History of The National Football League - Merger With The American Football League

Merger With The American Football League

The NFL held a monopoly on professional football in the United States for most of the 1950s, a rare occurrence for a league that had at least one competing league in every year since 1934. By 1960, a group of potential professional football owners that would become known as the Foolish Club had become frustrated with their efforts to buy into the NFL (some were NFL franchise minority owners such as Harry Wismer and Ralph Wilson; others, such as Lamar Hunt and Bud Adams, had tried but failed to buy NFL teams) and formed a new league, the American Football League. It was the eighth professional football league to use the name and the fourth to be universally considered a major-league competitor to the NFL. The AFL would prove to be the NFL's most formidable challenger to date.

By the middle of the 1960s competition for players, including separate college drafts, was driving up player salaries. In 1965, in the most high profile such contest and a major boost to the AFL, University of Alabama quarterback Joe Namath signed with the New York Jets rather than the NFL's St. Louis Cardinals for a then-record $427,000. In 1966, the NFL's New York Giants broke an informal agreement and signed placekicker Pete Gogolak, who was under contract to the AFL's Buffalo Bills. Then AFL Commissioner Al Davis embarked on a campaign to sign players away from the NFL, especially quarterbacks, but behind the scenes a number of NFL team owners began action to end the detrimental rivalry.

Several NFL franchises led by Cowboys General Manager Tex Schramm asked to meet with AFL owners to negotiate a merger. In an agreement brokered by Schramm and AFL founder Lamar Hunt, the two leagues announced their merger deal on June 8, 1966. The leagues would thenceforth hold a Common Draft and an end-of-season World Championship Game between the two league champions (later known as the Super Bowl and reverting to simply an NFL championship game). Still another city received an NFL franchise thanks to the AFL, as New Orleans was awarded an NFL team after Louisiana's federal Congressmen pushed for the passage of Public Law 89-800, which permitted the merger and exempted the action from Anti-Trust restrictions. The monopoly that would be created needed to be legitimized by an act of Congress. In 1970, the leagues fully merged under the name National Football League and divided into two conferences of an equal number of teams. There was a financial settlement, with the AFL teams paying a combined $18 million over 20 years.

Although the AFL's identity was subsumed by the NFL, the NFL eventually adopted many of the AFL's innovations including the on-field game clock, names on player jerseys, recruiting at small and predominantly black colleges, gate and television revenue-sharing, establishment of southern franchises, and more wide-open offensive rules.

Unlike previous armed conflicts such as World War I and World War II, both of which effectively stopped or dramatically reduced the amount of professional football played in the United States, both the AFL and NFL were largely unaffected by the Vietnam War and did not lose a significant number of players to the war draft. There is at least one recorded incidence of the NFL using champagne units to keep its players from being sent overseas (the Dallas Cowboys used the Texas Air National Guard's 147th Fighter Interceptor Group, a well-known champagne unit to shield seven Cowboys players from combat in Vietnam).