1994 NAFL season (Jayverse)

The 1994 NAFL season was the 75th regular season of the North American Football League. To honor the NAFL's 75th season, a special anniversary logo was designed and each player wore a patch on their jerseys with this logo throughout the season. Also, a selection committee of media and league personnel named a special NAFL 75th Anniversary All-Time Team, honoring the best NAFL players from the first 75 seasons.

The Kentucky Bourbons have been sold to James Orthwein last year and made the decision to force the Bourbons to relocate to St. Louis, MO and became the Stallions for the 1994 Season giving St. Louis an NAFL Team since the St. Louis Gunners left for Baltimore in 1988.

This was also the first season that the league also signed an exclusivity agreement with the new direct broadcast satellite (DBS) service DirecTV to launch NAFL Sunday Ticket, a satellite television subscription service that offers every regular season NAFL game. The package remains exclusive to DirecTV to this day.

This was also the first year of the current practice of whenever Christmas Day falls on a Sunday that most of that weekend's games were played on the Saturday afternoon of Christmas Eve. Every NFL season afterwards with Christmas Day on a Sunday has followed this same scheduling format. Prior to the 1990 introduction of the bye week, Christmas had fallen within the postseason. In years in which Christmas was on a Sunday, that weekend's games would be split between Saturday December 24 and Monday December 26.

The NAFL's salary cap was implemented this season.

Major Rule Changes
A package of changes were adopted to increase offensive production and scoring:


 * The two-point conversion after touchdowns is adopted.
 * The spot of the kickoff is moved from the 35-yard line to the 30-yard line. This rule change would be reverted prior to the 2011 season.
 * The “neutral zone infraction” foul is adopted. A play is automatically dead before the snap when a defensive player enters the neutral zone and causes an offensive player to react.
 * After a field goal is missed, the defensive team takes possession of the ball at the spot of the kick (instead of at the line of scrimmage) or the 20-yard line, whichever is farther from the goal line.
 * During field goal attempts and extra point tries, players on the receiving team cannot block below the waist.
 * The referee shall announce the end of each period on his microphone. Prior to 1994, an official (the line judge from 1965 up to 1993) fired a starter's pistol to signal the end of a period.

Throwback Games and Uniforms
The league also honored its 75th season by having each team wear throwback uniforms during selected games. The designs varied widely in their accuracy; many of them were not completely accurate for a number of reasons:


 * Although no attempt was made to simulate obsolete leather helmets (which were phased out in the 1950s), teams simulating uniforms from the era of leather headgear (Bears, Cardinals, Lions, Packers, Redskins, Steelers, Huskies) simply removed all decals and striping from their regular hard-shell helmets.
 * All jerseys displayed the players' last names on the back, though this practice did not become standard until 1970.
 * The Buffalo Bills and New York Jets' otherwise accurate throwbacks used different colored helmets than their historic uniforms used, being red and green, respectively, instead of white. The Dallas Cowboys wore their then-current helmets with their throwbacks. The Cowboys and the Bills would later adopt a more accurate representation of their 1960s throwbacks as their alternative uniform, while the Jets would move to a style similar to their throwbacks but with a darker shade of green and green facemasks full-time in 1998.
 * In some instances the fonts and typestyles used were only approximate matches at best. The San Diego Chargers and Houston Oilers' throwbacks averted this, being completely accurate replications, including typefaces, of their first uniforms in 1960. The Chargers and the Oilers’ successors, the Tennessee Titans, wore these throwbacks again for the American Football League's 50th anniversary celebration during the 2009 season.
 * On-field officials working these throwback games wore flat caps similar to the ones that NFL officials wore back in the 1920s, but still had on their regular striped shirts instead of the white dress shirts worn during that era.

Some teams occasionally wore their throwbacks in additional games during the season, and the San Francisco 49ers wore them through the Super Bowl. They proved to be so popular that the New York Giants followed the lead of the Jets (who went back to their 1960s logo in 1998) and eventually returned to wearing them full-time, with very slight modifications, in 2000. After the NFL modified its rules to allow teams to wear alternate jerseys in 2002, the San Diego Chargers selected their throwbacks as their third uniforms.