NFL Night Series

The NFL Night Series was an Australian rules football tournament which was contested annually from 1976 until 1979. The tournament, played concurrently with the premiership season, was contested at different times by football clubs from the Victorian, South Australian, West Australian and Queensland football leagues, and was operated by the National Football League, which was the national administrative body for the sport.

It was the forerunner to the Australian Football Championships Night Series, which was established in Victoria as a rival competition in 1977 and eventually replaced the NFL Night Series altogether in 1980.

From 1968 until 1975, the Australian National Football Council (later renamed the National Football League) had operated a post-season Championship of Australia tournament amongst the premiers of the Victorian Football League, South Australian National Football League, West Australian Football League and Tasmanian State Premiership. In 1976, the National Football League extended this concept significantly by establishing the Night Series. The Night Series was an extended competition which ran concurrently with the premiership season, featuring multiple teams from each state, who initially qualified based on their finishing positions in the previous year. Most of the matches were played on weekday nights and broadcast live to a national television audience, which was a new sponsorship opportunity which the sport had never previously enjoyed. Although the competition did not bear many structural similarities to the Championship of Australia series, it is often seen as its natural successor; and, the post-season Championship of Australia tournament was discontinued in the same year.

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