1994 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.
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.
This marked the last season until 2016 that the city of Los Angeles had an NFL team and the last one until 2017 that the city had two. 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 after twelve seasons to return to their previous home in Oakland, California. The Rams eventually returned in 2016 after failing to reach an agreement with St. Louis on a new stadium.
This was also the first season that the then eight-year old Fox network televised NFL games; the network had started its own sports division a year prior. 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 new direct broadcast satellite service DirecTV to launch NFL Sunday Ticket, a satellite television subscription service that offers every regular season NFL game. The package remains exclusive to DirecTV to this day.
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 due to the MLB strike, the NFL ultimately decided not to reschedule its Thursday night contests in October for Sunday, even though they would not 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. Prior to the 1990 introduction of the bye week, Christmas had fallen within the postseason. In years in which Christmas was on a Sunday, that weekend's games would be split between Saturday December 24 and Monday December 26.
The NFL's salary cap was implemented this season.
This was the first season of the 1990's to not feature the Buffalo Bills in the Super Bowl.

Draft

The 1994 NFL Draft was held from April 24 to 25, 1994 at New York City's Marriott Marquis. With the first pick, the Cincinnati Bengals selected defensive tackle Dan Wilkinson from Ohio State University.

Major rule changes

A package of changes were adopted to increase offensive production and scoring:
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.
Instead of wearing their throwbacks in additional games, the Dallas Cowboys celebrated their back-to-back Super Bowl titles by wearing "Double-Star" white alternative jerseys during Thanksgiving and through the playoffs. Similar to their throwbacks, they had blue sleeves and blue stars on each shoulder, but it was the modern star design with white lines and blue borders.

Final regular season standings

Tiebreakers

Statistical leaders

Team

Individual

Awards

Coaching changes

Offseason

The was the final season of selected Green Bay Packers home games in Milwaukee. Recent upgrades to Lambeau Field started to make it more lucrative for the team to play full time in Green Bay, while Milwaukee County Stadium was becoming outdated for football.
The home of the Indianapolis Colts, the Hoosier Dome, was renamed the RCA Dome after RCA acquired the naming rights
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 to Husky for the 2000 and 2001 seasons while their new stadium was under construction.