On August 20, 1920, representatives of several professional football teams met in Canton, Ohio, to form what became the American Professional Football Association. Two years later, the league renamed itself the National Football League. The meeting aimed to bring order to a chaotic landscape of independent teams and loose schedules. Standardized rules, contracts, and schedules helped the league grow. In the decades that followed, the NFL evolved into the dominant professional football league in the United States. The Canton meeting is recognized as the birth of the modern NFL.
