The National Football League (NFL) seems nearly omnipresent today in the United States. Even people who are not football fans know the team names and recognize the star players. That was certainly not the case one hundred years ago when the league was founded at a car dealership in Canton, Ohio. How this change occurred is the story that Richard C. Crepeau tells in NFL Football: A History of America's New National Pastime. Originally published in 2014, the University of Illinois Press issued this revised edition in 2020 to coincide with the NFL's centennial. The author has expanded a couple of chapters from the previous edition and added a new chapter.
The book is divided into three sections: “The Formative Years,” “The Rozelle Era,” and “The New NFL.” Within each section, chapters are often thematic, which occasionally means there is some repetitiveness. The first section examines the birth of...