CHAMPOGRAPHYThe geography of champions.

NFL

Championship eras

Era presets are tied to structural changes in how the champion was decided or how the league was organized. They are not arbitrary decades and they are not defined by which franchise happened to win.

Default analytical range

2002–present

32-Team Era

The 2002 realignment created the current structure: 32 teams in eight four-team divisions, with the champion decided by the Super Bowl.

The analytical default, because the league's membership and playoff structure have been stable since 2002.

Era definitions

1920–1932Available

Founding Era

The APFA/NFL of 1920-1932 crowned champions by season standings, with small-city clubs — Akron, Canton, Providence, Frankford — that no longer exist.

An epicenter from this period describes the league's original Midwest-and-Northeast industrial footprint, and its grounds carry explicitly lower coordinate precision.

Boundary basis: League founding in 1920 through the last standings title in 1932
1933–1965Available

Championship Game Era

A scheduled NFL Championship Game decided the title from 1933 through 1965, as the league consolidated into larger stadiums and bigger cities.

Geographic movement in this era reflects franchise relocations and consolidation more than expansion.

Boundary basis: First NFL Championship Game in 1933; Super Bowl era begins with the 1966 season
1960–1969Available

AFL Decade

The rival American Football League played ten seasons (1960-1969) before the merger. Its champions are recorded in this dataset as a separate, non-counted layer.

Turn this preset on to compare the span in which two leagues crowned champions; AFL titles are preserved but never double-counted against Super Bowl wins.

Boundary basis: AFL play began 1960; full merger completed after the 1969 season
1966–2001Available

Super Bowl Era (pre-realignment)

From the first Super Bowl after the 1966 season through 2001, the champion was decided by the Super Bowl while the league grew from the merger to 31 teams.

This era spans the merger, the 16-game schedule, and free agency — one preset for the pre-realignment Super Bowl decades.

Boundary basis: Super Bowl I follows the 1966 season; realignment in 2002

Pro football before the NFL

Professional football existed from 1892, through the Ohio League and the New York professional circuit of the 1910s. Those were loose regional arrangements with no fixed schedules and no governing body that awarded championships — "champions" were claimed by newspapers and promoters. This dataset therefore begins with the APFA/NFL's 1920 founding, the first point at which a league champion is a verifiable fact rather than a press claim.

The AFL (1960-1969) is different: it was a real league with official champions, so its ten titles are preserved as a recorded, non-counted layer — visible in the champions record and the downloadable CSV without double-counting the 1968 Jets and 1969 Chiefs, whose AFL championships and Super Bowl wins were the same season.

Primary boundary references

Explore the timeline