Birth Of The NFL

How it all began

Birth Of The NFL

The National Football League was officially born in August 1920. It had a different name back then, of course — the American Professional Football conference.

And its birth really wasn’t a heralded occasion.

I had to search long and hard to find this very small mention of its creation in a Mansfield, Ohio newspaper:

From The Mansfield News, August 23, 1920, page 7

The typography issues give you an idea of how little attention was paid at the time to the formation of this league. Most newspaper articles about football in 1920 were about the coming college football season, with little to no thought about even the possibility of a professional circuit.

There were a few other mentions of the nascent organization that month. This, for example:

From Buffalo Courier, August 30, 1920, page 6

And it wasn’t until the end of the month that the news reached newspapers in major cities:

From The Los Angeles Times, August 31, 1920, page 28

Less than a month later, the organization had changed its name to the American Professional Football Association, and had found a superstar figurehead to stick on top of the league:

From The Houston Post, September 19, 1920, page 14

As you can tell, things weren’t exactly well settled — and, in the end, the teams didn’t even play an even schedule. We’ll get more into that in future posts.