“Pro football began in 1892 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania when former Yale star William ‘Pudge’ Heffelfinger was paid a notable sum of $500 to play in a single game for the Allegheny Athletic Association on November 12. For nearly the next three decades, pro football faced its ups and downs as the game was played primarily in small towns throughout western Pennsylvania and the Midwest.”
The National Football League wasn’t born in Pittsburgh. That happened in Canton, Ohio, on Sept. 17, 1920, when a group of men gathered at the Hupmobile showroom owned by Ralph Hay, also the owner of the home-town Canton Bulldogs, where the result was the formation of the American Professional Football Association (APFA) that would be renamed the National Football League in 1922.
Art Rooney Sr. didn’t join until 1933, and so his Pittsburgh franchise isn’t the oldest in the NFL, but