Quick Facts

Interesting Notes

• With an estimated worth of $1.5 billion, the Dallas Cowboys are the most valued sports franchise in the world.
• The Colts were the first NFL team to have cheerleaders.
• The Oakland Raiders were originally named the Oakland Senors thanks to fan voting. After being ridiculed by the media for several weeks, the team changed its name to the Raiders (which finished third in the voting).

Culture in the NFL History

The game grew out of merger negotiations recently completed between two competing football leagues that had spent the 1960s fighting for the allegiances of America's sports fans. The venerable National Football League, which had been around since the 1920s, favored a smashmouth brand of football popular among traditionalists, while the upstart American Football League (founded in 1960) offered a more wide-open, high-scoring version of the game that appealed to younger fans. In 1966, after half a decade of fierce rivalry between the NFL and AFL, the two leagues' owners hammered out an agreement to merge into one unified organization: the modern NFL, a single football league that would be divided into two conferences (the NFC and AFC) to reflect the old NFL/AFL split. At the time of the 1966 merger agreement, however, both the AFL and NFL had to honor separate television contracts that made full integration of the two leagues impossible until 1970. In the meantime, the teams that won each league's separate playoffs would meet each January in a single, end-of-season game to crown a true national champion. That game—unpoetically named, at first, the "AFL-NFL World Championship Game"—quickly became known as the Super Bowl. And the rest, as they say, is history.