Start date 1994 | ||
Duration September 4, 1994 – December 26, 1994 Site Joe Robbie Stadium, Miami, Florida Champion Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco 49ers Similar 1992 NFL season, 1996 NFL season, 1997 NFL season, 1991 NFL season, 1990 NFL season |
The 1994 NFL season was the 75th regular season of the National Football League. To honor the NFL'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 NFL 75th Anniversary All-Time Team, honoring the best NFL players from the first 75 seasons.
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The Phoenix Cardinals changed their name to Arizona Cardinals in an attempt to widen their appeal to the entire state of Arizona instead of just the Phoenix area. The name was initially resisted by Bill Bidwill.
The Seattle Seahawks played their first three regular season home games at Husky Stadium because the Kingdome, the Seahawks' regular home field, was undergoing repairs for damaged tiles on its roof. The Seahawks returned for the 2000 and 2001 seasons while their new stadium was under construction.
The 1994 season marked the last one until 2016 that the city of Los Angeles had an NFL team. Both the Rams and the Raiders left the city following the season. The Rams moved east to St. Louis, Missouri, after being in Los Angeles for 49 years, while the Raiders left Los Angeles after 12 years to return to their previous home in Oakland, California. The Rams eventually returned to Los Angeles in 2016 after failing to reach an agreement with St. Louis on a new stadium.
This was also the first season that the then-fledgling Fox Network televised NFL games. Fox took over the National Football Conference package from CBS, who would return to televising the NFL in 1998. The league also signed an exclusivity agreement with the direct broadcast satellite (DBS) service DirecTV to launch NFL Sunday Ticket, a satellite television subscription service that offers every regular season NFL game. Today the package remains exclusive to DirecTV.
The season ended with Super Bowl XXIX when the San Francisco 49ers defeated the San Diego Chargers 49–26 at Joe Robbie Stadium. Both teams had met that regular season, the second straight season that had happened, and ninth time overall.
Even though the 1994 World Series was canceled, the NFL ultimately decided not to reschedule its Thursday night contests in October for Sunday, even though they wouldn't have competed with baseball those nights.
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.
Major rule changes
A package of changes were adopted to increase offensive production and scoring:
Throwback jerseys
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:
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 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.
Final regular season standings
W = Wins, L = Losses, PCT = Winning Percentage, PF= Points For, PA = Points Against
Clinched playoff seeds are marked in parentheses and shaded in green. No ties occurred this season.