In the beginning, each owner had 4 teams and the winner was the team with the most points at the end of the 16-week season. The original teams and owners were (note: nicknames really didn't come until '97):
In 1991, the GFL broke the gender barrier by admitting Krissy Dennis as an owner in place of Chuck. Jody Haggerty also joined the league in '91, taking over for Bob.
In '92, Jay "Doof" Davis bought Orr's teams, but failed to show up at the draft. So we stuck his teams with rejects like him. '92 was the first season using head-to-head play. Rather than just adding up team points from week to week, each team played a 13-game schedule, with the top 6 teams in each conference going on to the playoffs.
In '93 Brad Bellen and Steve Montauredes joined the league in place of Orr and Krissy respectively. Brad and Monty decided to split up the 8 teams evenly. Brad kept GB & Atl, but traded Philly and KC to Monty. Monty kept Denver and Pittsburgh and gave away Miami and the Mammoths.
1994 was the first year every owner returned from the previous season. Wes's Horned Owls won the Gregory Cup that year, then surprisingly moved to Oakland the following season. It was decided that starting in '95 each owner should have 2 teams in each conference and no more that one team in a division to minimize the number of games an owner would have two of his teams playing each other. So, Rusty's Seattle Mice and Big Cat's Arizona Salmon switched cities; Brad's Green Bay Camels and Monty's Kansas City Deadheads also switched cities.
In '95, Tim Olver took ownership of the 2 new expansion teams in Jacksonville and Carolina. The format of the playoffs was changed in '95. Since high-seeded teams were being routinely knocked out by wildcards, we decided to throw out head-to-head play in the playoffs. Instead, the winner of the playoffs was the team with the highest point total over the 4 weeks of the playoffs.
Wes's Storm moved from LA to St Louis.
Wes's Horned Owls moved from LA to Oakland.
Rusty's Mice moved from Seattle to Arizona.
Big Cat's Salmon moved from Arizona to Seattle.
Brad's Camels moved from Green Bay to Kansas City.
Monty's Deadheads moved from Kansas City to Green Bay.
In '96, Brian "Penguin" Gross took over for Wes and Bill Shaughnessy for Steve. Bill gave his Denver franchise to Tim so that each would have 3 teams.
Jim's Blackbirds moved from Cleveland to Baltimore.
In '97, Brian and Big Cat sold the St. Louis Storm and Seattle Salmon to Rich Gross, bringing the number of owners to nine. Even though this document refers to team nicknames prior to '97, they really weren't used until '97. Before that we just used the same names as the NFL.
Big Cat's Cobras moved from Houston to Tennessee.
In '98, Tim moved to Colorado so his teams were given to Jody's roommate Greg. We added a rule that a single team can trade away no more than 3 draft picks in a season.
Greg changed the name of the Carolina franchise from the Forks to the Muff.
Greg changed the name of the Jacksonville franchise from the Knives to the Junebugs.
Greg changed the name of the Denver franchise from the Spoons to the Dinosaurs.
In '99, Bill gave up his Pittsburgh Martinis to Joe Sepe (bringing the number of owners to 10) who in an effort to wipe out all memories of the old regime, changed the team name to the Pirhanas. The NFL put an expansion team back in Cleveland but the GFL stayed with 30 teams. Players could be drafted from Cleveland, but no Cleveland free agents could be picked up during the season.
Sepe changed the name of the Pittsburgh franchise from the Martinis to the Pirhanas
In 2000, the GFL entered its second decade. Very little changed from 1999. We added a rule that any team that trades away draft picks during the season is barred from making offseason trades that bring back draft picks.
The 2001 season was the third straight season with the same ownership. 1999-2001 was the most stable period in the history of the league. We added a rule that a team could start no more than 3 RBs each week.
2002 brought some big changes in the rules and the makeup of the league. The NFL added the Houston Texans, so we decided to expand the GFL to 32 teams also. Bill got the Houston Sanchos and Sepe got the Cleveland Coyotes. The NFL also switched to eight four-team divisions, so we did the same. However, we switched our cities around a bit to make sure each owner had no more than one team in each division and no more than two teams in each conference. After missing the last two drafts and having a hard time keeping up with the league, Big Cat decided to drop out for the good of the league. In honor of Big Cat, the old NFC was renamed the Marquard Conference (The AFC was renamed the Gregory Conference). Sepe was given Big Cat�s New Orleans Crawdads, Greg was given his Tennessee Cobras, and Bill was given his Minnesota Mallards (renamed to the Mud). A number of rules were changed also. We added assisted tackles and forced fumbles to the scoring system, created an Injured Reserve rule, did away with the wait-until-week 3-to-make-moves rule, and made a rule that it�s OK to make bench/start moves up until gametime Sunday when there is an early game.
Bill changed the name of his Minnesota franchise from the Mallards to the Mud
Greg changed the name of his Tennessee franchise from the Cobras to the Tadpoles
In 2003, Rich dropped out of the league because of a lack of time, so Brian "Smokey" McManus took over the Seattle Salmon and St. Louis Storm. There were no major rule changes.
In 2004, a few rule changes were made:
Sepe changed the name of his New Orleans franchise from the Crawdads to the Nomads.
In 2005, Sepe decided to quit the league. His New Orleans and Pittsburgh franchises were given to Smokey and his Cleveland franchise was given to Penguin. Smokey decided to change the name of the St Louis franchise from the Storm to the Clydesdales. A number of rule changes/clarifications were made:
2006 was a pretty stable season. Everyone came back and Jim added a 'Game Center' to the website that let everyone see how their players were doing in near real-time. There were just a couple of rules added:
2007 brought a number of changes. Penguin bowed out of the league after 11 seasons. His Oakland, New York, Chicago and Cleveland franchises were given to Kolson Schlosser. Smokey changed the name of the New Orleans franchise from the Nomads to the Voodoo. Rule changes that were made:
All owners returned in 2008. Rule changes:
The league's 20th season once again returned the same 8 owners. Kolson changed the name of the Chicago franchise from the Cardinals to the Clap. The league website, which had been a mixture of static reports uploaded to Jim's PSU web space each week and dynamic reports from a lame web server at Jim's house, was moved to a professionally maintained web provider. Pretty much all of the reports are now pulled from a database on the fly. The league now has its own domain name as well. A poll was held on about 10 different options and the winning name was tabandvodka.com, in recognition of the revolting cocktail that the winner must drink at the post-season party each year.
The only other major change had to do with the bad behavior rule. Because the rule lacked clear-cut standards, some owners were generally opposed to the whole idea and the penalty had real consequences for teams, people weren't really posting incidents to vote on. So we decided to change the penalty such that whichever owner had the most incidents would need to drink a 40-ounce bottle of Olde English malt liquor from a brown paper bag.
In 2010, the biggest change was a re-alignment of the teams. In the new alignment, there are 4 divisions and each owner has exactly 1 team in each division. This helps to even up the schedule. In other news, the number of cutdowns was reduced to two: down to 6 players per team by Aug 1 and down to 5 by 15 days before the draft. Finally, the commish took the first steps toward adding cool previews and recaps for each game.
In 2011, we did away with transaction fees going into a pool for the Cup winner and charged a flat entry fee of $100 with payouts:
Cup winner: 300
Orr Trophy winner: 150
2nd in postseason: 100
3rd in postseason: 50
Draft host: 125
Party host: 75
Jody took over as official league event coordinator and Bill as treasurer.
We also tweaked the lottery ball rule to say that weeks with less NFL games should have lower cutoffs for adding/subtracting lottery balls (e.g., if 4 NFL teams have a bye, that's 2 less games, so the cutoffs are 1800 and 3800 instead of 2000 and 4000.
The biggest change in 2012 was that the NFL began playing Thursday night games every week. Instead of having the free agent bidding deadline on Wednesday night, we said that teams could submit claims for Thursday night players. Any player claimed by more than one team goes to the team with the worst record. Sunday and Monday players could be picked up the same as before.
Bill decided to leave the 2013 draft early Saturday morning when we tried to start on time, he wasn't ready, we passed over him and he thought we were being unreasonable. So we took turns drafting for him to fill out his rosters, then found Jody and Greg's Optometry School classmate Mike Murphy to run those 4 franchises. Unfortunately, Mike didn't have the time to keep up with the league, so he'll go down as the answer to a GFL history trivia question.
In 2014, Chris "Fathead" Orr returned to the league after a 23-year hiatus, taking over Bill's old teams. Orr had a pretty good draft and first season back, getting the Sanchos into the post-season.
There were a couple of new rules added:
No major changes in 2015. All owners returned and no rule changes were made.
In 2016, we added a new short-term IR rule, allowing a team to replace an injured player on its roster for 4 weeks. We also increased the reward for winning the division to $25 of free agent money.
No major changes in 2017. All owners returned and no rule changes were made.
2018 saw Orr change the nicknames of three of his teams:
No major changes in 2019. All owners returned and no rule changes were made.
2020 was the COVID-19 season. The draft was virtual for everyone and we added 4 bench spots to each team to allow for players missing games due to the virus. A lot of NFL games were postponed, but never beyond their original week. In team news, the Horned Owls moved from Oakland to Las Vegas and the Washington franchise changed their name from the Baboons to the Tacocats.
Another COVID season, though not as bad as the first with vaccines being available. We cut back to 5 bench spots per team. The big news for 2021 was a new website/mobile app.
Another big change was that the NFL added an 18th week to the season. We decided to retain the 13-week season and 4-week postseason, but because they had byes through Week 14, we decided to skip Week 14.
Returning to the 18-week NFL season issue, it was decided that we'd add a week to the GFL regular season and start the postseason in Week 15. We also did away with having multiple rounds of cuts.
Smokey had to bow out of the draft due to health issues, so Cam Detwiler filled in. Cam wasn't participating during the season though, so Smokey came back to finish out the year.
Smokey had to bow out again, so we recruited former owner Tim Olver to take over his teams.
We switched to a new classification system for defensive players, with 3-4 OLBs being combined with 4-3 DEs to form an Edge Defender (ED) position and 3-4 NTs and 4-3 DTs combining to form a Defensive Interior (DI) position. Linebacker became all 4-3 LBs and just 3-4 ILBs. With these changes, we also changed the starting player requirements as follows:
All owners from 2023 returned and there were no major rule changes.