American Football (NFL) Quizzes

About American Football (NFL) Quizzes

American football is the most-watched sport in the United States by a wide margin, and the National Football League is its center of gravity. Thirty-two franchises, split into the American and National Football Conferences, play a 17-game regular season from September into January, and the whole machine builds toward one night in early February: the Super Bowl, almost every year the most-watched television broadcast in the country, seen by more than a hundred million people and treated by many as an unofficial national holiday. The commercials compete in their own bracket of fame, the halftime show is a career milestone for whoever performs it, and the Monday after is one of the biggest call-in-sick days on the American calendar.

The league grew out of a 1920 meeting in a car dealership in Canton, Ohio, where a handful of Midwestern club owners founded what was first called the American Professional Football Association. It took the name National Football League in 1922, then spent decades as a regional curiosity behind baseball and college football. Television changed everything: the 1958 championship between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants, decided in sudden-death overtime and carried nationwide, is still called "the Greatest Game Ever Played" and is widely credited with pushing the pro game into the mainstream. A rival league, the AFL, forced a 1966 agreement that fully merged the two leagues by 1970 and produced the modern two-conference setup and the Super Bowl itself.

Its traditions run deep. The Green Bay Packers are owned not by a billionaire but by their own fans, a publicly held nonprofit in a city of barely 100,000, and they still play at Lambeau Field, the "frozen tundra" where the 1967 Ice Bowl was played at minus 13 degrees. The Dallas Cowboys picked up the nickname "America's Team" in the late 1970s and have been the most valuable sports franchise on Earth for years, despite not reaching a Super Bowl since the 1995 season. Detroit and Dallas host games every Thanksgiving, a tradition older than the modern league. The championship trophy is named for Vince Lombardi, the Packers coach whose teams won the first two Super Bowls, and the winning players each receive a ring rather than a medal.

The great names carry far beyond the sport: Jim Brown, Johnny Unitas, Joe Montana, Jerry Rice, Walter Payton, Lawrence Taylor, Peyton Manning, and Tom Brady, who played until he was 45 and won seven Super Bowls, more than any single franchise has. Nearly all talent arrives through the college game and the annual draft, itself a prime-time television event in which the weakest team from the previous season usually picks first. Fantasy football, played by tens of millions of Americans, turns even casual viewers into people who track a backup running back's workload week to week.

For a quiz, the NFL is almost ideal: a century of well-documented history, 32 franchises each with their own lore, more than 50 Super Bowls, and a fan base that treats this knowledge as a point of pride. This category works through it piece by piece, from the championship games to the record book to the teams themselves.