The NFL’s 100th season is a journey worth remembering

The NFL turns 100 years old on Sept. 5, with the Chicago Bears and Green Bay Packers squaring off for the 199th time. It’s been an amazing trip to reach this point.

It wasn’t always certain. In fact, it was an impossible idea.

When the American Pro Football Association was formed in 1920, the notion was obscene. Paying young men was seen as the bastardization of an ideal. The collegiate game was king, and the ruffians who played afterwards for a few bucks here and there were questionable characters not yet ready for adult employment.

Pour over the history books, and the NFL being where it is could be considered a modern miracle. The league grew from small towns in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana. It eventually thrived in big cities, with Green Bay the last bastion of an outdated, bygone era. The league didn’t have a team west of Chicago until 1946, when the reigning champion Cleveland Rams packed up and headed for Los Angeles.

Over the years, the NFL adapted and survived. In the 1940s, the league faced a crisis brought on by World War II. Teams were losing players to the cause. The Pittsburgh Steelers were hit especially hard, merging first with the Philadelphia Eagles to become the Steagles. Later, the Steelers came together with the Chicago Cardinals, know simply as CARD-PITT.

Once the war ended, the players returned. So did the challenges. The late ’40s saw the rise of a challenger in the All-America Football Conference. By decade’s end, the AAFC was swallowed up by the NFL, merging the San Francisco 49ers, Baltimore Colts and Cleveland Browns into the established league.

It would be another eight years before the NFL became rooted in the American conscience. Dec. 28, 1958. The Greatest Game Ever Played. Unitas at Yankee Stadium. National television. Sudden death.

Finally, a nation met its tipping point with professional football. Then commissioner Bert Bell died prior to the 1960 season. The 12 owners had to make their choice for his replacement. They took an enormous gamble, placing a fledgling league in the hands of a 33-year-old former public relations man and eventual general manager of the Rams. Pete Rozelle.

Rozelle, not the 1958 title game, is the single biggest reason for the NFL’s rise. He realized the vast potential of television. He also realized the tams needed to split the revenue equally, something baseball still doesn’t know. In the 1960s, Rozelle created a merchandising department and hired a small-time company out of Philadelphia to be the league’s video arm. It was Blair Motion Pictures, soon to be known as NFL Films.

Rozelle also deftly handled the NFL’s biggest challenger yet; the American Football League. After the AFL was founded in 1960, it quickly competed for young players. In 1965, the upstarts began signing NFL players to exorbitant deals following the New York Giants signing kicker Pete Gogolak away from the Buffalo Bills. The result was skyrocketing salaries. By 1966, a merger was agreed upon, and Super Bowl I was only months away.

In the following decades, the NFL found prosperity. The challenges never end, though, ranging from strikes, stagnant offenses and instant replay to steroids, concussions and CTE. There was free agency coming into the game in 1993, and excessive rookie salaries counteracted by the rookie wage scale in 2011. The problems have varied in seriousness, but they have always, and will always, arise.

So many believe the path to success is linear. It isn’t. The NFL’s chart towards today’s immense popularity resembled that of a penny stock, finally taking root and climbing slowly.

The ugliness will persist, but so will the beauty. More than ever before, football is America’s game, capturing our country each autumn Sunday.

Welcome to the 100th season of the National Football League. Enjoy.