You need to select that column:
In [41]:
df.loc[df['First Season'] > 1990, 'First Season'] = 1
df
Out[41]:
Team First Season Total Games
0 Dallas Cowboys 1960 894
1 Chicago Bears 1920 1357
2 Green Bay Packers 1921 1339
3 Miami Dolphins 1966 792
4 Baltimore Ravens 1 326
5 San Franciso 49ers 1950 1003
So the syntax here is:
df.loc[<mask>(here mask is generating the labels to index) , <optional column(s)> ]
You can check the docs and also the 10 minutes to pandas which shows the semantics
EDIT
If you want to generate a boolean indicator then you can just use the boolean condition to generate a boolean Series and cast the dtype to int this will convert True and False to 1 and 0 respectively:
In [43]:
df['First Season'] = (df['First Season'] > 1990).astype(int)
df
Out[43]:
Team First Season Total Games
0 Dallas Cowboys 0 894
1 Chicago Bears 0 1357
2 Green Bay Packers 0 1339
3 Miami Dolphins 0 792
4 Baltimore Ravens 1 326
5 San Franciso 49ers 0 1003