sport in the United States was television: a league that plays once a week, on one day, fits a broadcast schedule better than any other sport ever has.

The moments

1. 1920

   Eleven clubs in a car showroom

   The American Professional Football Association was founded in Canton, Ohio, in a Hupmobile dealership. Two years later it renamed itself the National Football League. Most of the founding clubs were gone within a decade; the Chicago Bears and the Arizona Cardinals trace back to that room.

2. 1958

   The greatest game ever played

   Baltimore beat New York 23–17 in the NFL Championship, the first to be decided in sudden death. It was carried nationally on television, and the audience that watched it decide in overtime is the moment the professional game stopped being the college game’s poor relation.

3. 1967

   The first championship game between two leagues

   Green Bay beat Kansas City 35–10 in a half-empty Los Angeles Coliseum. It was not called the Super Bowl at the time; the name was borrowed later, and applied backwards to this game.

4. 1969

   Namath’s guarantee

   Joe Namath promised a win for the New York Jets against Baltimore, an 18-point favourite, and delivered it 16–7. The result forced the older league to accept the younger one as an equal, and the merger followed.

5. 1970

   One league again

   The NFL and the AFL completed their merger into a single league of two conferences. Three old NFL clubs — Baltimore, Cleveland and Pittsburgh — moved across to even the numbers at thirteen apiece.

6. 1972

   The only perfect season

   Miami won all fourteen regular-season games, both playoff games and the Super Bowl. No team has finished a season unbeaten since, and only two have gone through the regular season without losing.

7. 1972

   The Immaculate Reception

   With twenty-two seconds left in a playoff game, a pass deflected off a collision and Franco Harris caught it inches from the turf and ran it in. It is still argued about, because the rule that decided whether it counted was changed the following decade.

8. 1982

   The Catch

   Dwight Clark rose at the back of the end zone to take a high throw from Joe Montana and beat Dallas in the NFC Championship. It began San Francisco’s decade and ended the Cowboys’ previous one.

9. 2008

   18–1

   New England arrived at the Super Bowl unbeaten in eighteen games and lost it to the New York Giants 17–14, a game remembered for a catch made against a helmet. The perfect season is still 1972’s alone.

10. 2017

    28–3

    Atlanta led New England by twenty-five points in the third quarter of the Super Bowl and lost in overtime, the first overtime in the game’s history. It remains the largest comeback ever made in one.

Records that stand

Roll of honour

Counts include the pre-Super Bowl championships, which is why Green Bay leads the first line and not the second.