Pete Rozelle

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is an interesting sort. He has the polish and charm of the boy commissioner Pete Rozelle but he also knows how to carry the water of team owners like Paul Tagliabue.Goodell was recently at the Chautauqua Institution......

T.R. helps make game safer Theodore Roosevelt loved sports, hunting and the outdoors, but he grew concerned about college football, which bore little resemblance to what the sport looks like today. One newspaper reported that 18 college players died in...

A Few Seconds of Panic A 5-Foot-8, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL Stefan Fatsis Penguin: 340 pp., $25.95 George Plimpton, the longtime editor of the Paris Review, enjoyed a second literary career when he turned Walter Mitty-like...

One must be more than just a great coach or player to lay claim to the gridiron throne. To make our list of football titans, a legacy that has shaped and transformed the game we watch each fall is required. Note that the "reigns" do not cover a figure'...

George Halas not only witnessed the dawn of pro football. For 62 years he was pro football. What Halas did was hire Grange and Bronko and Healey, Musso, Bulldog and Atkins, Ditka, Butkus and Sayers, Luckman, Fortmann, Trafton, Payton, Hampton. The...

1. Rutgers beat Princeton 6-4 in the first intercollegiate football game on Nov. 6, 1869. The teams had 25 players each. The ball could be advanced only by kicking or batting it with feet, hands or head. 2. The first rules for American football were...

Perhaps Arch Ward had a prescient understanding of Chicago's appetite for football. Or maybe he was a curious sports fan who wanted to measure the talent differential between college football players, better known and more celebrated at the time, and...

Two weeks after his personal Super Bowl moment -- pulling the NFL back from the brink of a labor meltdown -- Paul Tagliabue has decided to walk away from the game. Tagliabue, the league's commissioner for more than 16 years, announced Monday he plans...

For a city that had waited patiently for more than a decade for the return of pro football, for so many whose last memory of the NFL in Baltimore was of watching their beloved Colts roll out of town under the cover of darkness, 1996 was a very good year...

Known as the dean of American pro football writers, Bob Oates has been long known as a strong advocate of pass offense, the subject of this two-part series. The second part follows. The significant advantages of passing over running have been...

Now that the first week of the 2005 NFL season is in the books, we finally have some clarity on several important issues: • The Dolphins and 49ers are the class of the league. Their fans might as well start making reservations for Super Bowl XL in...

It was early spring in 1991 when Art Modell came up with the idea of bringing together Bob Tisch and Wellington Mara. Modell was the Cleveland Browns' owner at the time. His best friend, Giants co-owner Mara, only a few months after celebrating the team'...