Football Leagues for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCXVIII

Super Bowl 3

Somewhere in the midst of a research job a few days ago one of the staffers stumbled across a website no one here had ever encountered before. Based on a cursory scan of some of our favorite topics, however, it appears that DifferenceBetween.net might well be a secondary mother lode of internet stupidification, putting the site right up there with eHow.com. If the lousy research performed by member Mabelle on the question "Difference Between NFL and AFL" is any indication, the quality of "information" on the website is, at best, suspect...

Why would we say that? well, although none of the staffers is a huge (American) football fan, the collective knowledge of the staffers is more than enough to know that Mabelle's definition of "AFL" leaves something to be desired:

"...the Arena Football League... was founded in 1987."

Uh, yeah: when Mabes pounded out her rubbish on Christmas Day, 2010, the Arena Football League was... going weak (it folded in 2019). Unfortunately, like many greedy, lazy researchers Mabelle stopped at the first result in her Google search. That means that she didn't run across the other AFL, the one that still exists; albeit in another form. 

You see, the American Football League (AFL) operated in competition with the National Football League (NFL) for a decade, and was so successful that the two leagues merged after the 1970 season. They became (respectively) the American and National Football Conferences (AFC, NFC) of the NFL. 

Had Mabelle some notion of the history of the Super Bowl, she might have remembered that the first four versions were head-to-head competition between the two leagues, with the AFL winning the third meeting courtesy of the New York Jets and Broadway Joe Namath (see above). Instead of blathering on about the differences between field size and rosters, perhaps Mabelle should have gone into more depth about the number of different versions of "AFL." But she didn't. That's why the lady is the first-ever recipient of the Dumbass of the Day award on the basis of "work" at another content farm called differencebetween.net. Somehow, we don't think she'll be the last.

SE - SPORTS