NFL History

The National Football League or more popularly known as the NFL is the biggest professional American Football league. It originally was formed in 1920 as was called the American Professional Football Association which was later changed to the American Professional Football League a year after. Its name was changed yet again to its current name a year after that. The league started with a mere 11 members but has evolved to 32 teams divided into 2 conferences with 16 teams each. This in turn has resulted in a flood of NFL merchandise available such as mini NFL helmets. The long history of the league has thus resulted in some amusing and interesting NFL trivia.

NFL popularity
American Football has been the most popular sport in the US since 1965. The NFL has the largest per-game attendance of any domestic professional sports league in the world, pulling over 67,000 spectators per game for every one of its two most recently completed seasons, 2006 and 2007. However, the National Football League's overall attendance is only about 20% of that of Major League Baseball, due to MLB's 162 game schedule.

In a sports poll completed in 2008, the NFL was the favorite sport of almost as many people (30 percent) as the combined total of the next four professional sports - baseball (15 percent), auto racing (10 percent), hockey (5 %) and men's pro basketball (4 percent). In addition, Football's American TV viewership numbers now surpass those of other sports. In addition, independent studies suggest that the average global viewership is just over 100 million, with the vast majority of whom are U.S. viewers.

The NFL logo
The old NFL logo with 25 stars was used between 1970 and 2008. It was replaced with a new logo, which contains 4 stars, for the 2008 season.

The Super Bowl Trophy
The trophy a team is given for winning the Super Bowl is called Vince Lombardi Trophy; Lombardi successfully the Packers to multiple NFL Championships in the 1960s.

NFL Players
Intriguingly, former Charger Defensive Lineman Ernie Ladd also managed a career in professional wrestling.

NFL Teams
The Green Bay Packers are not only the sole NFL team that is publicly owned by the community and fans. It is the only professional sports team in the United States with such a distinctive ownership arrangement. The Packers had the honor of winning the first two Super Bowls ever played, although at the time they were not yet referred to as Super Bowls. The Packers is the oldest team name that is still in use in the NFL.

The Colts were the earliest NFL team to have cheerleaders. The Colts are also the very first team ever to begin successional seasons with 9-0 records. In 1981 the Colts set a modern record for lowest number of punts returned in a season with just 12.

Earlier on, the Patriots were the solitary team in the league who had an image of a football as part of their NFL team helmet logo.