Listen and Subscribe
Podcast Transcript
On December 28, 1958, a record-setting audience of nearly 45 million people watched the National Football League championship game.
Pro football was on the rise, and investors took notice. They saw the potential to expand the brand into more cities.
When the NFL resisted expansion, a group of spurned young investors dared to create an alternative league. It was a decision that changed everything about professional football.
Learn more about the AFL-NFL merger on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
The National Football League was founded in 1920 in Canton, Ohio, originally consisting of 14 teams based in small Midwestern industrial towns. Some of the earliest teams were the Dayton Triangles, Canton Bulldogs, Akron Pros, Columbus Panhandles, Chicago Cardinals, and the Decatur Staleys.
The league changed slightly over the years, adding the Green Bay Packers in 1921, although the Packers’ origin story begins before the NFL’s, as they were founded in 1919. I covered the origins of the 13-time NFL champions in a previous podcast.
Over time, interest in the league grew as it added divisions, changed rules, and, in 1933, instituted a championship game.
The rise in interest and demand for tickets prompted the NFL to expand beyond its Midwestern roots, adding teams from New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh.
The NFL broadcast its first game on television in 1939 and received very few viewers. As televisions became more common, broadcasts improved, culminating in the famed “Greatest Game Ever Played,” the 1958 championship game between the Colts and Giants.
Lamar Hunt, a Texas oil heir, was one of the millions who watched the game with great interest. He saw football’s potential and sought to expand the league beyond its 12-team format.
Growing up in Dallas, Hunt dreamt of bringing professional football to his hometown. After a series of keen investments by his father, H.L. Hunt, Lamar had the financial means to make that dream a reality.
However, the NFL was not interested in expanding to Dallas, as it was largely still a Midwestern game.
Not giving up, Hunt offered to buy the Chicago Cardinals in 1959 to move the team to Dallas. Chicago had two of the 12 teams in 1958; the Cardinals played at Comiskey Park, with the Chicago Bears playing at Wrigley Field.
Encouraged by the NFL’s leadership, the Cardinals’ ownership refused the offer. The NFL was basically a monopoly, and its owners didn’t want to disrupt the system or share its earnings.
Out of options, Hunt picked up the phone and reached out to a group of young millionaires, some of whom had also been turned away by the NFL, including fellow Texan Bud Adams, Bob Howsam of Denver, Barron Hilton of Los Angeles, and Harry Wismer of New York. The group, which eventually grew to eight, concluded that the only way forward was to beat the NFL at its own game.
They created the American Football League, which was intended to be a direct competitor of the National Football League.
1960 was the inaugural season of the AFL, and Hunt placed his own franchise, the Dallas Texans, right in his hometown. To counter him, the NFL granted an expansion franchise to Clint Murchison Jr., creating the Dallas Cowboys and splitting the market. The brutal crosstown battle for fans would eventually push Hunt to relocate his team to Missouri in 1963, becoming the Kansas City Chiefs.
The nation’s sports media, encouraged by the NFL cartel, lambasted the new league and mocked the owners’ audacity in thinking they could compete.
Hunt and his fellow AFL owners adopted the moniker “The Foolish Club.” As noted by author Jim Morrison in Smithsonian magazine, “That was what the eight original team owners called themselves because they were crazy enough to take on the firmly entrenched NFL.”
The AFL quickly created a counter-brand to the NFL. In 1960, the NFL was conservative in both its management and its style of play. NFL offenses emphasized the power running game, playing the proverbial three yards and a cloud of dust. The NFL instituted rules to emphasize the run game and limit passing by allowing defensive players to maul receivers downfield.
The contrast in styles between the NFL and the AFL was stark. The AFL was a passing league. Led by pioneering San Diego Chargers coach Sid Gillman, AFL offenses defined the league.
.
Unlike the NFL, the AFL spread the field; it used pre-snap motion to free receivers and instituted rules to protect the quarterback and to free receivers in the defensive secondary. AFL quarterbacks threw deep on typical running downs and brought a new level of excitement to the game.
Long-time executive Gil Brandt framed it this way: For fans, even an unsuccessful deep pass play is more exciting than a run.
The AFL didn’t stop there; it adopted a 2-point conversion after touchdowns to increase drama. The AFL had brightly colored uniforms with names on the backs of jerseys.
In many ways, these contrasting leagues paralleled the NBA and ABA, whose unification I covered in a previous episode.
Another key similarity shared by the ABA and the AFL was their attitude toward Black players. While the NFL, much like the NBA, adhered to unwritten quotas that limited Black athletes on active rosters, the AFL scouted everywhere.
Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt hired Lloyd Wells, the first full-time Black scout in pro football history. Wells prioritized campuses like Grambling State, Morgan State, and Prairie View A&M.
Capitalizing on this blind spot in the NFL, the AFL used this new strategy to sign a series of game-changing talents like Buck Buchanan, Willie Lanier, and Otis Taylor.
The NFL adapted quickly and began drafting the same players into its league that the AFL drafted into theirs, sparking fierce bidding wars that eventually became known as the “babysitting wars.”
College seniors couldn’t officially sign pro contracts until their post-season bowl games ended. To secure the top players, teams hired scouts to act as bodyguards.
In a ridiculous display, the two leagues checked players into remote motels under fake names, fed them steak dinners, hid them from opposing scouts, and guarded the hotel doors.
During the bowl games, the final game of a player’s season, scouts from both leagues stood on opposite sidelines, armed with fountain pens, notary publics, and contracts stuffed inside their suit jackets. Literally, the second the final whistle blew, it was a mad dash onto the field, a race for the top player’s signature.
The NFL assumed it would reign supreme because of its history and TV contract advantage; that changed in 1964 when the AFL landed a TV deal worth 36 million dollars over 5 years.
For the first time, the AFL was on equal footing with the NFL.
Flush with new cash flow, the AFL’s New York Jets made a splash by signing star Alabama quarterback Joe Namath. Much like his ABA counterpart Dr. J, Namath became an immediate national sensation.
The leagues coexisted in an uneasy truce until 1966. An unwritten gentleman’s agreement governed the two leagues’ contracts: if a player was under contract in one league, you couldn’t sign him, even if they had completed their contract and were renegotiating.
That agreement was torn apart in 1966 by Wellington Mara of the NFL’s New York Giants. With the Giants’ kicking game an absolute disaster, they looked to solve the problem with the signing of Buffalo Bills kicker Pete Gogolak.
Gogolak was revolutionizing the kicking position with a soccer-style kick for the two-time AFL champion Buffalo Bills. When Gogolak’s option year expired, Mara swooped in and signed him to an NFL contract, tripling his salary and starting a bidding war between the two leagues.
The new AFL commissioner and Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis acted quickly, encouraging league officials to sign Roman Gabriel and John Brodie, also free of their NFL contracts, to “future contracts” with the AFL, including Brodie on an astonishing $250,000-per-year deal.
The future for both leagues was untenable if they were simply going to raid each other’s rosters for top talent at astronomical prices.
Lamar Hunt set up a series of secret meetings with NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle. The meetings were held in homes, hotels booked under aliases, on airport runways, and in back rooms, anywhere to keep the proceedings secret.
The negotiations were ruthless.
Hunt demanded that every AFL team, including a new expansion franchise in Cincinnati, be immediately admitted into the new league. Rozelle countered with harsh terms on sharing TV contracts in joint markets like New York and the San Francisco Bay Area. Each time they moved closer to a deal, the two sides drifted apart with another key demand.
However, they did agree on some points.
Both sides wanted a common draft in which the leagues would hold a single binding draft, eliminating costly bidding wars. Both sides also recognised the benefits of a championship game between the two leagues.
On the evening of June 8, 1966, Pete Rozelle and Lamar Hunt walked into a packed press conference in New York City to announce the formal merger.
The two leagues would play separate schedules within their own conferences, be bound by the rules of a common draft and player-acquisition protocols, and play a championship game at the end of the season.
Rozelle and Hunt had achieved something remarkable… except as it turns out, the entire deal was illegal. For the two leagues to merge, they needed congressional approval.
Under federal antitrust law, two competing corporate giants cannot simply conspire in a backroom deal to eliminate competition, suppress labor costs, and divide the national television market.
The head of the powerful House Judiciary Committee, Emanuel Celler of New York, felt this created a monopoly and trashed the agreement’s limitations on collective bargaining and the unified draft.
Before the 1966 agreement, players drafted in one league could choose which league they wanted to play in and bargain with the opposing league.
Rozelle needed allies in Congress and found them in Louisiana Senator Russell Long, the Senate Majority Whip, and Louisiana Congressman Hale Boggs, the House Majority Whip. Their terms for Rozelle were simple: if there wasn’t an NFL franchise in New Orleans, there would be no merger.
Rozelle agreed, and Boggs slipped the language into an appropriations bill, which was quickly signed into law by football-fan President Lyndon B. Johnson.
Rozelle got his new expanded league, and Louisiana got the New Orleans Saints.
The merger between the NFL and the AFL created a sports empire. The crown jewel was a new championship game called the Super Bowl.
The first Super Bowl took place in January of 1967, with the NFL’s Green Bay Packers defeating the AFL’s Kansas City Chiefs 35-10.
As it turns out, the old-guard NFL leaders were initially right. Their style of play would beat the AFL style head-to-head, as the Packers won the second Super Bowl as well, beating the Oakland Raiders 33-14.
However, Joe Namath’s heroics in Super Bowl III proved that AFL teams were perfectly capable of beating the Old-Guard NFL.
The AFL and NFL teams became the basis for the major division in the sport today, the AFC and the NFC.
The all-time Super Bowl record, which gives NFC teams a razor-thin 30–29 lead, stands as living proof of the merger’s competitive balance.
The merger overseen by Rozelle and Hunt created something much bigger than two conferences in a professional football league; they created the most lucrative sport in the world.
According to 2026 data, the average NFL team is worth nearly $10 billion, and the league almost doubles the revenue of its closest competitor, Major League Baseball.
The NFL of today wouldn’t be where it is without the AFL merger. In a very real sense, the most lucrative sports league in the world owes its success to having kept a bunch of teams from joining it in the early 1960s.