History of The National Football League - Beginnings

Beginnings

Professional football was primarily a regional sport in the early part of the 20th century, with most informal circuits centered around a single state or region with only limited play outside state lines. There were no national leagues or tournaments for the professional game, despite numerous attempts: an earlier National Football League (backed by what would become Major League Baseball) was unable to expand beyond Pennsylvania in 1902, the New York City-based World Series of Pro Football tournament disbanded after two seasons and lack of fan interest. and other attempts to either combine existing circuits or create new ones from scratch never materialized.

By the late 1910s, the regional circuits had organized into more or less leagues of varying degrees of organization. One of the most prominent at the time was the Ohio League, which boasted the services of legendary American Indian athlete Jim Thorpe, among other stars. Another was the somewhat lower-caliber, but better-organized, New York Pro Championship; two of the New York circuit's best teams, the Rochester Jeffersons and the Buffalo All-Stars, went on a barnstorming tour of Ohio. After Lyons's Jeffersons played, and lost badly to, Thorpe's Canton Bulldogs in a 1917 match, Jeffersons owner Leo Lyons (believing that the foundation of a league could build a sport that rivaled baseball, which then held an effective monopoly on professional sport, in popularity) suggested to Thorpe that a league be formed.

Lyons' vision of a national league of existing football clubs (which, at the time, was competing with another proposed league, again backed by baseball) was cut short by the United States' entry into World War I and further hampered by a flu pandemic in 1918, which forced most of the Ohio League teams to suspend operations due to either travel restrictions or loss of players to the war effort. New York's teams, although they were forced to reduce their schedules, continued and (along with the few other remaining teams that survived the suspension, including the OL's Dayton Triangles and Michigan's Detroit Heralds) picked up many of the stars that remained stateside. This had the effect of spreading out the talent across a broader geographic area. Over the course of 1919, as professional football had increased in parity, teams began reaching out and participating in more barnstorming tours. By then, two informal but distinct interstate circuits had developed: one around the Eastern Seaboard (particularly New York City, New Jersey and Philadelphia) that played mostly on Saturdays due to blue laws, and another centered around the Midwestern region (Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ohio, and upstate New York) that played on Sundays. It was the latter that formed the basis of what would eventually become the modern National Football League.

Ohio's teams went along with the idea in the face of escalating costs: several bidding wars in the early 1900s, both in Pennsylvania and Ohio, had damaged the sport significantly, and another bidding war was about to erupt if something was not done. By forming a national league, teams reasoned that it would eliminate the practices of looting other teams' rosters and concentrating top talent in only a few teams, thus distributing talent more evenly and efficiently thereby reducing costs for each individual team while still keeping a top-level product on the field.