What Was The Evolution Of The American Football Club (Nfl)

811 Words2 Pages

Until the AFL’s inception in 1960, the NFL dodged several of its rivals and went undefeated. Despite the common conception that American Football League (AFL) was a weaker league than its counterpart National Football League (NFL), AFL proved competitive enough to earn the popularity and win the Super Bowl III that led to the historic NFL-AFL merger in 1966. In spite of bad press NBC, CBS network coverages AFL was able to grow and survive. AFL signed many star players to play in their league to gain that competitive edge. AFL introduced many policies and rules to professional football, which was later adopted by the NFL as well. AFL proved its competency as a league to win a spot within the NFL organization in the later years. Press definitely portrayed AFL as a bad, less competitive league, which was already a struggle for AFL to survive. NFL assumed that the AFL …show more content…

Soon after the AFL’s inaugural season in 1960, it announced a 14-game regular season instead of 12-game season, which NFL quickly adopted in 1961. Another novel idea at the time, was players’ last names on the jersey back, gained momentum and adopted by the NFL by 1970. NFL game plans were normally conservative style, however, the AFL chose a flashier, exciting style of play, a narrower and longer ball usage. In conjunction with the college football, AFL introduced two-point conversion to pro football. Among other good policies were, having the official time on the scoreboard clock, rather than keeping by on-field officials, all league games on one network coverage first CBS (1960-1964) then to NBC and sharing stadium and TV revenues with home and visiting teams. NFL gained some of the novel rules introduced by AFL and eventually saw AFL to be its equal in pro football to initiate a merger in the later

Open Document