The American Professional Football Association votes to call itself the National Football League
Two years after representatives from Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and New York gathered inside a Canton auto showroom to formalize professional football, the league they built was still wearing a borrowed name. On June 24, 1922, the American Professional Football Association voted to rename itself the National Football League — a title that matched the scope its founders had always intended. The APFA had been formed to standardize schedules, end the raiding of players between clubs, and lift the game's reputation. The new name was the simplest signal that it meant to do all of that, and more.
The NFL is now the wealthiest professional sports league in the world, with 32 teams and an annual championship — the Super Bowl — that routinely draws the largest single-day television audience in American broadcasting. That structure traces back to one vote on a June afternoon in 1922, when a loose association of Midwestern clubs decided the game deserved a national name.
QWhy was Jim Thorpe elected president of the APFA if he was primarily a player?
Thorpe was the most famous athlete in American professional football in 1920 — an Olympic gold medalist, a collegiate legend, and an active player for the Canton Bulldogs. The founders of the APFA wanted a name that would give the new league credibility in newspapers and with the public. Thorpe's election as president was essentially a branding decision: his reputation was the association's best advertisement. He was not expected to run day-to-day operations, and he didn't. The arrangement said something honest about what the early league valued most.
QWhere, exactly, did professional football's founding meeting take place — and why there?
The August 20, 1920, meeting that created the APFA was held inside the Jordan and Hupmobile auto showroom in Canton, Ohio. Canton was home to the Bulldogs, one of the stronger clubs in pre-league professional football, and the showroom belonged to a local businessman connected to the team. There was nothing ceremonial about the venue — it was simply a large indoor space available on short notice. Canton later became the home of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, a choice that traces directly back to the city's role in that August meeting.
QHow many of the original 1920 APFA teams survived to become modern NFL franchises?
Of all the clubs that played in the APFA's inaugural 1920 season, only two have an unbroken lineage into the current NFL. The Decatur Staleys relocated to Chicago and became the Bears. The Chicago Cardinals moved cities over the decades, eventually settling in Arizona. Every other franchise from that founding season either folded, merged, or dissolved entirely. The NFL now fields 32 teams; the odds that any given 1920 club would still be operating a century later were, as it turned out, quite low.
