He helped persuade the Pittsburgh Steelers (the Browns' archrivals) and Baltimore Colts (who shared the Baltimore-Washington market with the Washington Redskins) to follow suit, and each team received US$3 million to make the switch. The AFL was also the most successful of numerous upstart leagues of the 1960s and 1970s that attempted to challenge a major professional league's dominance. All ten AFL teams made up the bulk of the new American Football Conference. However, not wanting to undermine its own brand, the University of Washington was unwilling to let the fledgling league use Husky Stadium, and Rhodes' effort came to nothing (Seattle would later get a pro football team of its own). [14] The AFL began regular-season play (a night game on Friday, September 9, 1960) with eight teams in the league – the Boston Patriots, Buffalo Bills, Dallas Texans, Denver Broncos, Houston Oilers, Los Angeles Chargers, New York Titans, and Oakland Raiders. The loss reinforced for many the notion that the AFL was an inferior league. The AFL added its tenth and final team on May 24, 1967, when it awarded the league's second expansion franchise to an ownership group from Cincinnati, Ohio, headed by NFL legend Paul Brown. Oct 13, 2019 Semi 2: Philadelphia/AZ Hawks/Baltimore/Boston vs Montreal/Chicago. This fourth version of the AFL was the most successful, created by a number of owners who had been refused NFL expansion franchises or had minor shares of NFL franchises. On August 8, 1961, the AFL challenged the Canadian Football League to an exhibition game that would feature the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and the Buffalo Bills, which was attended by 24,376 spectators. Kevin Sherrington of The Dallas Morning News has argued that the presence of AFL and the subsequent merger radically altered the fortunes of the Pittsburgh Steelers, saving the team "from stinking". The Chiefs upset the Raiders in Oakland 17–7 in the league's Championship, the final AFL game played. Flores also has a Super Bowl ring as a player (1969 Kansas City Chiefs). The Continental League, a proposed third league for Major League Baseball that was to begin play in 1961, never played a single game, largely because MLB responded to the proposal by expanding to four of that league's proposed cities. Foss commissioned a friend of Harry Wismer's to develop the AFL's eagle-on-football logo. But the 1968 Jets had less than a handful of "common draftees". Bell, wary of expanding the 12-team league and risking its newfound success, rejected the offer. The bidding war for players between the AFL and NFL escalated in 1965. "[28][35][40], Namath and the Jets made good on his guarantee as they held the Colts scoreless until late in the fourth quarter. Long passes ("bombs") were commonplace in AFL offenses, led by such talented quarterbacks as John Hadl, Daryle Lamonica and Len Dawson. Tweet. 2001 National Football League Record and Fact Book, p. 405, Edited by Randal Liu and Matt Marini, Workman Publishing Company, New York, American Football League (disambiguation), Learn how and when to remove this template message, Full Color Football: The History of the American Football League, American Football League Most Valuable Players, American Football League Rookies of the Year, American Football League win-loss records, "New Pact to Last at Least 3 Years: Woodard's Position Unsure After 1970 Merger", "Kansas City Chiefs History – AFL Origins", September 4, 1985 – McGroder Joins The Wall Of Fame, "Oilers leave rich legacy of low-budget absurdity", "Canadian Football League 1960 Attendance on CFLdb Statistics", "Gillman laid foundation for all who followed", http://www.jsonline.com/story/life/green-sheet/2017/10/24/when-lombardi-sacked-milwaukees-bid-land-pro-football-franchise/789376001/, "Barron Hilton's Chargers turned short stay into long-term success", "Page 2's List for top upset in sports history", "Can Hornets match greatest all-time upsets? Videos - Most popular Twitter Videos in the last 24 hours! Needing cash, the Bidwills began entertaining offers from would-be investors, and one of the men who approached the Bidwills was Lamar Hunt, son and heir of millionaire oilman H. L. While the first years of the AFL saw uneven competition and low attendance, the league was buttressed by a generous television contract with the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) (followed by a contract with the competing National Broadcasting Company (NBC) for games starting with the 1965 season) that broadcast the more offense-oriented football league nationwide. Both the WHA and ABA lost several teams to financial insolvency over the course of their existences. All nine teams that were in the AFL at the time the merger was agreed upon were accepted into the league intact (as was the tenth team added between the time of the merger's agreement and finalization), and none of the AFL's teams have ever folded. [35] The league resulting from the merger was a 26-team juggernaut (since expanded to 32) with television rights covering all of the Big Three television networks and teams in close proximity to almost all of the top 40 metropolitan areas, a fact that has precluded any other competing league from gaining traction since the merger; failed attempts to mimic the AFL's success included the World Football League (1974–75), United States Football League (1983–85), the United Football League (2009–2012) and the AAF (2019), and two iterations of the XFL (2001 and 2020). The AFL also introduced the two-point conversion to professional football thirty-four years before the NFL instituted it in 1994 (college football had adopted the two-point conversion in the late 1950s). The NFL considers AFL statistics and records equivalent to its own. We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us. We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us. Oakland's eight-man ownership group was reduced to just three in 1961, after heavy financial losses in their first season. I think the league has always had good personnel, but the blocks were subtler and better conceived in this game."[36]. The AFL and NFL operated as separate leagues until 1970, with separate regular season and playoff schedules except for the championship game. The following is a sample of some records set during the existence of the league. ", "This time, realignment will be cool breeze", "=NBC gains broadcast rights to American Football League", "Dallas meeting in '66 saved Steelers from stinking", "Black football players boycott AFL All-Star game", American Football League week-by-week box scores, 1960–1969, PFRA article about the 1926 seasons of both the NFL and AFL, Pro Football Hall of Fame American Football League Legacy Game, Official Titans website story on the AFL's 50th Anniversary Celebration, National Federation of State High School Associations, High School Football National Championship, World League of American Football/NFL Europe/NFL Europa, American Association (1936–1941)/American Football League (1946–1950), American Football Association (1978–1983), Pacific Coast Professional Football League, Western Pennsylvania Professional Football Circuit, Association of Professional Football Leagues, Champions Professional Indoor Football League, Professional Indoor Football League (1998), Professional Indoor Football League (2012), "The Star-Spangled Banner" (Whitney Houston recording), All My Rowdy Friends Are Here on Monday Night, National Football League Players Association, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=American_Football_League&oldid=983375744, Defunct professional sports leagues in the United States, 1970 disestablishments in the United States, Defunct national American football leagues, Articles with dead external links from September 2010, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles needing additional references from December 2018, All articles needing additional references, Pages using navbox columns without the first column, Wikipedia articles with WorldCat identifiers, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, Established itself as a major American football league, Moved to Los Angeles in 1982, returned to Oakland in 1995 then, History: The AFL – Pro Football Hall of Fame (, This page was last edited on 13 October 2020, at 22:03. While the NFL was still emerging from thirty years of segregation influenced by Washington Redskins' owner George Preston Marshall, the AFL actively recruited from small and predominantly black colleges. "[28], The second AFL-NFL Championship (Super Bowl II) yielded a similar result. In addition to AFL greats like Hank Stram, Lou Saban, Sid Gillman and Al Davis were eventual hall of fame coaches such as Bill Walsh, a protégé of Davis with the AFL Oakland Raiders for one season; and Chuck Noll, who worked for Gillman and the AFL LA/San Diego Chargers from 1960 through 1965. Partly to honor Bartle, the franchise officially became the Kansas City Chiefs on May 26. The transformation of the struggling Titans into the New York Jets under new ownership further solidified the league's reputation among the major media. Hunt and Schramm completed the basic groundwork for a merger of the two leagues by the end of May, and on June 8, 1966, the merger was officially announced.
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