There are activities that really describe what a nation is all about. One of those things, according to Jack Elway, is the National Football League or NFL. There is no institution that better describes what it means to be American. It was first started in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association, but it took on the NFL name just two years later. While there are other football leagues in the country, the NFL is the biggest and undoubtedly the best. It is the one that everybody wants to join. At present, it consists of 32 teams from different towns and regions across the country.
Jack Elway Talks about NFL History
cn is closely related to college football. It descends directly from rugby, however, which came from Canada towards the end of the 19th century. When McGill University in Montreal asked Harvard University to come to Quebec to play, it started to develop as American football, with a focus on colleges. In Quebec, however, they still played the Canadian version.
Although there were some other highly elite sports played in college at the time, American football started to get increasingly popular. This was particularly true on the East Coast of the country. Professional football, meanwhile, was more popular in the Midwest. Jim Thorpe was the first president of the American Professional Football Association, which was founded in Ohio. It wasn’t technically a league at that time, and it only had 11 teams within it. The reason the Association was formed, was to stop other teams’ players from getting robbed just to win a game.
When the NFL was born, the rules of the game became set as well, and those become enforceable laws. Yet, teams still seemed to come and go into the league. It wasn’t until the 1970s and 1980s that the National Football League really became part of the nation. This is when they started to organize the Super Bowl, perhaps the greatest sporting event of the year in the country. This game is the final of the NFL series, and it is now an accepted, although undeclared, national holiday.
What really made the NFL such a part of the American way of life, however, was that it created an almost cult-like following. Suddenly, it wasn’t just about the game anymore. It was about the glitz and glamour that came with it, the TV coverage, the entertainment, and the event as a whole. The football series suddenly became entertaining, in other words. To build on this, the NFL also developed pre-season games, which were for exhibition purposes. And to make things even more interesting, international games started to be developed. Those are now known as the American Bowls.
The NFL formed the World League of American Football (WLAF) in 1991. The goal was to ensure that this body would help to further develop the sport and athletes. Today, the WLAF is known as NFL Europa. It has a presence in the Netherlands and in Germany, and it hopes to expand on this. Today, the NFL even has the NFL Network, which is its own television channel. They started this in 2003.
