American football began as a college game closer to soccer than to anything on television now, and its first professional was paid in secret. These stories run from a Chicago neighborhood club of the 1890s to a Super Bowl that was not yet called the Super Bowl, by way of a wartime team stitched from two cities, a halfback who painted horns on his helmet, and a championship game the network cut away from.
Every tile in a Football game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Legends
nine stories
1The $500 that made football professional
On the tile: Heffelfinger1892
On November 12, 1892, the Allegheny Athletic Association handed a former Yale guard, William Heffelfinger, known as Pudge, $500 to play one game against the Pittsburgh Athletic Club. He forced a fumble, picked it up and ran it in for the game's only touchdown. Touchdowns were worth four points then, so Allegheny won 4-0. Pittsburgh's followers charged that he had been paid, but proof did not become public for almost eighty years, until the Hall of Fame received an Allegheny expense sheet showing the payment. It now calls that sheet pro football's birth certificate.
When team owners met in Canton in 1920 to build a professional league, they elected Jim Thorpe president, hoping to capitalize on his fame. He had won the decathlon and the pentathlon at the 1912 Olympics, and the Hall of Fame calls him the most famous athlete of the age. A year later Joe Carr replaced him, but Thorpe kept playing through 1928, for Canton, Cleveland, the Oorang Indians, Rock Island, New York and the Chicago Cardinals. His Olympic medals, stripped over money he had taken for minor league baseball, were restored in 1982.
Fritz Pollard weighed about 165 pounds, and contemporary accounts made him the most feared running back in the new professional league. He had led Brown to the 1916 Rose Bowl, and he was with the Akron Pros when they joined that league in 1920. In 1921 Akron named him co-coach, making him the first African American head coach in NFL history, and he kept playing while he did the job. Recognition took a long time. He entered the Hall of Fame with the class of 2005.
Red Grange finished his last college season at Illinois in November 1925 and signed with the Chicago Bears shortly afterward. On Thanksgiving Day, 36,000 people watched him play the Chicago Cardinals to a scoreless tie, the largest crowd pro football had drawn. At the beginning of December the Bears went barnstorming: eight games in twelve days. A crowd of 73,000 came to the Polo Grounds, helping assure the future of the league's troubled New York franchise. Nine more games followed in the South and West, and 75,000 turned out at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
On November 28, 1929, Ernie Nevers of the Chicago Cardinals scored six rushing touchdowns and kicked four extra points against the crosstown Bears, who had Red Grange in their backfield. That is forty points by one man, and the Cardinals won 40-6. Nevers had reached the league by way of the Duluth Eskimos and was named All-NFL in each of his five professional seasons. The Hall of Fame counts those forty points as the oldest record still standing in the league.
Wartime rosters were short on depth in 1943, and Sammy Baugh, who before the war had usually played half the game, often stayed on the field for all sixty minutes. That season he led the NFL in passing, in punting and in interceptions, which is to say he was the best man in the league at throwing the ball, at kicking it away, and at catching the other team's throws. He threw 23 touchdown passes. Washington tied for its division title, then won the playoff 28-0. He entered the Hall of Fame with the class of 1963.
7Cut by Pittsburgh, playing for six dollars a game
On the tile: Johnny Unitas1955-1956
Pittsburgh drafted Johnny Unitas in the ninth round in 1955 and released him before the season started. He spent that autumn playing semi-professional football for six dollars a game, and he waited. Baltimore gave him a tryout in 1956, and coach Weeb Ewbank signed him as a backup to George Shaw. Unitas went on to throw a touchdown pass in 47 consecutive games, a streak that stood for more than fifty years. He entered the Hall of Fame with the class of 1979.
Paul Brown ran a football team the way a principal runs a school. The Hall of Fame credits him as the first pro coach to use intelligence tests as a hint to how quickly players would learn, the first to use notebooks and classroom techniques extensively, the first to build complete statistical studies from film clips, and the first to grade his own players on what the film showed. He also called plays from the sideline by rotating guards in as messengers. In seventeen seasons in Cleveland, his teams went 167-53-8.
George Halas sat in the Canton meeting that created the league in 1920, representing a company team called the Decatur Staleys. He stayed with that franchise, which became the Chicago Bears, from its beginning until his death in 1983. He coached forty seasons in four separate stretches, stepping away once for military service and twice besides, and won six NFL titles. His 324 victories, playoff games included, stood as the league record until Don Shula passed him in 1993.
On August 20, 1920, men representing four Ohio teams met in the Jordan and Hupmobile auto showroom in Canton and agreed to form a league. A second meeting on September 17 brought in clubs from Indiana, New York and Illinois, and the group named itself the American Professional Football Association. Membership cost one hundred dollars a team, a figure chosen to give the venture an appearance of respectability. No team ever paid it.
Green Bay dropped out of the league in January 1922, after admitting it had used players who still had college eligibility. Curly Lambeau bought the franchise back with fifty dollars of his own money, local merchants arranged a $2,500 loan, and a public nonprofit corporation was set up to run the team. It has sold stock six times since, in 1923, 1935, 1950, 1997, 2011 and 2022. Today roughly 5.2 million shares belong to about 539,000 stockholders, and none of them receives a dividend. The shares carry a vote for the board instead.
In 1922 the league fielded eighteen teams, and one of them was an advertisement for a dog kennel. Walter Lingo, owner of the Oorang Dog Kennels in LaRue, Ohio, organized the Oorang Indians to sell his Airedales, and they were an all-Indian team, with Jim Thorpe, Joe Guyon and Pete Calac in the lineup. The team folded after the 1923 season. Two other changes from 1922 have lasted more than a century: the league renamed itself the National Football League on June 24, and the Chicago Staleys became the Chicago Bears.
The Pottsville Maroons beat the Chicago Cardinals 21-7 late in the 1925 season, in what was widely regarded as the championship game. Then Pottsville scheduled a game against former Notre Dame players in Philadelphia, inside Frankford's protected territory. League president Joe Carr sent three notices forbidding it, and Pottsville played anyway, on December 12. Carr fined the club, suspended it and returned its franchise to the league. The Cardinals, with the best record in the league, were named champions. Pottsville kept pressing, and in 2003 the owners rejected a plan to share the title, 30-2.
5The oldest club in pro football began as a neighborhood team
On the tile: Cardinals1890s
Chris O'Brien put together a neighborhood team on the south side of Chicago in the 1890s and called it the Morgan Athletic Club. It became the Normals, then the Racine Cardinals, named not for the Wisconsin city but for a street in Chicago. From there it became the Chicago Cardinals, then the St. Louis Cardinals, then the Phoenix Cardinals, and in 1994 the Arizona Cardinals. The Hall of Fame calls it the oldest continuing operation in pro football.
The league admitted five new franchises in 1925, and one of them went to Tim Mara and Billy Gibson for five hundred dollars. That was the New York Giants. The club was in trouble inside its first season and survived anyway. Tim's son Wellington joined the organization in 1937 as a part-time assistant to the president, became club secretary the next year, and spent nearly seven decades with the team. The players called him Duke, on account of his name.
7The team named for its coach, and its first NFL day
On the tile: Browns1946-1950
The Cleveland club that Paul Brown organized for the new All-America Football Conference was named after him. It began play in 1946 and won that league's first championship, beating the New York Yankees 14-9. After four seasons in that conference, Cleveland, San Francisco and Baltimore joined the NFL for 1950. The first game of that season matched Cleveland, the former AAFC champion, against the NFL champion Philadelphia Eagles, and Cleveland won 35-10. By December the Browns were NFL champions too, beating Los Angeles 30-28.
On August 31, 1934, the Chicago Bears, defending NFL champions, played a team of the best college players in the country at Soldier Field, in the first Chicago College All-Star Game. A crowd of 79,432 turned out, and the game ended in a scoreless tie. College football was king in those years, and the professional league needed a showcase like this one. Pro football gained new prestige just by sharing a field with the college stars, even on a day when nobody scored.
The Super Bowl had never been held in the North until January 24, 1982, when the game went to the Pontiac Silverdome outside Detroit and San Francisco beat Cincinnati 26-21. When Pontiac was awarded the game, Commissioner Pete Rozelle recalled that people there had talked to him years earlier about a domed stadium. They got one, and then they made their case for the Super Bowl. The rest of that year went less smoothly for the sport: a players' strike lasting fifty-seven days cut the regular season from sixteen games down to nine.
For its first three decades, American football had no legal forward pass. When the throw was finally legalized in 1906, it came with risks attached: an incomplete pass drew a 15-yard penalty, and a pass that fell untouched handed the ball to the defense. Established coaches at the elite eastern schools were slow to embrace it. The first authenticated completion in a professional game came on October 27 that year, when George Parratt of Massillon, called Peggy, threw to Dan Riley. Not until February 25, 1933 could a passer throw from anywhere behind the line of scrimmage.
The touchdown was not always the biggest score in football. In 1898 it went from four points to five, which only drew it level with a field goal: until 1904, a kick through the posts was also worth five. Then the kick started shrinking. A field goal dropped to four points in 1904 and to three in 1909. The touchdown made the last move in 1912, when it was increased from five points to six. Six for a touchdown and three for a field goal are still the values in the NFL rulebook.
From 1933 the NFL's goal posts stood on the goal line itself, at the front of the end zone, where receivers learned to use them to screen defenders. Until 1967 they were shaped like an H. On February 22, 1967 the slingshot post became standard, a design its inventor pictured as a fork with the two inside prongs knocked out, along with a six-foot border around the field. The posts finally moved back to the end lines on April 25, 1974, in the same package of rules that pushed kickoffs from the 40-yard line to the 35.
Officials have not always thrown yellow. For years the flag that landed on the grass was white. On April 5, 1965, the NFL changed the color of the officials' penalty flags from white to bright gold, and the yellow flag everyone now recognizes dates from that decision. The crew throwing them had been growing for decades: a fourth official, the field judge, was added in 1929, a fifth, the back judge, in 1947, and a sixth, the line judge, on February 19, 1965.
In 1956 the NFL made it illegal to grab an opponent's face mask, with one exception that says a good deal about the era: grabbing the face mask of the ball carrier was still allowed. That loophole lasted until 1962, when the NFL and the AFL both prohibited grabbing any player's face mask. The same 1956 round of rule making prohibited using radio receivers to communicate with players on the field, and replaced the white ball with black stripes, used for night games, with a natural leather ball with white end stripes.
For the league's first twenty-three seasons a player could take the field bareheaded if he wanted to. The NFL made helmets mandatory in 1943, the same year it cut the schedule to ten games, with the war thinning every roster. Plastic was already on its way in. John T. Riddell had introduced the first plastic helmet in 1939, but after the war a faulty plastic mix left many shells breaking into pieces, and on January 14, 1948, the NFL prohibited plastic helmets. The ban did not last. Within about a year the mix was corrected and plastic helmets were back.
Football used to ask the same eleven men to play offense and defense. Free substitution changed that, and the league could not make up its mind about it. Adopted on April 7, 1943. Withdrawn in 1946, with substitutions limited to no more than three men at a time. Adopted again for one year on January 20, 1949. On January 20, 1950, unlimited free substitution was restored for good, and with it arrived two platoons and the specialists who fill a modern roster.
8The AFL had the two-point conversion 34 years first
On the tile: Two-point play1960-1994
The American Football League adopted the two-point option on the point after touchdown on January 28, 1960, in its first year of operation. The NFL did not follow. The two leagues merged into a single league in 1970, and the older one still did not follow. The two-point conversion reached the NFL rulebook only on March 22, 1994, thirty-four years late, as part of a package that also moved the spot of the kickoff back to the 30-yard line.
On March 11, 1986, NFL owners approved limited use of instant replay as an aid to officials, which made the television camera part of the machinery of the game rather than a spectator at it. They renewed the system in 1988 by a vote of 23 to 5. The same 1986 meeting produced a rule with an entirely different flavor, forbidding players to wear or display equipment or apparel carrying commercial names, organization names or personal messages of any type.
The Bears and the Portsmouth Spartans finished 1932 tied for first, so the league arranged an extra game to settle it. Cold weather drove that game inside, to Chicago Stadium, where the field was only 80 yards long and ran right up against the walls. The league improvised: goal posts came forward from the end lines to the goal lines, and inbounds lines, or hash marks, were drawn ten yards from the walls. Chicago won 9-0 on December 18, on a two-yard pass from Bronko Nagurski to Red Grange. Both improvisations were written into the rules in 1933.
The Chicago Bears came to the Polo Grounds on December 9, 1934, unbeaten at 13-0 and heavily favored, and found the field frozen into an icy surface. The New York Giants found their answer at nearby Manhattan College: basketball shoes borrowed from its team. There were not enough pairs for everyone, so in the second half the Giants put them on their ends and backs. Down 13-3 going into the fourth quarter, New York scored 27 points in that quarter alone and won 30-13. The game came to be known as the Sneakers Game.
Three weeks after losing to Washington 7-3, the Chicago Bears met the same team for the NFL championship on December 8, 1940, and won 73-0. They led 28-0 at halftime, and it remains the most lopsided game in NFL history. It was also the first championship carried on network radio, called by Red Barber for 120 stations of the Mutual Broadcasting System. Chicago kicked so many extra points into the stands that officials asked the Bears to run plays for their last two conversions, because they were down to their last football.
The league had written sudden death into its by-laws back in 1941, to settle a playoff game still tied after four quarters, and first used it in a 1955 preseason game in Portland, Oregon. Then, on December 28, 1958, the NFL Championship Game itself finished level. Baltimore and New York played on, and after 8 minutes and 15 seconds of overtime, Colts fullback Alan Ameche ran one yard for the touchdown that ended it, 23-17. It is often called the greatest game ever played.
The game played on January 15, 1967 was officially the First AFL-NFL World Championship Game. Green Bay beat Kansas City 35-10 before 61,946 people at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, and two networks carried it at the same time, CBS and NBC. The familiar name came in sideways. Lamar Hunt used it in meetings in 1966, and by his own account it probably came from a bouncy toy his children owned, the Super Ball. The NFL recognized the title Super Bowl for the first time in 1969.
Green Bay had put electric heating coils under its field in 1967, but on the last day of that year the temperature was thirteen degrees below zero, and the cold overwhelmed them. Dallas and Green Bay played for the NFL championship on a field like a sheet of ice. With the Packers behind 17-14 in the final minute, quarterback Bart Starr kept the ball himself and pushed one yard over the goal line with 13 seconds left. Green Bay won 21-17 for its third straight NFL title, and the game came to be known as the Ice Bowl.
On November 17, 1968, the New York Jets led the Oakland Raiders by three points with about a minute left when NBC left the game so that Heidi, a made-for-TV movie about a girl and her grandfather in the Alps, could start on time at 7 p.m. Eastern. Viewers in the Eastern and Central time zones missed the finish. In the last 42 seconds Oakland scored two touchdowns, nine seconds apart, and won 43-32. So many angry fans called that NBC's switchboard gave out, and the network later installed a new phone in its control room, the Heidi phone.
The American Football League had lost the first two championship games against the NFL, 35-10 and 33-14. The second of them, in January 1968, produced the first three-million-dollar gate in pro football history, so the meetings were lucrative even when they were lopsided. Then, on January 12, 1969, at Miami, the New York Jets beat the Baltimore Colts 16-7. It was the first Super Bowl won by an AFL team, and it came while the two leagues were still assembling the merger that joined them in 1970.
Pittsburgh had never won a postseason game when it trailed the Oakland Raiders 7-6 on December 23, 1972, facing fourth-and-10 with 22 seconds left. Terry Bradshaw threw, Raiders safety Jack Tatum collided with Pittsburgh's Frenchy Fuqua, and the ball ricocheted back to Franco Harris, who scooped it up and ran for a touchdown. Under the rules of the day, the play was dead if the ball had touched Fuqua and not Tatum. The touchdown stood, the Steelers won 13-7, and the Immaculate Reception is still being debated.