Is the history of the NFL important to you ?

Itssoeasy

I'm asking as its a thing with me with all the sports I've followed and follow. When I started following the eagles I decided to research their history and the league history, I feel like I couldn't understand the present(2000,2001) without understanding the past. And the NFL has a great history going back which helps.

I followed man united when I was younger like most of my friends but I knew and know ridiculous facts about the team which my friends didn't don't know.

Red Crow

It's not particularly important to me as such. I'm only a recent fan since 2005. I'm not an expert on football by any means but this forum over the past 24 months has helped me learn and understand a lot more about the game. I'm still learning about the current history of the NFL so I try not to dive too deep into the past.

I do find out the movement of teams to be particularly interesting especially surrounding the creation of the Ravens and what Modell done to the people of Cleveland.

shamrock55

Just realised now that redskins are the highest grossing franchise in the nfl plus they have sold out every home game since 1958 slightly off topic i know but this thread made me read up on a bit of their history

TheLongRun

Didn't come into it when I picked the team I support but the history added an extra dimension to it when after I'd chosen.

Realt Dearg Sec

When you're a bears fan, history is pretty much all you've got.

mikemac1

Ravens are a young franchise


A lot of the fan forums have posters going on and on about Irsay and the Baltimore Colts and bitterness still 30 years later.
I'm not interested in that at all.

TO.

When I get interested in things I like to know as much as I can about the interest both historical and current.

jack presley

TO. wrote: »

When I get interested in things I like to know as much as I can about the interest both historical and current.

Yeah me too. It was the same with baseball too. Over the past few years I've tried to reading as much as I can about the 'old days'

eagle eye

Personally I'd read something about history when I come across it but wouldn't really go out of my way to know much about the team before I started following them.

I've been following the game for around 30 years at this stage and I have a lot of great memories. I think what you watch and remember over time is the really special stuff.

NFL films is really great though and I have learned a lot about the history of the game from watching those but that is about every team not just my own.

Son Of A Vidic

Ya history is very important to me, especially for the team you follow. For example, I suppose there are a few guys here who don't remember the Pats when they were one of the unluckiest franchises in football. The nomad years and having no proper home ground ect. But I also try to know as much about the history of other teams in the league to. I think that is just as important tbh.

smackbunnybaby

I think its very important.
I grew up on football (soccer) and if someone told me they liked soccer but didn't know about Pele, Maradona, Puskas etc and couldn't tell you about the 1970 World Cup, I probably wouldn't take them seriously :-)
But that's just me...

davyjose

As a Colts fan, it's a weird one. I don't really see the team in Indy, and the team in Baltimore as the same organisation. I think the Colts probably should have changed their name, and given the rights of the name and history back to the city of Baltimore (like the Browns/Ravens situation, and the OKC/Seattle situation in Basketball), but hindsight is 20/20 and the early 80's were a much different time.

For me, pre-98 is meh, and post 1998 I'm obsessive about the history and stats and all that good stuff.

JaimeLannister

I'd give this book the highest recommendation possible for anyone with an interest in the history of the NFL

http://www.amazon.com/Americas-Game-Michael-MacCambridge/dp/0375725067/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1371507407&sr=1-1&keywords=america%27s+game

Some great stuff about the early days of the NFL, the NFL/AFL merger, the influence of TV, and more. A great read.

You betcha.

Packers fan. So it kinda comes with the territory. Not sure anyone can be a real Packers fan and not know about Lambeau and Lombardi and Hutson and Nitschke and Starr and Hornung and the Ice Bowl and Lofton and right up to Favre and White.

jack presley

[Deleted User] wrote: »

You betcha.

Packers fan. So it kinda comes with the territory. Not sure anyone can be a real Packers fan and not know about Lambeau and Lombardi and Hutson and Nitschke and Starr and Hornung and the Ice Bowl and Lofton and right up to Favre and White.

History is very important to me too but I've been a Redskins fan since I was a kid so how do you think I felt when I started reading up on their history and George Preston Marshall in particular a few years back?

Mikeyt086

TO. wrote: »

When I get interested in things I like to know as much as I can about the interest both historical and current.

This.

Nothing better than watching things like "Barry Sanders: A Football Life" and finally understanding why and how the characters you hear so much about impacted the sport.

(By the way if you haven't seen that, it's on YouTube, and holy ****e it's amazing)

poldebruin

Mikeyt086 wrote: »

This.

Nothing better than watching things like "Barry Sanders: A Football Life" and finally understanding why and how the characters you hear so much about impacted the sport.

Barry Sanders is qualifying as history now? Jeez, I feel old!

I love the history of the NFL, even more so when I was younger. I couldn't read enough magazines and books about it (pre-internet) I loved looking at the old (technicolor) uniforms, and at how gritty and dirty the sport was. The old stadiums with the throngs of fans - no indoor stadiums, playing outdoors in Minnesota on ice fields. The different style of play, bruising rushing, deep passing. To see some of the hits (that were possibly only borderline legal - even then) it seems like a different game at times.

It definitely makes the NFL more interesting when you know a little of the history.

jack presley

jack presley wrote: »

History is very important to me too but I've been a Redskins fan since I was a kid so how do you think I felt when I started reading up on their history and George Preston Marshall in particular a few years back?

Ach, wouldn't worry, even the ugly history is interesting. It's disappointing any racism existed, but it wasn't the fault of Marshall or the Redskins, they only reflected a much wider problem. For a decent snapshot of the race issue, the ESPN film The Ghosts of Ole Miss traces the conflict on that campus when James Meredith was trying to gain admission to the campus as the football team were in the middle of their best season back in 1962.

Again, maybe as a Packer's fan, we point to Vince Lombardi's famous intolerance of racism, and (which was perhaps more unusual in the 1960s in football) his intolerance of homophobia as beacons of forward thinking. But suspect that if one were to probe further, players under different administrations and in different eras faced prejudice for different reasons.

frostie500

I think that for any kind of "foreign" sport that having an understanding of the history is really important. We all grew up surrounded by football, GAA and rugby so to a degree we learned the history by hearing our dad's and uncle's talk about different teams and players since we all kids but for something like American Football the chances are that most of us were the first in our families to take any interest in it so the majority of us started to learn about the different aspects of the sport.

Personally I always think it's funny when you go to the States and so many locals all think that it's amazing when an Irishman has any sort of understanding of the game but it goes back to we basically look to immerse ourselves into the sport to "catch up" on what we might have missed when we were younger.