2006 NFL season
87th season in the history of the National Football League
The 2006 NFL season was the 87th regular season of the National Football League (NFL). Regular season play was held from September 7 to December 31, 2006.
The season began with the reigning Super Bowl XL champion Pittsburgh Steelers defeating the Miami Dolphins in the NFL Kickoff game.
The NFL title was eventually won by the Indianapolis Colts, when they defeated the Chicago Bears 29–17 in Super Bowl XLI at Dolphin Stadium at Miami Gardens, Florida on February 4, 2007.
New NFL commissioner
On March 20, 2006, Paul Tagliabue announced his plans to retire as NFL commissioner. During an NFL meeting in Northbrook, Illinois, on August 8, league team owners selected Roger Goodell, the NFL's then-current chief operating officer, as the new commissioner. Tagliabue continued to serve as commissioner until Goodell officially replaced him on Friday September 1.
Tagliabue became NFL commissioner on October 26, 1989. During his tenure, the league added four new teams; saw four franchises move (including two franchises—the Rams and Raiders—from Los Angeles, the second-largest television market in the United States); the construction of seventeen new stadiums; began its own in-house television specialty cable network, the NFL Network; greatly increased television rights fees with its broadcasters, including the addition of the Fox network and its NFL programming; and maintained labor peace with the players' union.
Draft
The 2006 NFL draft was held from April 29 to 30, 2006, at New York City's Radio City Music Hall.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “2006 NFL season” is 87th season in the history of the National Football League. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through season, 87th and history, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q385964. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2006, 2007 and 1989.
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This entry incorporates text from “2006 NFL season” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.