"The 26 Teams"

This poster comes from the 1970s, showing the wordmarks of all the teams in the league at the time.

Information on these old wordmarks is hard to come by, but we can narrow down the timeframe. The presence of all the former AFL teams, and the absence of the Seahawks and Buccaneers, helps us date it between 1970 and 1976.

What strikes me today is how many clubs are still using these marks. Here's a version I worked up using the logos from 2013:

In addition to the Packers, the Bears, Bills, Cowboys, Colts and Washington have retained their classic looks virtually unchanged. Those old Browns and 49ers wordmarks endured until relatively recently (2003 and 2004, respectively). Also worth noting that the Vikings have since reverted to an earlier wordmark that predated our poster (the Browns might have, too).

Then there are the minor changes; the Chiefs introduced a modified upper-case version of their old lower-case logo sometime before 1983, the Raiders tightened up their kerning a bit, and the Saints made the most subtle change, losing the dot over their "i".

As for the others, you can see a trend towards arcs, arches and protrusions, meaning the names don't all fit together in my version as neatly as their 1970s counterparts did.