American Football League

American Football League (AFL), American major professional gridiron football league that was founded in 1959 and began play in 1960 as a rival of the National Football League (NFL). The American Football League (AFL) competed for the attention of fans and challenged the prominence of the NFL in the 1960s, eventually leading to the first Super Bowl (an end-of-season championship game between the AFL and NFL champions) in 1967 and a merger of the two leagues in 1970.

Early years

With the increasing popularity of the NFL in the late 1950s, wealthy Texas businessman Lamar Hunt, the son of oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, sought to place an NFL team in Dallas, but the league did not want to expand beyond its 12 teams. In 1959 the 27-year-old Hunt recruited seven other ownership groups to form an eight-team league. Acknowledging the uphill battle they faced, the group of owners called themselves “The Foolish Club.”

The AFL suffered an early setback when the ownership group from their Minneapolis, Minnesota, team left the league to join the NFL as the Minnesota Vikings in 1960; the AFL replaced it with a franchise in Oakland, California. The new league began play in 1960, backed by a five-year television contract with the ABC network that helped solidify it as a serious challenger to the NFL. The AFL’s eight teams were split into two divisions: the Boston Patriots, Buffalo Bills, New York Titans, and Houston Oilers constituted the East Division, and the Los Angeles Chargers, Denver Broncos, Oakland Raiders, and Dallas Texans (who were owned by Hunt) made up the West Division. On New Year’s Day in 1961, the Oilers defeated the Chargers, 24–16, at Jeppesen Stadium in Houston to win the inaugural AFL championship.

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The Chargers relocated to San Diego in 1961. Hunt moved the Texans to Kansas City, Missouri (where they were renamed the Chiefs), in 1963, after the NFL awarded an expansion team to Dallas (the Cowboys). That same year the New York Titans changed their name to the Jets. The Miami Dolphins were added to the league in 1966, and the Cincinnati Bengals joined in 1968.

The AFL revitalized professional football with an open style of play on offense that emphasized passing rather than the more conservative rushing-based game plans that were prominent in the NFL. The AFL also added a two-point conversion option following touchdowns decades before the NFL adopted it. Among the AFL’s notable players were quarterbacks George Blanda and Len Dawson, running back Floyd Little, wide receiver Don Maynard, and linebacker Nick Buoniconti.

Competition leads to a merger

However, no AFL player was as notable as Joe Namath, the University of Alabama quarterback who decided to bypass the more established NFL to sign with the AFL’s New York Jets in 1965. That year the emboldened AFL signed a second television contract, this time with the NBC network, and engaged in a fierce bidding war for top talent with the NFL. Before the Jets signed Namath, the St. Louis Cardinals of the NFL had drafted him and agreed to entertain his then-outlandish contract request: $200,000 and a new Lincoln Continental convertible car. After leading Alabama to the national championship in the 1965 Orange Bowl game, Namath signed a three-year contract worth more than $400,000 with the Jets. Signing Namath was a boon for the AFL. The good-looking and charismatic quarterback helped drive audience members to a sport that was increasingly becoming a television experience.

Hunt and Dallas Cowboys general manager Tex Schramm held secret talks about an AFL-NFL merger because the bidding war for players was making business difficult for both leagues. In June 1966 the AFL and NFL announced they would be merging, with a championship game between the two leagues starting in January 1967 that would later be called the Super Bowl. The merger called for a single draft of players and for NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle to be the commissioner of the expanded NFL. However, the merger would not be fully implemented until 1970.

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Because of concerns that the U.S. Justice Department would challenge the merger on antitrust grounds, the two leagues asked Congress to seek an antitrust exemption. Rozelle said that the merger plan would be scrapped if Congress did not grant the exemption. The NFL offered House Majority Whip Hale Boggs, a Louisiana Democrat, an expansion team in New Orleans in exchange for his help in getting the antitrust exemption passed. Less than two weeks after Congress passed the exemption in the fall of 1966, Rozelle announced a new NFL team for New Orleans, which was later named the Saints.

Super Bowl

The first Super Bowl, which was officially called the AFL-NFL World Championship Game, took place at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on January 15, 1967. The NFL champion Green Bay Packers handily defeated the AFL champion Kansas City Chiefs, 35–10, reinforcing the perception among the news media and fans that the NFL was the superior league. There was a similar result in 1968, when the Packers defeated the Raiders, 33–14, in Super Bowl II at the Orange Bowl in Miami. When the Jets prepared to face the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III in January 1969 (also at the Orange Bowl), Namath’s confidence was nothing short of brazen, declaring to an audience at the Miami Touchdown Club a few days before the game, “The Jets will win—I guarantee it.” He backed up his words, leading the Jets to a 16–7 victory in one of the biggest upsets in professional gridiron football history.

Sportswriter Edwin (“Bud”) Shrake summed up the significance of the Jets’ victory in a Sports Illustrated magazine article in 1969: “There is still a reasonable debate whether Namath is now the best quarterback in the game, or even the best in the AFL, but what the Jets accomplished against the Colts in Miami has lifted an entire league out of its adolescence.” The Chiefs won the 1969 AFL championship, concluding the final postseason for the league, then went on to defeat the Minnesota Vikings, 23–7, in Super Bowl IV. In 1970 the AFL merged with the NFL, and its teams became members of the NFL’s new American Football Conference (AFC).