The Scrapbook History Of Pro Football

While the Super Bowl has become a worldwide cultural event, the annual league championship games had a long history even before the first Super Bowl in January, 1967. From the first American Football League's attempt to settle the league title on the gridiron in 1926 to the separate NFL and AFL championships of the 1965 season, this history offers a narrative of each game, including line-ups, box scores and team statistics.

Big television contracts in the 1960s created the Super Bowl, as well as the 1970 merger of the National Football League with the pass-oriented American Football League. Since then, professional football has been America's most popular televised team sport, developing into a wide-open passing game by the 21st century. Handling the completion side of the aerial game, receivers are not often as celebrated as quarterbacks or coaches, even in the era of San Francisco 49er Jerry Rice's supremacy. This book provides a history of pro pass receiving and its influence on the game prior to the televised era. The author studies pro football's formative and mid-20th century years, highlighting the players who pulled pigskins from flight, like the legendary Don Hutson, Gibby Welch, Johnny Blood, Ray Flaherty, Crazy Legs Hirsch, Mac Speedie, Choo Choo Roberts and many others.

" NFL placekicking has quite a history, from the dropkick, to the placekick, to kicking barefoot, to soccer style kicking. Each style of kicking is analyzed through statistics to show its effectiveness for field goals and extra points. Also discussed is the use of artificial turf and the development of domed stadiums and their effects on placekicking accuracy"--

Title Quests: A Complete History of the National Football League’s Championship Series is a retelling of a fascinating series of championship NFL Football contests that have seen scores ranging from 7–0 to 73–0, dark suspicions of underworld interference, a game played just inshore from a roiling Gulf of Mexico hurricane, featuring teams with names such as the Boston Redskins, Chicago Cardinals, and Cleveland Rams. These games have been played in blizzards, downpours, and deserts, interrupted by power failures, featuring brothers versus brothers, witnessing wild comebacks and collapses, with a team winning the title in its very first year in the league, and marking the birth and death of dynasties. Expect the unexpected.

The 1970 merger between the American Football League and the National Football League laid the foundation for a stronger brand of gridiron competition, providing a new level of excitement for fans. This book examines each year of the NFL's pivotal decade in detail, covering the great names, great rivalries and great games, as well as the key changes in both strategy and rules. Along the way, the author explains how pro football developed into a near-religious American tradition.