The just completed Stanley Cup Finals between the Chicago Blackhawks and Boston Bruins sparked a lot of talk about hockey's Original Six. Those original teams in hockey had me thinking about football's original teams. The NFL that we know today started out as the American Professional Football Association in 1920. The only teams to play in that first season that are still playing today are the Chicago Bears and Chicago Cardinals. The Green Bay Packers were around but they didn't join the new professional football league until 1921. The league changed it's name to the National Football League prior to the 1922 season. The APFA/NFL was lucky to make it out of that first decade. Teams came and went. There was a high of twenty-two teams and a low of only ten. Teams like the Columbus Panhandles, Duluth Eskimos, and Milwaukee Badgers took the field against the big, bad Chicago Bears. Professional football was not the lucrative business that it is today. In 1925, the New York Giants joined the league. The 1920s started with only two teams that would survive. The decade closed with four teams that would make it to the present day.
The 1930's brought some stability to the NFL. The small town teams, except for that cute Green Bay team, started to fade away. The remnants from the semi-pro, pre-NFL days were replaced by big city teams like the Philadelphia Eagles, Pittsburgh Pirates/Steelers, Detroit Lions, Washington Redskins, and Cleveland Rams. A Brooklyn/Boston team that can be linked to our present day Indianapolis Colts rounded out a ten team league that brought about a brighter future for professional football. As the '30s became the '40s, the war years created some difficulties for the NFL just as they did everywhere. Some teams joined forces to survive, but they did survive. The end of the war found a second professional league in the All-America Football Conference. By the end of the decade, that new league would provide the NFL with two new teams in the Cleveland Browns and San Francisco 49ers. This created the 12-team league that entered the expansion of the 1960s and a football war with the AFL.
Technically, the NFL has an Original Two. There's no real way around the fact that only the Chicago Bears and Chicago Cardinals have played in all of the APFA/NFL's 93 seasons. Granted, the Cardinals have moved around some in those 93 years. They even joined forces with the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1944 to survive World War II. I tend to think of the Packers and the Giants as original teams as well. Curly Lambeau and his Packers were playing competitive football before the new professional league was formed. They just signed up a year late. The Packers and Giants were part of the professional football chaos of the 1920s. They lived it and made it through. They deserve some recognition for surviving that decade. So, the NFL has their Original Two. Original Four if you cut a couple teams some slack.
No comments:
Post a Comment