How NFL Teams Got Their Names: All 32 Origins

NFL teams got their names in one of five ways: from a sponsor or a person, from local history or industry, from a fan contest, from the baseball club in the same city, or from a city the franchise has since left. The Packers are the first kind, named for the meat company that paid for their jerseys in 1919. The 49ers are the second, the Seahawks the third, the Bears the fourth and the Cardinals the fifth. There has never been a league system. Each of the 32 was chosen by an owner, a sponsor, a newspaper poll or an accident.

The Oakland club of 1960 shows how loose the process could be. For a short spell that spring, the new American Football League team was the Señores, a name that came out of a contest run through a local newspaper. It was also taken for a private joke, because a member of the ownership group was known for greeting people as "señor." The sportswriters laughed, the fans winced, and before the team had played a game the owners quietly switched to another entry from the list. Raiders.

The five patterns behind NFL team name origins

The patterns follow the calendar more closely than they follow geography.

The oldest clubs were named the way businesses are named. A man owned the team, or a company paid for the jerseys, and the name said so. In the 1920s and 1930s, when football clubs were tenants in baseball parks and wanted some of the landlord's publicity, the fashion was to echo the baseball team. After the Second World War owners began reaching for civic identity instead, the industry or the history that a city already told stories about. And from 1960, when the American Football League put eight new teams on the market at once and needed newspaper attention for all of them, the name-the-team contest became standard procedure.

The fifth pattern is not a method of choosing at all. It is what happens when a team moves and the owner decides the name is worth more than its meaning.

• 32Team names in use
• 7Franchises that have changed nickname
• 4Names coined in a city the team has since left
• 3Teams named after a person

Counted from the origins set out on this page. A nickname change is counted only if the franchise had already played under the earlier name in a league.

These categories overlap, and it would be false tidiness to pretend otherwise. The Steelers are named for an industry, and the name came out of a contest. The Ravens are named for a piece of local literary history, and the name was chosen by poll. The Bills are named after a man, by contest, as a pun. Where a name fits two patterns, this page files it under the one that explains what the name means and mentions the other. Four names, the Jets, Eagles, Panthers and Titans, were simply decided on by an owner or his family, and they are dealt with where they come up.

Named for a sponsor or a person: why they are called the Packers

Green Bay's name is an advertisement that the advertiser stopped paying for in about 1921.

When Curly Lambeau organized a town team in August 1919 he was working as a clerk for the Indian Packing Company, which canned meat. He asked his boss for money to buy uniforms. The company gave him $500 and the use of an open lot next to the plant, and the newspapers began calling the team the Packers before anyone had formally decided on it. It stuck. Indian Packing was bought out by a rival, the Acme Packing Company, the meat business in Green Bay faded, and the team went on being called after an employer that no longer existed. Who has owned the club since is a different story, told in our guide to the Packers' public ownership.

Of the 32 names, only three refer to an individual.

The Browns and Paul Brown

Cleveland's franchise in the new All-America Football Conference held a naming contest in 1945, and the most popular suggestion was the surname of the coach it had just hired. Paul Brown was already the best-known football man in Ohio, having won at Massillon's Washington High School and at Ohio State. Brown objected to having a team named for him. A second choice, Panthers, was announced and then withdrawn when a local man who had owned an earlier Cleveland Panthers team asserted his rights to it. The club went back to Browns.

A competing story holds that the name was short for "Brown Bombers," after the heavyweight champion Joe Louis. The club's own history credits the coach, and so do most historians. Whatever the truth, the club kept the name after Art Modell fired Paul Brown in January 1963, and it went on honoring a man the owner had dismissed.

The Bills and the Chiefs

Buffalo's name is a pun and has nothing to do with Buffalo. William F. Cody, the scout and showman known as Buffalo Bill, earned his nickname hunting bison on the Great Plains. In 1947 the city's AAFC club, until then the Bisons, ran a contest for something less ordinary, and the winning entry tied Cody's frontier image to the Frontier Oil Company, owned by the team's president. That club folded when the AAFC did. When Buffalo received an AFL franchise for 1960, the old name was revived.

The Chiefs came north as the Dallas Texans in 1963. Kansas City's mayor, H. Roe Bartle, had done the persuading, promising owner Lamar Hunt a surge in season ticket sales. Bartle was a large man with a larger voice who had spent years as a Boy Scout executive, and half the city knew him as "the Chief." Hunt at first wanted to keep calling the team the Texans. He was talked out of it, a contest produced Chiefs among its popular entries, and the choice honored the man who had made the move happen.

Named for local history and industry: why the 49ers are called the 49ers

Gold was found at Sutter's Mill in January 1848. The news took most of a year to cross the continent, and the great rush of prospectors into northern California came in 1849, which is why the people who made the trip were called forty-niners and why a football team founded in San Francisco in 1946 is called the 49ers. It is the only team in the league named for a year. The club's first emblem was a mustachioed prospector firing a pair of pistols.

That is the purest example of the second pattern, the name that tells a visitor what the city is proud of. The others are easy to decode once the pattern is clear.

Pittsburgh made steel. Art Rooney's club had been the Pirates, after the baseball team, and in 1940 he asked the public for something of its own; Steelers was the winning suggestion, and the helmet logo adopted later is a steel industry trademark.

Boston began a revolution. The AFL franchise awarded to the city in 1960 asked for public submissions, and Patriots was the favorite, a reference every New England schoolchild understood.

Dallas settled on Cowboys in 1960 for the image the whole country already attached to Texas. Houston, four decades later, went further and simply named its team for the state. Minnesota's Vikings, announced before the club's first season in 1961, acknowledged the Scandinavian ancestry of a large share of the Upper Midwest, and the club took the name of the state rather than of Minneapolis or St. Paul so as not to choose between them.

The Saints and a date on the calendar

New Orleans is the one case where the timing did the naming. The league awarded the city a franchise on November 1, 1966. November 1 is All Saints' Day, a major feast in a city as Catholic as New Orleans, and the jazz standard "When the Saints Go Marching In" was already the nearest thing the place had to an anthem. The name was announced early the following year.

Named after baseball: the Bears, the football Giants and the Lions

In 1922 baseball was the national sport and professional football was a tenant. Most NFL clubs played in major league or minor league ballparks, drew a fraction of the baseball crowd, and were glad of any association with the team whose name was already on the building.

George Halas had brought his club to Chicago from downstate Illinois a year earlier under the name of its former sponsor. When he was free to rename it, his first thought was to call it the Cubs, after the baseball team whose park he rented. He then reasoned that football players are bigger than baseball players, and that if the baseball men were cubs, his were bears. It is the best-known naming story in the sport and one of the few that comes straight from the man who did the naming. The earlier life of that franchise is covered in our list of the league's oldest franchises.

New York's entry of 1925 did not bother with a variation. Tim Mara's team played at the Polo Grounds, home of baseball's New York Giants, and took the same name. Newspapers distinguished the two by writing "the football Giants," and the club's corporate title still carries the phrase. The baseball Giants left for San Francisco after the 1957 season. The football Giants are still explaining themselves.

Detroit's is the Bears' logic turned sideways. When the Portsmouth Spartans were bought and moved to Michigan in 1934, the new owners wanted a jungle cat to stand beside baseball's Tigers, and chose the one they considered the king.

A habit that left one long shadow

The practice was common enough that the league once included Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Yankees, Cincinnati Reds and Cleveland Indians of its own. The Pittsburgh club began as the Pirates. And in 1932 a new Boston franchise set up at Braves Field, home of the National League's Boston Braves, and called itself the Braves.

A year later it moved across town to Fenway Park, where the Red Sox played. Staying "Braves" in a rival's ballpark made little sense, so the owner changed the name while keeping the Native American imagery the club had already invested in, and arrived at a word that also echoed the new landlord's. The team took that name to Washington in 1937 and kept it for 83 years. The name it chose in 1933 became the most contested in American sport. That story has its own section below.

The baseball habit died with the 1930s. Its last trace is a rhyme: when New York's AFL team was renamed in 1963, one attraction of "Jets" was that it sounded like the Mets, with whom it was about to share a stadium.

NFL teams named by fan contests, from the Broncos to the Ravens

A contest costs almost nothing and fills newspaper columns for weeks. A new franchise with no players, no coach and no stadium has very little else to announce, which is why owners of expansion teams have reached for one so reliably.

1. 1Franchise awardedThe city gets a team, often more than a year before it will play a game.
2. 2Entries invitedA newspaper or the club asks the public for suggestions, with a prize for the winner.
3. 3ShortlistStaff or a panel cut thousands of entries to a few names, discarding those already trademarked or plainly unsuitable.
4. 4Owner decidesThe owner picks from the shortlist. The most-submitted name usually wins, but not always.
5. 5Winner chosen among entrantsWhere many people sent in the winning name, one is selected by a tiebreaker such as a short essay or a draw.

A general description of the process the clubs below followed. Details varied, and in every case the owner, not the public, made the final decision.

The results, in the order they happened:

Team	Contest held	What the name refers to
Denver Broncos	1960	The unbroken horse of the West; an earlier Denver baseball club had used the name
Miami Dolphins	1965	The marine mammal common off the Florida coast
Atlanta Falcons	1965	The bird of prey, proposed by a Georgia schoolteacher
Seattle Seahawks	1975	A common name for the osprey, a fishing hawk of the Pacific coast
Tampa Bay Buccaneers	1975	The pirates of Gulf Coast legend
Jacksonville Jaguars	1991	The big cat, chosen two years before the city was awarded a team
Baltimore Ravens	1996	Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven"

Miami's contest drew nearly 20,000 entries and Seattle's a few more than that, with well over a thousand different names proposed in the Seattle case. In Atlanta several people suggested Falcons; the schoolteacher won because of the reason she gave, which praised the bird as proud, courageous and never known to drop its prey. Tampa Bay's name leaned on a local tradition that already existed, the Gasparilla festival and its mythical pirate.

Jacksonville's contest was held in 1991 by the civic group campaigning for a franchise, which is why the Jaguars had a name before they had a team.

Baltimore, and a poem written in New York

The Ravens are the best-documented case. When Cleveland's football organization moved to Baltimore in 1996 it arrived without a name, the old one having been left behind by legal agreement. Focus groups reduced a long list to three finalists, Americans, Marauders and Ravens, and the Baltimore Sun put them to a telephone vote. More than 33,000 calls came in. Ravens took nearly two-thirds of them.

Poe is the connection. He lived in Baltimore as a young man, died there in 1849 in circumstances nobody has ever fully explained, and is buried downtown. "The Raven" itself was published in 1845, when he was living in New York, a detail the city has sensibly declined to dwell on. The team's early mascots were three costumed birds named Edgar, Allan and Poe.

Names that only make sense somewhere else

A red bird is not native to the Sonoran Desert in any way that would suggest it as a symbol, and the Arizona Cardinals were not named for a bird in the first place. The name described the color of some secondhand jerseys the club acquired in Chicago at the start of the last century. The bird came later, as a logo, once the color had become a nickname and the nickname needed a picture. The franchise took the name to St. Louis in 1960, where it collided with a baseball team that had been the Cardinals since 1900, and then to Arizona in 1988.

The Rams are a second-hand name twice over. When a Cleveland group started a team in 1936, its general manager admired the football program at Fordham University in New York, whose teams were and are the Rams. So a team in Ohio was named for a college in the Bronx, and has since carried the name to Los Angeles, to St. Louis and back to Los Angeles.

The Colts' name did mean something where it was coined. Baltimore's first professional team, in the AAFC in 1947, chose it by contest to honor Maryland's horse breeding and racing, the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico above all. A new Baltimore franchise adopted the name in 1953. In 1984 that franchise left for Indianapolis, a city whose famous race involves no horses.

Why none of the three was renamed

The explanation is the same each time. The owner who moved the team was the owner who had held it before, and the name was the most valuable thing he was bringing with him.

By the time the Cardinals left Chicago they had forty years of league history and a family ownership that identified with the name. The Rams arrived in Los Angeles in 1946 as the reigning champions; nobody discards a champion's name. The Colts' owner moved his team out of Baltimore overnight in March 1984 precisely to keep control of everything the franchise owned, and the name was on that list.

Baltimore never accepted it. When a Canadian Football League team set up there in 1994 and tried to call itself the Colts, the NFL went to court and stopped it. A city can lose a name and still not be allowed to use it.

The same reasoning has kept the Raiders' name through three moves: Oakland to Los Angeles in 1982, back to Oakland in 1995 and on to Las Vegas in 2020. The full record of who moved where is in our NFL relocation history.

The stories people get wrong

Four origin stories circulate in versions that are tidier than the facts. Two are too cynical, one is too simple, and one leaves out the interesting part.

The Chargers and the credit card. Barron Hilton, the hotel heir who owned the Los Angeles Chargers in 1960, had recently launched the Carte Blanche charge card, and the suspicion has followed the team ever since that the name was a plug. Hilton denied it. The name came from a public contest, and his account was that he chose it because he liked the bugle call and the shout of "Charge" that Los Angeles crowds had taken up. It is fair to say the coincidence did not trouble him, and fair to add that nobody has produced evidence the card was the reason.

The Jets and the airport. The usual explanation is that the team was named for the planes passing over Shea Stadium on their way into LaGuardia. That has the order backward. The franchise was renamed in 1963, when it was still playing at the Polo Grounds, by a new ownership group that wanted to bury the debt-ridden Titans of New York. The move to Shea came in 1964. The airport was part of the thinking, since the owners knew where the team was headed, but so were the jet age as an idea and the rhyme with the stadium's baseball tenant.

The Eagles and the national bird. Philadelphia is where the country was founded, the eagle is the national emblem, and most people assume the one led to the other. The actual source is more specific and more dated. Bert Bell named his new franchise in 1933 for the Blue Eagle, the insignia of the National Recovery Administration, the New Deal agency created that same summer. Shops displayed the Blue Eagle in their windows to show they were complying with its codes. Bell borrowed the most visible symbol of optimism in a Depression year. The agency was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1935, and its emblem survives mainly on a football helmet.

The Bengals and the tiger. Cincinnati's team is not named for an animal chosen at random. A professional club called the Cincinnati Bengals played in the city from 1937 to 1941, in the minor and rival leagues of the time, and when Paul Brown founded the present franchise in 1967 he took the old name deliberately, to give the new team a link to the city's football past. It was Brown's second naming story. Having had one team named after him in Cleveland, he named the next one himself.

Teams renamed without moving

Seven of today's franchises have changed nickname after playing under an earlier one in a league. Two did it on moving: the Portsmouth Spartans became the Detroit Lions in 1934 and the Dallas Texans became the Kansas City Chiefs in 1963. The other five, in the table below, did it without leaving town, and two more clubs have changed the place name in front of a nickname that stayed the same.

Franchise today	Earlier name	Changed to	Year
Chicago Bears	Chicago Staleys	Chicago Bears	1922
Washington Commanders	Boston Braves	Boston Redskins	1933
Pittsburgh Steelers	Pittsburgh Pirates	Pittsburgh Steelers	1940
New York Jets	Titans of New York	New York Jets	1963
New England Patriots	Boston Patriots	New England Patriots	1971
Arizona Cardinals	Phoenix Cardinals	Arizona Cardinals	1994
Tennessee Titans	Tennessee Oilers	Tennessee Titans	1999

The reasons divide cleanly. Some owners were shedding a name that belonged to someone else. Halas's club owed its first name to the A.E. Staley starch company and dropped it as soon as a one-season agreement with the founder ran out. Rooney's Pirates were a borrowed identity he had tired of.

Others were burying a failure. The Titans of New York had been named by their first owner, a broadcaster named Harry Wismer, on the theory that titans are bigger than giants. By 1962 the club could not meet its payroll and the league was paying the players. The syndicate that bought it wanted no reminder.

A wider map, and a name that was refused

The Patriots and Cardinals changes were about territory. A team that wants to sell tickets across six states, or across a whole state, has a reason not to name itself after one city.

Boston's club spent its first eleven seasons moving among borrowed stadiums, and when it finally built one, in the suburb of Foxborough, it announced that it would be known as the Bay State Patriots. The league turned the name down. The explanation usually given is that headline writers would have shortened it to initials nobody wanted. Within weeks the club had settled on New England.

Oilers to Titans

The Tennessee case is the slowest. The Houston Oilers moved to Tennessee in 1997 and kept their name for two awkward seasons, one in Memphis and one in a college stadium in Nashville, playing as the Tennessee Oilers in a state with no oil industry to speak of. After a search, Titans was announced in December 1998 to take effect with the opening of a new stadium the following year. Nashville has long called itself the Athens of the South and has a full-scale replica of the Parthenon in a city park, which gave a name out of Greek myth a local excuse.

The sharp-eyed will notice that the franchise now uses the name the Jets threw away.

Washington in detail: a name retired in July 2020

No naming story in the league has been argued over as long, and it helps to take it in order.

1. 11932The franchise begins in Boston as the Braves, playing at the ballpark of the baseball team of that name.
2. 21933It moves to Fenway Park and is renamed the Redskins.
3. 31937The club relocates to Washington and keeps the name.
4. 4July 3, 2020Under pressure from sponsors, the club announces a review of the name.
5. 5July 13, 2020The name and logo are retired.
6. 62020 and 2021 seasonsThe club plays as the Washington Football Team.
7. 7February 2, 2022The name Commanders is announced.

Dates are those of the club's own announcements. The franchise has been in the Washington area since 1937.

The 1933 name was chosen by the club's founding owner, George Preston Marshall. A claim often repeated is that it was meant to honor the head coach hired that year, William "Lone Star" Dietz, who presented himself as Native American. A statement attributed to Marshall at the time said the coach was not the reason, and Dietz's ancestry has been seriously questioned by historians.

Objections began in earnest in the late 1960s and never stopped. Native American organizations, the National Congress of American Indians most prominently, argued that the word was a slur, pointing out that dictionaries labeled it offensive. A federal trademark board twice ordered the team's registrations canceled, in 1999 and 2014, on the ground that the marks disparaged Native Americans. Neither order stuck: the first was overturned in federal court, finally on the ground that the petitioners had waited too long to bring their case, and the second became moot after the Supreme Court ruled in an unrelated 2017 case that the law against disparaging trademarks violated the First Amendment.

So the law did not force the change. Money did. In the summer of 2020, amid a national reckoning over race, the company whose name was on the team's stadium asked publicly for a new one, other sponsors signaled the same, and large retailers pulled the merchandise. The review announced on July 3 lasted ten days.

The interim name, Washington Football Team, was meant as a placeholder and lasted two full seasons. The club said the search was slowed by trademarks, since speculators had registered many of the obvious candidates, and it ruled out at least one fan favorite on those grounds. Commanders, a reference to the capital's military presence, was unveiled on February 2, 2022.

Names tried and dropped

For every name that lasted there is one that was announced, printed on letterhead and withdrawn.

Dallas went through two. The NFL's 1960 expansion team was first to be the Steers, an idea abandoned when someone considered what a steer is. It then became the Rangers, which lasted until the owners realized a minor league baseball team of that name was still operating in the city and did not want the confusion. Cowboys was the third choice.

Oakland's Señores appear at the top of this page. Raiders had been among the contest entries all along, so the owners were overruling their own contest.

Cleveland announced Panthers before Browns. Boston had its Bay State interlude.

The finalists that lost

Modern franchises publish their shortlists, so the losers are on the record.

City	Year decided	Name chosen	Names that lost out
Jacksonville	1991	Jaguars	Sharks, Stingrays, Panthers
Baltimore	1996	Ravens	Americans, Marauders
Houston	2000	Texans	Apollos, Bobcats, Stallions, Wildcatters
Kansas City	1963	Chiefs	Texans, which the owner had hoped to keep

Houston's list is the most revealing. Apollos pointed at the space program and Wildcatters at the oil business, both of them more particular to the city than the name that won. Texans claimed the whole state and was the hardest of the five for anyone to dislike. That is how most modern names are chosen. A name that a focus group cannot object to will usually beat one that some people love.

Texans also had a history the club had to step around. Lamar Hunt's AFL team had been the Dallas Texans before it became the Chiefs, and a short-lived NFL team of 1952 had used the name before that. Houston's is the third franchise in the NFL or AFL to try the name and the first to keep it.

Jacksonville's rejected Panthers became the name of the Carolina franchise that entered the league in the same season. The Carolina owner's son is credited with that choice, along with the black, blue and silver colors, and no contest was held.

Who controls a team name

A club owns its name in the ordinary legal sense. The league controls what can be done with it.

Team names and logos are registered trademarks, and for more than sixty years the clubs have licensed them collectively through a league-owned company and divided the proceeds, an arrangement that is one strand of the system described in our explainer on NFL revenue sharing. Because every club has a financial interest in every other club's marks, a change of name is not a private decision. In practice no franchise renames itself alone: the proposal goes through the league office, the trademark work is done centrally, and, as Boston found out in 1971, the answer can be no.

The Browns name stayed in Cleveland

When the Browns' owner announced in 1995 that he was moving the team to Baltimore, Cleveland sued. The settlement, reached in early 1996 among the city, the owner and the league, did something without precedent. The league kept the Browns' name, colors, uniform design and records in trust for a future Cleveland team and committed to putting one there by 1999. The departing organization went to Baltimore as a new franchise and had to find a new name, which is how the poll that produced Ravens came about.

Before 1996 a name belonged to whoever owned the franchise and went wherever he went. Since then cities have treated the Cleveland deal as the standard to aim for, and owners planning a move have had to negotiate over the name as a separate asset.

The Oilers name was retired

Houston's case went the other way. When the Tennessee franchise dropped Oilers in 1999, the name was retired with the league's agreement, so that no later team could pick it up. The Oilers' history and records stayed with the Tennessee club, which has since worn the old uniforms as throwbacks.

That is part of why Houston's 2002 expansion team is the Texans and the city's football past belongs to Nashville. Cleveland kept its history and lost its players. Houston lost both.

Quick reference: all 32 NFL team names and meanings

The table lists every franchise alphabetically by its current location, with the origin in a line and the first season the club played under its present nickname. For the eight original AFL teams, and how they entered the league, see our history of the AFL-NFL merger.

Team	Where the name comes from	Nickname first used
Arizona Cardinals	The color of secondhand jerseys bought in Chicago	1901
Atlanta Falcons	Fan contest; the bird of prey	1966
Baltimore Ravens	Newspaper poll; Edgar Allan Poe's poem	1996
Buffalo Bills	Contest; a play on Buffalo Bill Cody, revived from a 1947 club	1960
Carolina Panthers	Chosen by the founding owner's family	1995
Chicago Bears	Bigger relatives of baseball's Cubs	1922
Cincinnati Bengals	An earlier Cincinnati professional team	1968
Cleveland Browns	Paul Brown, the first coach	1946
Dallas Cowboys	The ranching image of Texas	1960
Denver Broncos	Fan contest; the wild horse of the West	1960
Detroit Lions	A companion to baseball's Tigers	1934
Green Bay Packers	The Indian Packing Company, the first sponsor	1919
Houston Texans	The state, chosen from five finalists	2002
Indianapolis Colts	Maryland horse racing, by way of Baltimore	1953
Jacksonville Jaguars	Fan contest held before the franchise existed	1995
Kansas City Chiefs	The nickname of Mayor H. Roe Bartle	1963
Las Vegas Raiders	The owners' replacement for a contest winner in Oakland	1960
Los Angeles Chargers	A contest entry picked by owner Barron Hilton	1960
Los Angeles Rams	Fordham University's teams, by way of Cleveland	1936
Miami Dolphins	Fan contest; the marine mammal	1966
Minnesota Vikings	The Scandinavian heritage of the Upper Midwest	1961
New England Patriots	Public suggestions; the Revolution's Boston origins	1960
New Orleans Saints	All Saints' Day and a jazz standard	1967
New York Giants	Baseball's New York Giants	1925
New York Jets	The jet age, a new stadium by an airport, a rhyme with Mets	1963
Philadelphia Eagles	The Blue Eagle of the National Recovery Administration	1933
Pittsburgh Steelers	The city's steel industry	1940
San Francisco 49ers	The Gold Rush prospectors of 1849	1946
Seattle Seahawks	Fan contest; the osprey	1976
Tampa Bay Buccaneers	Fan contest; Gulf Coast pirate legend	1976
Tennessee Titans	Greek myth, for the "Athens of the South"	1999
Washington Commanders	The military presence in the capital	2022

The year for the Cardinals is the traditional one and cannot be documented to the month. Every other date is the first season in which the name appeared on a schedule.

1900s1names

1910s1names

1920s2names

1930s3names

1940s3names

1950s1names

1960s13names

1970s2names

1990s4names

2000s1names

2020s1names

Counts the 32 names in the table above by the season each was first worn. Thirteen date from the 1960s, when the AFL and NFL expanded against each other.

Show the numbers

Current nicknames by the decade they were first used

Item	Value
1900s	1names
1910s	1names
1920s	2names
1930s	3names
1940s	3names
1950s	1names
1960s	13names
1970s	2names
1990s	4names
2000s	1names
2020s	1names

Read down the right-hand column and the fashions show. Before 1940, sponsors and baseball. In the 1940s, industry and history. From 1960, contests, and animals above all: of the thirteen names from that decade and the six adopted since by brand-new franchises, eight are creatures of one kind or another.

What the table cannot show is how many of these names were accidents that hardened. Nobody in Green Bay in 1919 was choosing a name for the ages. A cannery paid for some jerseys. Nobody in Chicago in 1901 imagined a football club in Arizona. A man bought faded shirts and defended the color. The names that feel most permanent in the league, the ones that turn up in our guide to how the NFL's divisions are arranged as if they had always been there, were mostly decided in an afternoon by someone with a more pressing problem. The founding of the league those early clubs joined is the subject of our piece on the 1920 meeting in Canton, and the rest of the sport is covered from our American football hub.