NFL Logo Variation - NFL Illustrated

One thing I noticed when looking at the 1966 NFL program I reviewed in the last post was the NFL logo on the front of the cover:



The NFL shield on the cover is very different from the standard NFL logo that was being used at the time:

Paul Lukas from Uni Watch also picked up on the logo difference (good catch!). The standard logo was included in the Coke ad I reviewed last time (but which for some reason did not include the lines behind the letters):


It appears the NFL created a separate logo for their publishing division which was called National Football League Illustrated, and handled the production of game programs. In addition to the 1966 programs, the logo can be found on programs from 1967 though 1969 as well (programs from 1965 and earlier have the regular NFL logo):

1967:


1968:


1969:


After the merger in 1970, it appears that the NFL Illustrated logo disappeared from game programs as the NFL started publishing PRO! magazine which was essentially the same program for all the games in every city each week with some team specific pages included for the two teams that were playing in that week's games:

By publishing PRO! magazine as the program for all the games instead of having each team handle its own game program (especially after merging with the AFL), there was much more uniformity for the game programs after the merger.

Unfortunately, that meant no more programs with covers where you could definitely tell who the home team was like this:




After the merger, the program covers for PRO! magazine were much more generic, and not team specific.

Getting back to the NFL logo, given the attention that has been paid to the NFL logo after its change this year to this:

from this:


I thought it was interesting to see a variation of the logo that rarely gets mentioned: