Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

How did the NFL start?

By Joe Smeltzer | Last updated 7/16/19

The National Football League is the most successful professional sports league in North America, but during its early years, the league hardly had a national following. By the start of the 1920s, football was a popular sport in the United States but not at the professional level. The pro game didn’t have an established league as professional baseball did.

In 1920, Ralph Hay, owner of the Canton Bulldogs — the champions of Ohio — and several colleagues believed they needed to unify professional football teams. According to the Pro Football Hall of Fame website, Hay and other owners met Sept. 17, 1920, in his automobile showroom in Canton, where they finalized the formation of the American Professional Football Association.

When did the NFL get its name?

The first APFA game was played in 1920. Initially, the league had 14 teams — the franchises played in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and New York. In 1922, the league was renamed the National Football League. Then in 1945, the Cleveland Rams moved to Los Angeles, a sign the NFL was truly becoming a national league, and the “N” in NFL made a lot more sense.

Why the NFL?

Only two teams with APFA origins remain: the Decatur Staleys (now the Chicago Bears) and Chicago Cardinals, who moved to St. Louis in 1960 and then to Arizona in 1993.

The NFL’s dominance was briefly threatened in the 1960s by the upstart American Football League. In 1970, however, the leagues merged, and since then, the NFL has been the king of not only football, but North American sports as well.

Today, 22 states have NFL teams, 18 more than originally made up the league.

Joe Smeltzer has more than a decade of journalistic experience, starting when he was a sophomore in high school with his blog, Smeltzer on Sports. Since then, he’s earned a degree in communication (with an emphasis on journalism) from Waynesburg University, where he worked on the student newspaper for all four years, eventually becoming sports web editor. Joe began contributing for Yardbarker in the summer of 2019, the same year he became a stringer for the Observer-Reporter in Washington, Pennsylvania, where he still contributes to local high school sports coverage. He is also a Penn State athletics beat reporter for Nittany Sports Now, under the Pittsburgh Sports Now umbrella. In two and a half years on the Penn State beat, Joe’s mainly covered football, wrestling and men’s basketball and covered prime events such as the 2023 Rose Bowl and 2024 U.S. Olympic wrestling trials.

More must-reads: