The very first professional American football game took place in Latrobe Pennsylvania. In 1895, a team from Latrobe played a team from Jeannette who were also from Pennsylvania.
The American Professional Football Association (APFC) formed the first league of professional teams in 1920. Each team were charged $100 for entry into the league.
The APFC began with just eleven teams in 1920 and changed its name to the National Football League (NFL) in 1922. Numbers have increased over the years and there are currently thirty two teams from the USA.
The NFL is evenly split into two main conferences, the (NFC) National Football Conference and the (AFC) American Football Conference. Each of the two conferences has four separate divisions, which have four teams in each.
A regular NFL season consists of a seventeen week schedule, each team includes one ‘bye week’, which means they all play sixteen games. All teams play three other teams in their own division twice.
The most touchdowns achieved by any player in their career was 208, Jerry Rice scored this amount from 1985- 2004. He played for San Francisco, Oakland and Seattle, five of these were made in the game between San Francisco and Atlanta.
Before changing his career, O.J Simpson scored touchdowns in fourteen consecutive games in 1975. This is only topped by Lenny Moore and LaDainian Tomlinson who both total eighteen games.
The largest ever crowd attendance at any game to date is 112,376. This was between the Dallas Cowboys and the Houston Oilers which was a pre-season game played in Mexico City 1994. The largest crowd for a regular season game was also in Mexico City between Arizona and San Francisco where numbers reached 103,467. Expectations are that these numbers will be beaten in the 2010 ‘Super Bowl’.
