Professional gridiron football
The AFL is the second longest running professional football league in the United States after the NFL, although its current incarnation is a separate entity from the original, which folded due to bankruptcy in 2008.
Though there are still numerous teams at the semi-pro level in both the United States and Canada, they have mostly dropped to regional amateur status, and they no longer develop professional prospects, in part due to the rise of indoor football.
The NFL relies on television for nearly half of its revenue; this is in part because the league only plays one game each week, leaving fewer opportunities for ticket sales than the other professional sports (in turn, however, NFL stadiums have among the highest per-game attendance thanks to large stadium capacities, figures only exceeded or matched by some of the major college football teams and by the NASCAR Sprint Cup, both of which are also weekly events) and because the expense of the game (it has the largest rosters of any professional sport) makes the cost highly prohibitive.
For several years afterwards, individual players and sometimes entire teams received compensation to play in "barnstorming" type games without rigid schedules and against a variety of opponents.
William Chase Temple would become the first man to directly bankroll a football team himself when he assumed "ownership" of the Duquesne Country and Athletic Club in either 1898 or 1899.
The Cardinals organization, which was originally based on Racine Street in Chicago, has operated near-continuously since 1913, but counts an earlier team that played from 1898 to 1906 as part of its history.
Professional football took a step back as the Ohio League relied more on local, cut-rate talent, such as player-promoter George Parratt, and its Pennsylvania counterpart also steered clear of major spending.
The confusion reached a peak in 1925, when the aforementioned Maroons were hailed as the NFL champions by several newspapers after Pottsville defeated the Chicago Cardinals on December 6, even though there were still two weeks left in the season.
This portion of the NFL's existence saw the admission of the Boston Braves, owned by George Preston Marshall who was to exert major positive and negative influences on the league.
In 1939, NBC broadcast the first-ever televised Professional Football game from Ebbets Field, an October 22 contest between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Eagles.
Before this AFL's second year, the Rams jumped to the NFL and were replaced by the first Professional Football team to actually play its home games on the West Coast, the Los Angeles Bulldogs, who had several stars including quarterback Harry Newman and end Bill Moore.
The Boston Shamrocks, with all-star end Bill Fleming, outdrew the NFL's Redskins in 1936, causing George Preston Marshall to move the team to Washington.
The PCPFL was notable for its continuous operation through World War II (it even spun off a second league in 1944) and for its open embrace of black talent that had been blacklisted from the NFL since the 1930s.
Paul Brown made many innovations to the game on and off the field, including year-round coaching staffs, precision pass patterns, face masks, and the use of "messenger guards".
It was more of a 'swallowing' of the AAFC, with only the Browns, 49ers, and Colts being admitted to the established league, even though the Buffalo Bills drew good crowds and raised funds from citizens to back the franchise.
The league started out by signing half of the NFL's 1960 first-round draft choices including the Houston Oilers' Billy Cannon, and never slowed down.
With future Hall of Fame Coaches Hank Stram (Dallas Texans/Kansas City Chiefs) and Sid Gillman (LA/San Diego Chargers) as well as others like the Buffalo Bills' Lou Saban, the league offered a more risk-oriented on-field approach that appealed to fans.
Although it lost the first two, by its demise it had beaten two NFL teams proclaimed as "the best in history" to win the final two World Championship games between two Professional Football league champions.
The 1960 NFL had ten teams, only two south of Washington, D.C. and/or west of Chicago (the Los Angeles Rams and San Francisco 49ers), and none in the Southern United States, where college football still dominated.
The merger was agreed to in 1966, with a championship game to be played between the league titlists, and a merged schedule beginning with the 1970 season, when existing TV contracts could be re-worked.
The ACFL also produced some significant talent (e.g. Marvin Hubbard, Jim Corcoran and the first female professional football player, placeholder Patricia Palinkas) and lasted longer, through 1971, with a return season in 1973.
Originally intended as a minor league, this ended when several deep pocketed owners began luring top talent such as Herschel Walker to the USFL with high salaries.
This was a major problem for several teams, who were ill-prepared to face the NFL juggernaut, and fans quickly walked away from these lame-duck franchises when it became clear the USFL was done with spring football.
In 1993, the NFL began exploring expansion, eyeing five proposals (Baltimore, St. Louis, Memphis, Charlotte and Jacksonville), all of which were in cities that had hosted professional football before.
The average home attendances in the NFL: ¹ 80,000 without people watching on screens at the party decks The United Football League began play in 2009 with an abbreviated "Premiere Season" that featured four teams, two on each coast, in a six-week schedule.
By 1954, the IRFU and WIFU had gone professional (in part thanks to an American television contract from NBC that paid the Big Four more than the one DuMont was offering the NFL), and in that year the ORFU dropped out of competition for the decades-old Grey Cup, the championship of Canadian football.
Initially starting with the Sacramento Gold Miners (who jumped more or less intact from the WLAF and would become the San Antonio Texans in 1995), by 1995 the CFL had five U.S. teams, mostly based in the southern and western United States.
The league itself was suffering from financial problems at the time, and the general suspicion was that the addition of American teams was mainly a gambit to net expansion revenue for the eight remaining Canadian franchises.
The Alouettes' situation was largely stable for the first two decades after relaunch before a sudden collapse in the team's finances forced its owner to return the franchise to the league in 2019.
John F. Bassett, a Canadian multimedia heir, was at the center of two attempts to bring the rival leagues to Canada, first with the Toronto Northmen in the WFL, then with a USFL team in Hamilton, Ontario.
