A depiction of the 1970s peg board (Photo courtesy of Davide Barco).
How did the NFL create schedules in the 1920s? Long story short? They didn’t. The concept of a uniform, league-specific schedule was many years in the future. Let’s talk about the NFL schedule before it was one!
The Birth of a League
Football historians may disagree about just when the NFL was created. The American Professional Football Association (APFA) began in 1920 and was renamed the National Football League in 1922. So did the NFL exist in 1920 or 1922? Good thing we don’t have to answer that question here because the schedule-building model didn’t really change in those three seasons.
The Birth of the NFL Schedule
Let’s get into specifics on how unspecific NFL schedules were in the 1920s.
In the 1920s (and beyond), scheduling was the responsibility of the individual football franchises. Basically, anything went when it came to opponents as well. College? Professional football? Semi-professional football? Perfect! Frankly, college football was so much more established that they may have played at a similar level or better than many of the franchises.
The number of games played and the skill level of the teams played didn’t matter to the APFA. No official records were kept, and the championship was awarded based on ballot votes.
Franchises were forming and folding faster than anyone could really keep track of them. A team may only play four games in a season, and it could be because they collapsed early on or formed towards the end of the season. Talk about confusing!
Four teams did come together to form a more concrete schedule in 1920. The Canton Bulldogs, Akron Pros, Cleveland Tigers, and Dayton Triangles agreed to a six-game schedule with a mixture of home and away games. This, like everything else, was not standardized.
Schedule Barriers
Some significant barriers to successfully standardized schedules would be money. Even if teams were able to get a form of transportation big enough to shuffle their teams across the country, they couldn’t afford that or the gas it would need. Men worked full-time jobs and played football on the side, so they couldn’t afford the time off either.
Many opponents were not feasible due to distance. As a result, many franchises played the team’s around them, hence integrating college ball and semi-professional team play into a schedule. If no one else is close, what else could be done when most franchises were as broke as a joke?
The Birth of a Computer
We all know the NFL isn’t quick to adapt to modern technology. In the 1970s, a peg board with special tags for each game was mounted to the wall. There were 224 games to navigate, meaning there was a sea of tags. The peg board wall looked more confusing than the victim charts they made trying to identify the Green River Killer. Sometimes it would take weeks of tag shuffling to create just a few different schedule options.
It’s not totally clear when the NFL began implementing computers for scheduling. It may have occurred in the 1990s, but it was likely in the 2000s before the peg board was retired. How nuts! For other historical moments in sports history, look at my content here.
