slapshot

It looks hand-lettered to me. The letters aren't consistent from word to word.

Progressive looks like a custom/modified version of Eurostile Bold Condensed and obliqued. The underneath copy is Univers Condensed Oblique.

Eurostile Bold Condensed bottom copy is Helvetica

For this year? Not sure yet. For the past 5 years it's been Aurora. With a little bit of Bank Gothic thrown in.

Brody Script is very close to that one. Don't know the "MAME" one though.

I don't think it's necessary to convert the text to outlines first. I think the text is still live even under the arch/envelope distortions, isn't it? Once you expand appearance it generates the outlines. As far as the .ttf fonts into Illustrator question, just do what you would normally do with any font. On a Mac, you can double click on the file and it will open up in FontBook on its own, and you can click the button that says "activate this font". For PCs, just place the file into your font folder (somewhere on the C drive).

Or you could plate the 6 outline on top of the area to be knocked out, select both, then go to the Pathfinder palette and select "Minus Back".

?unless it's designed by Phoenix, then there's a 99% chance that it's City Bold

In order to downsave an Illustrator file to an earlier version, you have to go to "Export", then select "Illustrator Legacy" as the file type. Once you click on the OK button, another window will give you a list of all the different Illustrator versions to save the file.

Boston College's font is custom-made for the athletic department. It's used for all sport-specific logos, names and numbers on all uniforms, regardless of manufacturers (except for hockey, which has "Boston College" set in the font Compacta.) SF Archery is very close to it, and is probably the closest font found for it.

Nah, the first step for most people is to PM-me

I think if you go Object -> Expand and select both fill and stroke, it will turn your brush stroke into a vector shape.

Baseline shift. As long as your text is still active (not outlines), go to the type palette and look for the baseline shift field (I think it's the lower left, it has a lower case A above an arrow pointing up). Use a negative number to lower the text, and a positive number to elevate it. Another way to do it if you have text on the top and bottom of a circle is this way: lower the text on the top of the circle, but raise the text on the bottom. Visually they should look like they were types on the same circle.

Sometimes the monitor plays tricks on you. I've seen lines that appear straight when viewed up close, but not straight when zooming out. The best way to see if it looks right is to print it out, or print out an enlargement of the area that's affected. If it prints fine, then it's ok. If not, then you have to tweak it a bit.

You'd probably have to Nick1733 for those. He made vector files of all the NFL jerseys, I think the link was posted in the earlier pages of the NFL numbers/letters thread.