Continuing our look into the stories behind the names of the NFL playoff teams, we now move on to the NFC.

The New York Giants
Technically the New York Football Giants, this team is one of the oldest in the league.  They joined the league in 1925 and have been forever in the ownership of the Mara family.  Before 1956 the team played in New York’s famed Polo Grounds which at the time housed the New York Giants of baseball, before they moved to San Francisco.  I haven’t been able to find it absolutely confirmed anywhere, but in the era (see Pittsburgh Steelers) football teams who were tenets of baseball teams often took the same name as their hosts.

One Sunday in December by Lou Sahadi gives a nice breif history of the club. Read the full story

By Stephen Turk

As the baseball playoffs go on, it’s got me thinking about the names of the team s involved.  We have the Boston Red Sox, the Tampa Bay Rays, the Philadelphia Phillies, and the Los Angeles Dodgers.  The Dodgers, Red Sox, and Phillies have all been around for a long time, and as such their team names came about in different ways than teams that came about later.  The Rays, of course, are one of these later teams, and looking at the stories behind the names, yields some interesting stories, as well as tracks some of the changes that have occurred in sports.

Let’s look at the three old time teams first.  When pro baseball started up, there weren’t official team names for many of them.  They would be the baseball club from Hyannisport or wherever.  Nicknames often came about from sportswriters making an alliteration of the coaches name, relating them to a popular trend, or merely pointing out a common element of their play or uniform detail. Read the full story