The Super Bowl: Chasing Football Immortality

The Super Bowl: Chasing Football Immortality — page 5
approached three fellow team owners about banding together to start the American Professional Football Conference APFC It was time to see if other owners were ready to buy into the idea Hay made his case before the men gathered in the showroom In the new league he envisioned teams would share a common rule book they would not raid one another's rosters and the size of contracts would be limited For two hours the men hammered out an outline for the league Hay's vision became reality The APFC still disjointed disorganized and largely dysfunctional changed its name to the American Professional Football Association APFA and began its first season just a few weeks later Despite its shortcomings the APFA marked the jumping off point for organized professional football Less than two years later the league changed its name to the National Football League THE DAWN OF THE NFL CHAMPIONSHIP For more than a decade the NFL remained a very loosely organized league Franchises came and went Teams picked which teams they wanted to play including non NFL teams and scheduled games however they wanted to They didn't even play the same number of games The NFL had no playoffs so champions were determined by the regular season winning percentages Chaos was the way of the young league and that was never truer than in the 1932 season The Green Bay Packers led the NFL with 10 victories Yet at the time the league discarded all ties when calculating winning percentages And based on winning percentages the Packers 10 3 1 mark left them behind both the Chicago Bears 6 1 6 and the Portsmouth Spartans 6 1 4 After throwing out the tie games the Bears and Spartans were both left with 6 1 records 8 THE SUPER BOWL