As college football thrived in the early 20th century, professional football struggled for respectability. To the American sporting public at the time, football was inextricably linked to the university setting. Walter Camp developed the modern game on a college campus, professionalism purportedly undermined the sport’s core principles, and certain college football games were already established annual traditions by the end of World War I. But the uphill battle proved quite winnable for the pro game, as it became—by a good measure—the dominant version of the sport by the end of the century.
The group of teams that became the NFL was organized in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association (changing its name in 1922), with Jim Thorpe as its nominal president. Former (and sometimes current) college stars had played for money since 1892, initially for athletic clubs in western Pennsylvania, then for the openly professional teams that were formed in mostly small towns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois. In its first season, in 1920, the APFA had 14 teams, including George Halas’s Decatur (Ill.) Staleys, who in 1922 became the Chicago Bears, the NFL’s dominant team for much of its formative period.
Joe Carr, an experienced promoter, succeeded Thorpe as president in 1921 and remained in that position until his death in 1939. Over the 1920s and early 1930s, league membership fluctuated between eight and 22 teams, the majority not in large cities but in towns such as Akron, Canton, Dayton, and Massillon, all in Ohio; Racine, Wisconsin; and Rockford, Illinois. With professionalism widely regarded as the greatest danger to college football, professional football was little more respectable than professional wrestling. Red Grange’s turning professional in 1925 provided a temporary boost to the professional game, but interest in professional football could be sustained only in those communities with franchises.
The NFL took its modern shape in 1933 under Carr’s guidance, when it was reorganized in two five-team divisions of big-city clubs (with Green Bay the lone exception) whose leaders would meet at the end of the season for the NFL title. In the 1930s professional football was predominantly a working-class spectator sport. The preseason College All-Star Game, created by Chicago Tribune sports columnist Arch Ward in 1934 to pit the reigning NFL champion against a team of just-graduated collegians, helped break down the barrier between college and professional football. Over the 1930s and ’40s the professional sport’s popularity grew in NFL cities, particularly those such as New York without a major state university with which to compete for the community’s loyalty. Minor professional leagues such as the American Association, Dixie League, and Pacific Coast Professional Football League had relatively modest local followings.
The NFL was also successful enough to attract competitors. The American Football League was formed in 1926 by Grange and his agent, but it lasted just one year. A second (1936–37) and third (1940–41) AFL were also formed. Finally, the All-America Football Conference (1946–49) seriously challenged the existing league and contributed the Cleveland Browns, San Francisco 49ers, and a first version of the Baltimore Colts to an expanded NFL in 1950. Yet professional football could offer the public nothing comparable to the compelling rivalries, youthful enthusiasm, and colourful pageantry of college football. It was only in the 1950s with the arrival of television that professional football could reach beyond the franchise cities to become a national sport.
(b. May 28, 1888, near Prague, Indian Territory [now in Okla.], U.S.—d. March 28, 1953, Lomita, Calif.)
One of the most accomplished all-around athletes in history, Jim Thorpe was selected by American sportswriters and broadcasters in 1950 as the greatest American athlete and the greatest football player of the first half of the 20th century.
Predominantly of American Indian (Sauk and Fox) descent, James Francis Thorpe attended Haskell Indian School in Lawrence, Kansas, and Carlisle (Pa.) Indian Industrial School. While playing football for Carlisle under coach Pop Warner, he was chosen as halfback on Walter Camp’s All-America teams in 1911 and 1912. He was a marvel of speed, power, kicking, and all-around ability. Also in 1912 Thorpe won the decathlon and the pentathlon by wide margins at the Olympic Games in Stockholm, but in 1913 an investigation by the Amateur Athletic Union showed that he had played semiprofessional baseball in 1909 and 1910, which should have disqualified him from Olympic competition. He was subsequently stripped of his gold medals.
Jim Thorpe in his playing days with football’s Canton (Ohio) Bulldogs. Hulton Archive/Getty Images
From 1913 through 1919, Thorpe was an outfielder for the New York, Cincinnati (Ohio), and Boston baseball teams in the National League. He was more successful as one of the early stars of American professional football from 1919 through 1926. He spent two seasons (1922–23) with the Oorang Indians, whose owner attracted crowds by having Thorpe and his teammates dress up and perform “Indian” tricks before games and at halftime. In 1920–21 he served as the first president of the American Professional Football Association (later the NFL). He also excelled in such diverse sports as basketball, boxing, lacrosse, swimming, and hockey.
In his later years, even as he was celebrated in magazine and newspaper articles as one of the greatest athletes of all time, alcoholism and inability to adjust to employment outside sports reduced Thorpe to near poverty. The 1951 film biography of his life, titled Jim Thorpe—All-American and starring Burt Lancaster, transformed his story into uplifting melodrama, with the fallen hero rescued by his old coach Pop Warner.
In 1954, after his death, the communities of Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, merged to form the borough of Jim Thorpe. From 1955 the Jim Thorpe Trophy was awarded annually to the most valuable player in the NFL. In 1973 the Amateur Athletic Union restored his amateur status, but the International Olympic Committee did not recognize his amateur status until 1982. Thorpe was subsequently restored as a “cowinner” of the decathlon and pentathlon of the 1912 Olympic Games (along with the second-place finishers in those events). His Olympic gold medals were restored to his family in 1983.
Through the end of World War II, very few African American athletes had an opportunity to play mainstream football at any level. A separate and decidedly unequal black football world first emerged in the 1890s as part of the larger expansion of college football. The first documented game between all-black colleges was played in 1892 in North Carolina between Biddle University and Livingston College. The first black college conferences, the Colored Intercollegiate Athletic Association and the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, were formed in 1912, followed by the Southwestern Athletic Conference in 1920 and the Midwestern Athletic Association in 1926. Black college football was woefully underfunded, but it had its own All-Americans (stars such as “Jazz” Byrd, Ben Stevenson, “Tarzan” Kendall, and “Big Train” Moody), its great rivalries (Howard-Lincoln, Tuskegee-Atlanta, Morgan-Hampton, Wiley-Prairie View), its own pageantry, and even its own scandals. All of this took place outside the consciousness of the mainstream football public but was thoroughly covered by a thriving black press.
Mainstream football, however, was not altogether segregated. William Henry Lewis and William Tecumseh Sherman Jackson were black teammates for Amherst College in 1889, and Lewis made Walter Camp’s All-America team in 1892 after he had moved to Harvard to play football while attending law school (he later became an assistant U.S. attorney general). A handful of black players were always part of big-time college football, and some—including Lewis, Fritz Pollard at Brown, Paul Robeson at Rutgers, and Duke Slater at Iowa—were among the early game’s greatest stars. Yet, until 1939, when UCLA fielded a team that included Jackie Robinson, Kenny Washington, and two other black teammates, no college had more than one or two black players, and most continued to have none.
The routine indignities facing the black pioneers on predominantly white teams and campuses became compounded when intersectional games were scheduled between segregated Southern schools and marginally integrated Northern ones. Typically, the Northern school agreed to “bench” its one or two black players so as not to offend Southern sensibilities. Such incidents occasionally aroused local protest from progressive student groups and were thoroughly covered in the black press, but they went largely unreported in the mainstream media. By the late 1930s the typical arrangement was to hold out the black players for games played in the segregated South but to allow them to play at home, an accommodation that continued into the 1950s.
The first integrated college football game in the South took place in 1947 between Virginia and Harvard, whose Chester Pierce was permitted to play. Many Northern schools solved the problem simply by not scheduling teams from the South, and bowl games likewise avoided racial incidents by matching up only Southern teams. The Cotton Bowl was integrated, without incident, in 1948, the Orange Bowl in 1955. The Sugar Bowl was integrated by the University of Pittsburgh’s Bobby Grier in 1956, only after Georgia’s segregationist governor, Marvin Griffin, backed down from threats to keep Georgia Tech from playing. The integration of Southern college teams progressed gradually over the postwar years. The Big 6 conference was integrated in 1947 and the Missouri Valley Conference in 1950; but the Atlantic Coast Conference did not begin integrating until 1963, the Southwest Conference until 1966, and the Southeastern Conference until 1967.
The NFL had been integrated at the beginning, with Fritz Pollard among the league’s first stars and some 13 African American players hired between 1920 and 1933. Between 1934 and 1945, however, a “gentleman’s agreement,” apparently at the instigation of George Preston Marshall, owner of the Boston (later Washington) Redskins, kept the NFL all-white. The reintegration of professional football began in 1946—in the NFL, where the Rams risked losing their lease on the Los Angeles Coliseum if they did not sign Kenny Washington (the Rams signed Woody Strode as well, to give Washington a black roommate); and in the rival All-America Football Conference, where coach Paul Brown immediately signed Bill Willis and Marion Motley for his Cleveland Browns—and it was completed in 1962, when Marshall signed Bobby Mitchell to play for the Redskins. The first generation of black NFL stars came almost exclusively from the mainstream football world, but in the 1960s NFL scouts discovered the black colleges, Eddie Robinson’s Grambling Tigers in particular. This golden era for black college football was short-lived, however, as integration ended the black colleges’ monopoly on local African American athletic talent.
Together with the racial integration of the game at all levels, the coming of television in the 1950s marked a new era in the development of American football. The 1950s were a boom time for professional football but a bad time for the colleges, yet intercollegiate football, too, emerged from the decade not only intact but on the verge of unprecedented prosperity.
Immediately following World War II, college football experienced a surge in popularity, but attendance declined by the end of the decade and recovered very slowly over the 1950s. Many colleges dropped the game as too expensive, including one-time powers such as Fordham and St. Mary’s. The informally organized Ivy League became a formal organization in 1954, choosing to play a “deemphasized” brand of football. The National Association of Intercollegiate Basketball, created in 1940 by small colleges concerned about the state of amateurism in that sport, became the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) in 1952 and first sponsored a national championship in football in 1956.
The colleges and universities that clung to the big-time game faced a double crisis: the impact of television on gate receipts and the final throes of the ongoing controversy over professionalism. The NCAA named its first executive director, Walter Byers, in 1951 (he continued in that role until 1987) and took on regulatory and enforcement powers for the first time. Regarding television not as the tremendous source of revenue it eventually became but as the most serious threat to gate receipts, the NCAA in 1951 assumed control of broadcasting rights and established severe restrictions on the number of times any team could appear on TV. Under NCAA control, while attendance grew from 20 million in 1961 to 35.8 million in 1981, TV revenues increased from $3 million to $31 million, then doubled in 1982 when the NCAA signed its final contract with the networks.
Divvying up these huge revenues nearly tore the NCAA apart—small schools sought a portion for themselves, while the major football powers resented sharing the income that they generated. The big schools also chafed as NCAA decision making was dominated by the more numerous smaller schools. University and college divisions were created within the NCAA in 1968, with 223 schools in the former and 386 in the latter. Then, at a special meeting in 1973, institutions were assigned to Divisions I, II, or III, based essentially on the size and ambitions of the football program. Subsequent conventions fought over the allocation of TV revenues among the divisions, and in 1977 the major football conferences (excluding only the Pacific-8 and the Big Ten), along with the major independents such as Notre Dame, formed the College Football Association (CFA) to challenge the NCAA’s power. Faced with the threat of the CFA, the NCAA at its 1978 convention split Division I into Division I-A (the big-time football schools) and I-AA.
Still unsatisfied by the division of TV revenues under the new arrangement, the CFA attempted to negotiate its own TV contract in 1981. When the NCAA threatened sanctions, the Universities of Georgia and Oklahoma sued the organization for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act; the University of Texas sued separately. By 1984 the plaintiffs had prevailed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the NCAA no longer controlled TV contracts. The CFA itself was undermined in 1990 when Notre Dame broke ranks to sign its own contract with NBC, after which individual conferences began negotiating separate arrangements with the networks.
As a consequence of these varied actions, by the 1990s television revenues were going almost entirely to the big football schools, and major conference realignments—Penn State joining the Big Ten in 1990, the Southeastern Conference expanding to 12 teams in 1992, the Big 8 becoming the Big 12 in 1996 by absorbing four Texas schools from the disbanded Southwest Conference—resulted in large part from consideration of TV markets.
College football’s other post–World War II crisis, regarding professionalism, reached a flash point in the late 1940s and early 1950s over athletic scholarships. Subsidizing athletes had been common since the 1920s but was not officially sanctioned and was entirely unregulated, controlled more often by alumni than by athletic departments. When the NCAA took on the issue after World War II, the Big Ten and the Pacific Coast Conference lobbied for need-based scholarships that awarded on-campus jobs. The Southeastern and Southwest conferences led the campaign for open athletic scholarships, declaring the job plan merely hypocritical (entailing phony jobs that required no work).
The job plan bloc prevailed at the NCAA convention in January 1948, passing what became known as the Sanity Code, but battles at subsequent meetings led to its being rescinded at the 1951 convention, and the now-familiar athletic grant-in-aid was finally adopted in 1957. Also in 1951, most of Army’s football team was dismissed for cheating on exams; and it had been revealed earlier in the year that basketball players at several major universities had accepted money from gamblers to shave points. Out of this morass of scandal, the NCAA emerged stronger than ever, solidifying its standing as the regulatory, investigative, and punitive organization that ruled collegiate sports.
Once the issue of financial support was resolved and the sport fully integrated, the players’ status as student-athletes received sharper scrutiny. The NCAA first tied eligibility for athletic scholarships to academic success in high school in 1965 with its “1.6 rule,” then replaced it with a 2.0 grade-point-average standard in 1973. When the group passed Proposition 48 in 1983, followed by Proposition 16 in 1992, which together set minimal grade-point averages in a high school core curriculum and scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test for scholarships and freshman eligibility, it addressed one continuing controversy while provoking another—its disproportionate impact on African Americans.
The problems and convulsions of the larger society inevitably spilled over into college football. The racial turmoil of the late 1960s led to bitter confrontations between black players and white coaches at several universities, and drug problems arose periodically, ranging from the abuse of amphetamines in the 1970s to the more dangerous abuse of anabolic steroids in the 1980s. The passage of Title IX forced athletic departments to divert financial resources into sports for women as well as men and made the football team, with its huge number of scholarships but also its unique capacity to generate income, a focal point for debates over gender equity. The commercialization set in motion by television led to institutional partnerships with soft drink and shoe companies, corporate sponsorship of bowl games, and million-dollar contracts for football coaches who were expected to contend for national championships. The competing demands of the sport, as an extracurricular activity for student-athletes and as mass entertainment, remained at the heart of American college football at the turn of the 21st century.
Even as bowl games proliferated in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, controversies shadowed them for their commercialization of the amateur sport and prolonging of the season at the expense of academics. Resistance disappeared when the financial windfall from the televised contests became a major source of revenue for the top teams and conferences. A new controversy emerged in the 1970s, however, regarding the bowls’ inability to produce an unambiguous national champion. A perennial call for a national championship playoff, resisted by defenders of the traditional bowl games, eventually prompted the creation in 1992 of the Bowl Coalition—involving four major bowl games (Cotton, Fiesta, Orange, and Sugar), five major conferences (excluding the Big Ten and Pac-10), and independent Notre Dame—with the goal of matching the two top-rated teams in a championship game that would rotate among the four bowls.
In 1995 the Bowl Coalition was replaced by the Bowl Alliance (involving six conferences, Notre Dame, and only three bowls), but the nonparticipation of the Rose Bowl, Big Ten, and Pac-10 continued to leave the scheme badly flawed. In 1998 the Rose Bowl and its two participating conferences joined the Bowl Championship Series (BCS), which included all the major teams and conferences, with a supposed national championship game now rotating among the Rose, Orange, Sugar, and Fiesta bowls.
While the BCS and its forerunners produced match-ups of the two top-ranked teams in the coaches’ poll in 10 of the first 16 years of the system, the arrangements were not without controversy. The matching of the University of Nebraska with Miami in the 2002 Rose Bowl, after Nebraska had failed to win its own conference championship, made it clear that the BCS had not yet resolved the issue and guaranteed that a debate over a playoff along the lines of the NCAA basketball tournament would continue. In 2003, because of its relatively low computer rankings, the University of Southern California was not selected to play in the national championship game despite having ended the regular season atop both the AP and coaches’ polls. This resulted in the only split championship in the BCS era and led to the replacement of the AP poll by the Harris poll in the BCS formula. Many observers have agitated for the FBS to adopt a playoff format similar to that of the lower college football divisions, but the bowl tradition (more than 30 games played from just before Christmas to just after New Year’s Day, usually in warm locales, attracting hundreds of thousands of vacationing fans) and the financial windfall provided by bowls make such a change unlikely.
Connected to a national audience through television—and under no obligation to build character or maintain educational standards—professional football became the most spectacular success story in the world of American sport over the second half of the 20th century. To an even greater degree than for college football, television became the professional sport’s lifeblood, with increasingly lucrative television contracts guaranteeing large profits for every club no matter how well it fared on the field. In the 1950s, while college authorities fretted over television, NFL commissioner Bert Bell embraced it immediately and won congressional approval to black out television coverage in the cities where home teams were playing. In a stroke, Bell’s efforts assured maximum attendance for the league’s 12 clubs with little impact on the size of the league’s rapidly growing TV audience. The televised championship game between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants in 1958, decided in sudden death overtime, is widely recognized as the turning point in professional football’s embrace by a national audience.
Baltimore Colts quarterback Johnny Unitas (No. 19) throwing a pass during the 1958 championship game against the New York Giants. Robert Riger/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
When Bell died in 1959, he was succeeded by the general manager of the Los Angeles Rams, Pete Rozelle, who became the most powerful and most effective commissioner in American professional sports. In addition to creating NFL Properties, which became a multibillion-dollar enterprise, Rozelle negotiated a series of contracts with the TV networks that grew from $4.65 million for the 1962 season to nearly $500 million per year when he retired in 1989, guaranteeing more than $17 million per club before a single fan bought a ticket. Most crucially, Rozelle persuaded Congress to continue granting the NFL exemptions from the Sherman Antitrust Act, allowing franchises to operate not as individual businesses but as a single entity, each club sharing equally in league-generated revenues. (In 2010 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Sherman Antitrust Act did indeed apply to the NFL; by that time, however, the league had already established itself as the most powerful and profitable professional sports organization in the country.) Under Rozelle, the value of franchises increased from about $1 million in 1960 to more than $100 million in 1989, and under the structure he put in place franchise values exceeded $500 million by the end of the 20th century.
The NFL faced competition from a new rival in 1960, when the American Football League (AFL), backed by Texas billionaire Lamar Hunt, fielded teams in eight cities, three of them in direct competition with NFL franchises. A television contract with NBC gave the AFL a financial security none of its predecessors had had, and the NFL and AFL agreed to a merger in 1966, completed in 1970 with 26 clubs in two conferences. The pass-oriented AFL brought more excitement to professional football, as well as the game’s most glamorous player, the New York Jets’ quarterback Joe Namath. Out of the merger also came the Super Bowl, which soon became the single most popular and lucrative of all sporting events in the United States. Super Bowl I (not yet with that name) was played between the Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs after the 1966 season, with more than 40 percent of the country’s television sets tuned in to the two networks that broadcast the game. That percentage never dropped lower than 36, and it nearly hit 50 in 1982, as the game was eventually watched by as many as 130 million Americans in addition to a worldwide audience. The Super Bowl became a major civic ritual, as famous for its surrounding hoopla and million-dollar commercials as for the football games.
Constant innovation held fan interest and kept it steadily increasing. Polls beginning in the early 1970s repeatedly identified professional football as Americans’ favourite sport. Over the 1970s and ’80s the NFL withstood the challenge of new rival leagues—the World Football League (1974–75) and the United States Football League (1983–85)—and invested in the Arena Football League (an indoor version of the sport that was played on a shortened field during the NFL’s off-season from 1987 to 2008 and again from 2010 in a new incarnation) and expanded into Europe in 1991 with the World League of American Football (later NFL Europe; disbanded in 2007).
The African American athletes who increasingly dominated football also brought a new style to the game. The beginnings of end zone dances in the 1970s escalated into highly choreographed routines, followed by other attention-grabbing gestures by defensive as well as offensive players. These displays eventually led to rules against “excessive celebration” (in the NCAA as well as the NFL) and countercharges by African American spokesmen that the banned actions and gestures were not failures of sportsmanship but African American self-expression. Fans were divided between enjoyment of the antics and criticism for the loss of old-fashioned values, but the new flamboyance played well on television, and it made football more than ever an arena in which Americans dealt with shifting attitudes about race.
The two events most responsible for shaping the NFL for the 21st century took place off the field: a series of legal decisions established free agency for players and gave owners greater freedom to move their franchises. The growth of television revenues inevitably led the players to demand a fair share of the profits. In 1970 a brief trainingcamp strike by the NFL Players Association (formed in 1956 but relatively inactive until the 1970s) caused no disruption of the football season but foreshadowed more serious labor-management disputes to come. In 1974 a 41-day strike during training camp affected only preseason games, as the Players Association capitulated. More serious and prolonged strikes in 1982 (when the players were locked out for 57 days and the season was reduced to nine games) and 1987 (when a strike lasted 24 days, leading owners to cancel one game and hire “replacement” players for three more) were equally unsuccessful from the players’ perspective but far more damaging to the image of the league.
A full quarter of the league’s veteran players crossed picket lines in 1974, and in 1982 and 1987 those who refused to strike or who criticized the union included some of the game’s top players. What the players lost on the picket line, they won in court, however, as a series of lawsuits finally forced the owners in 1993 to agree to free agency, with a salary cap (a limit on each club’s expenditures on salaries). With players now able to change teams, salaries increased dramatically—from an average of $490,000 in 1992 to $663,000 in 1993 and reaching $1,896,000 by 2009—yet the clubs’ financial stability and the competitive balance among teams were preserved by the salary cap and the college draft, which the Players Association made no attempt to challenge.
The NFL’s other defeat in court benefited individual owners. In 1980 Al Davis, the managing general partner of the Oakland Raiders, successfully sued the NFL for not allowing him to move the Raiders to Los Angeles, where he expected to make considerably more money (after leaving in 1982, Davis returned the Raiders to Oakland in 1995). The freedom to move franchises without league approval gave owners a powerful position in negotiating with city governments that viewed an NFL franchise as an essential foundation of community pride and the local economy. Numerous franchise shifts in the 1980s and ’90s provoked local outrage but did not damage the league. At the turn of the 21st century, professional football was without question the most popular and the most profitable of American sports.
A member of the Los Angeles Raiders takes a break from picketing during the 1987 NFL players strike. Mike Powell/Getty Images
The gridiron football played in Canada closely resembles the U.S. game, but it developed independently, and, overshadowed by ice hockey, it never achieved equal national importance.
Canadian football’s earliest history remains uncertain. It is generally agreed that rugby came to Canada with British soldiers early in the 19th century, and games were reported in the Toronto Globe as early as 1859. Students at the University of Toronto were playing football by the early 1860s, but it was clubs in Quebec and Ontario, rather than universities as in the United States, that led the way in developing the sport. Several of these clubs formed the Foot Ball Association of Canada in 1873, adopting Rugby Union rules in 1875. This initial association collapsed in 1877, to be followed by the first of the Canadian Rugby Football Unions in 1880; the final one, the Canadian Rugby Union (CRU), formed in 1891. Provincial unions were likewise formed in Ontario and Quebec in 1883, but football developed later in the West, with the Western Canadian Rugby Football Union not forming until 1911. The top senior clubs—the Big Four of Quebec and Ontario (Ottawa, Montreal, Hamilton, and Toronto), together with the five top Western clubs (Winnipeg, Saskatchewan, Calgary, Edmonton, and British Columbia)—eventually formed the major football organization in Canada, the professional Canadian Football League.
The Grey Cup, named for Governor-General Earl Grey, was first awarded in 1909, with college and club teams alike competing. Over time, the Grey Cup became Canada’s professional championship, as well as a week-long festival and the premier single sporting event in the country.
The CRU became the umbrella organization for all the football unions, including the Canadian Intercollegiate Rugby Football Union, which was formed by eight universities in 1897 in reaction to the growing professionalism among the top senior clubs. In addition to the championship for senior clubs, the CRU sponsored an intermediate championship beginning in 1894 and a junior championship beginning in 1908.
No clear boundaries between intercollegiate and club football, or even amateur and professional, were drawn in Canada for several decades, nor were football’s commercial possibilities realized for some time. Unlike U.S. football, early Canadian football was a game for the players rather than the spectators. The University of Toronto’s victory over the Parkdale Canoe Club for the initial Grey Cup, for example, drew 3,807 fans and generated gross revenues of $2,616.40. This was at a time when top U.S. university teams were playing before 50,000 spectators and Yale was earning more than $1 million from football.
Developing a uniform set of rules in Canada was far more difficult than in the United States. The U.S. model was a powerful influence that was resisted by those who desired to preserve the Canadian-ness of Canadian football. Though clinging to certain rugby features, the Canadian game was gradually “Americanized” by U.S. coaches such as Frank “Shag” Shaughnessy at McGill University (1912–29) and by pressure from Western clubs, which were more open to U.S. influence and to professionalism. The legalization of the forward pass in 1931 led clubs, particularly in the West, to seek U.S. players skilled at the passing game who were offered local employment in the midst of the Great Depression rather than direct payments.
An openly professional league, along the lines of the NFL, was first discussed in the 1930s, but it did not become a reality until after World War II. In 1935 the first-ever Western victory for the Grey Cup, by a Winnipeg club with nine U.S. players on the roster, marked a major turning point. The eastern-dominated CRU responded by establishing a residency requirement for players and limiting “imports” to five. The limit was raised from five to seven in 1950, then to eight in 1952, nine in 1954, and eventually 16. The top clubs formed their own Canadian Football Council (CFC) in 1956, dropping the name rugby altogether. The CFC became the Canadian Football League (CFL) in 1958 and withdrew from the CRU, with the four privately owned eastern clubs becoming the Eastern Football Conference in 1959 and the five community-run Western clubs becoming the Western Football Conference in 1961.
With the creation of the CFL, Canadian football at last took its modern form, with clearly differentiated professional and amateur versions. The CRU changed its name to the Canadian Amateur Football Association (CAFA) in 1966, when it also turned over trusteeship of the Grey Cup to the CFL; since 1986 CAFA has been known as Football Canada. As senior club football outside the CFL declined, the intercollegiate game, at a level comparable to (non-scholarship) Division III in the United States, became the chief amateur version. Provincial and regional intercollegiate athletic unions joined in a reconstituted Canadian Interuniversity Athletic Union (CIAU) in 1961 and changed its name to Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS) in 2001. Since 1967, conference champions have competed for the Vanier Cup in an annual Canadian College Bowl.
The CFL experienced a period of growth and relative stability in the 1970s and early 1980s, reaching an attendance record of 2,856,031 in 1983. Average salaries likewise increased, from $16,072 for imports and $10,920 for nonimports in 1970 to $72,259 and $53,189 in 1985. With more than eight million viewers making the Grey Cup the most-watched sporting event in Canada, television revenue reached $15.6 million for 1981–83 and $33 million for 1984–86.
Then came precipitous decline and turmoil. Faced with competition from televised NFL games and a persistent perception that home-grown football was second-rate, the CFL saw TV revenues fall to $240,000 per club by 1991. Montreal lost its original franchise in 1982, then its replacement in 1987. Deficit-burdened franchises did not move but repeatedly changed hands. The purchase of the Toronto Argonauts in 1991 by millionaire Bruce McNall, actor John Candy, and hockey great Wayne Gretzky marked the most conspicuous effort to produce first-class football with highly paid U.S. stars, but the experiment failed, and McNall and Gretzky sold the club in 1994 after Candy died.
Constantly fearing NFL expansion into Montreal and Toronto, CFL leaders had been discussing since the early 1970s their own expansion into the United States, which became a reality with teams in Sacramento (Calif.) in 1993 and Las Vegas (Nev.), Shreveport (La.), and Baltimore (Md.) in 1994, but the experiment failed after just three seasons. In 1996 the CFL reverted to an eight-team all-Canadian league, then returned to its original nine for the 2002 season. That configuration lasted only until 2006, when the Ottawa franchise folded. Stadium renovations by a number of teams in the early years of the 21st century increased attendance numbers league-wide, and simultaneous improved television revenues helped the CFL again become a profitable enterprise by 2010, with an eye toward expansion.
