Commissioner of the NFL
overview of the CEOs of the National Football League
The commissioner of the National Football League is the chief executive of the National Football League (NFL). The position was created in 1941. The current commissioner is Roger Goodell, who assumed office on September 1, 2006. Since the death of Paul Tagliabue on November 9, 2025, Goodell is the only living NFL commissioner.
Until 1941, the NFL's chief executive was the league president. On January 17, 1941, the NFL franchise owners amended the league's constitution to change the chief executive's title from "president" to "commissioner".
Temporary Secretary
Ralph Hay (1920)
In 1920, the Canton Bulldogs were one of 14 teams to form the American Professional Football Association (APFA), which would become the National Football League (NFL) two years later. Bulldogs owner Ralph Hay was named the first head of the league (the title was officially "Temporary Secretary" until a permanent president could be chosen).
Hay did make one notable contribution in his short tenure as Temporary Secretary. Vernon Maginnis, who operated one of Akron's professional teams in 1919, wanted to field a team under the name of the Massillon Tigers in 1920.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Commissioner of the NFL” as overview of the CEOs of the National Football League. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5869995. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1941, 2006, 2025 and 1920.
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This entry incorporates text from “Commissioner of the NFL” 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.