The Birth of the American Football League: A New Era in Pro Football

On August fourteenth, nineteen fifty nine, the NFL officially had a challenger challenging them for the best American football league in the nation when the American Football League held their first meeting and announced their teams for the upcoming league, starting a rivalry that would lead to the expansion of American football and to the number one sport in America. Here's a story behind the AFL and how it all got started. Today on Daily Sports History, Welcome to Daily Sports History. I'm Ethan Reese, your guide to a rapid deep dive into sports history every day, and today's trivia question to listen out for is how many teams merged from the AFL to the NFL. So in the nineteen fifties professional football really took a jump. In the early nineteen hundreds, football was mainly focused around college and even though professional league started to pop up here and there, none of them really took a stronghold or could even challenge Major League Baseball. College football was still king and over the years in the nineteen thirties nineteen forties. In the nineteen fifties, American football continued to grow, and professional football eventually eclipsed college football. And went and was going toe to tow with Major League Baseball, but that doesn't mean there wasn't challenges. As one franchise in the NFL, the Chicago Cardinals, was being overshadowed by another team in the same city, the Chicago Bears, and they were hoping to move their franchise to another city so they could have more success as this time in foot as this time in professional sports, selling tickets and attendance was the main way teams in the league made their money, which is very different than today, and since the Bears were getting all the attendants and fanfare, the Chicago Cardinals wanted to move for a better chance to have that success, and they had a location all picked out in Saint Louis, but the NFL would not sign out. But the NFL needed did the team to pay money before they would allow them to move. And the Chicago Cardinals were owned by the Bidwell family and they weren't extremely well off, so they looked for investors and they came across Lamar Hunt, who was the son of millionaire oil tycoon H. L. Hunt, and Lamar Hunt would offer to buy the Cardinals and move them to Dallas, where he grew up, but the negotiation between the Bidwells and the Hunts did not go very well, as the Bidwells still wanted to have controlling interest in the franchise and didn't want to move the team to a city that had failed to hold an NFL team before, as Dallas previously had a team that failed in nineteen fifty two, which was the Dallas Texans. So after failing to get a deal with Lamar Hunt, they went to Bud Adams, Bob Housman, and Max Winter to try to make a deal as well, but none of them could get a deal done with the Bidwell family, and that is when these four got together and approached the NFL commissioner Bert Bell about offering expansion to the league because at this time, the NFL only had twelve teams. But the commissioner Bell didn't feel so strong about expanding the team as they were just now starting to have success and they didn't want to risk weakening the talent pool, and he rejected the offer. So after the rejection, Lamar Hunt had an idea, why don't he get the guys he just had and some other wealthy football fans together to start their own league as there's only twelve teams, and it was challenged to buy a team and they weren't going to expand. So you wanted to own a professional football team, you needed to start your own league. And Lamar Hunt didn't just make it an idea. He started to put together the American Football League. And so they start meeting with other possible owners in possible locations, one in Minnesota, one in Seattle, and Buffalo, New York, Los Angeles, and they actually did reach out to the NFL to try to figure out where they could go to not conflict with the NFL. And after all this communication and meetings and everything tracking down possible owners, on August fourteenth, nineteen fifty nine, the very first AFL league meeting was held in Chicago, with their charter membership given to Dallas, New York, Houston, Denver, and Minnesota. And then a week later they officially and at this point they didn't have a name for the league until a week later where they officially named themselves the American Football League, taking from Major League Baseball where they the National League in the American League, and even though the NFL didn't treat this as a hostel, they were much bigger at the time, and at this point they didn't think a league would really compete with them. But at the end of the year, the NFL's commissioner Bell passed away and the new league commissioner was Pete Roselle, who took a very different tactic, who actually tried to to poach some of these owners of these teams from the AFL, as they were supposed to have a team in Minnesota, and he actually went to the owners of that franchise and convinced them to join the NFL instead, and that team became the Minnesota Vikings, which started in nineteen sixty one, and about a week after and a week after they announced their name, they announced the name of the new league, the American Football League. Conveniently, the NFL announced that they changed their idea about expansion that they previously vetoed to Lamar Hunt and his investors and decided they were going to expand to Houston and Dallas, to locations that the AFL was going after, and they would start playing in nineteen sixty one, although Houston did not expand at the time, but Dallas started to play in nineteen sixty which was the Dallas Cowboys, and also the NFL allowed the Chicago Cardinals to move to Saint Louis and limiting another market that the American Football League could go to. So after losing the Minnesota team, the NFL needed at another team, and there was a minority owner of the Detroit Lions who was looking to own his own team with majority With the majority ownership, he was looking at Miami, but it was to struggle to find conditions that were suitable as both Miami and when they were looking at Seattle they both wanted to play at the local colleges in the area, but the colleges would not allow them to use their facilities and so that made it very difficult for the team because they would have to build their own field. And this led Ralph Wilson to negotiate a team in Buffalo that became the Buffalo Bills and they were awarded a team on October twenty eighth, nineteen fifty nine, and later Boston would be rewarded a team called the New England Patriots in November that same year, and just before the year ended, Joe Foss, a former World War Two Marine fighter ace and former governor of South dak Koda, was named the AFL's first commissioner in December in nineteen fifty nine, and they held their first draft in Boston in November that year and it lasted thirty three rounds. Keep in mind, no players were on any of these teams, that's why they had so many rounds. They needed to get players on these teams. And a month later in December, they would hold another draft after adding the Oakland Raiders to the leagues, and they would inherit the Minnesota selections as Minnesota had already left for the NFL from the previous draft, and they would have another twenty rounds in December to give each team a full possible roster. But back then, just because you drafted a guy didn't mean he would come play for you, as many of these players were also drafted by the NFL, so you also had to sign free agents. Some of them were former NFL players, college players that didn't get recruited or drafted by either league, some from the Canadian Football League, and some were just people that came out to tryouts held by the local team. But they made a big splash when the Houston Oilers signed Billy Cannon, who was an All American in the nineteen fifty nine Heisman Trophy winner, who was a halfback from LSU, and they signed him to one hundred thousand dollars contract, which was double the contract he had already signed with the Los Angeles Rams. But Cannon would go on to play for the Houston Oilers and help lead them to the first three AFL Championship Games. So in nineteen sixty they came in with eight total teams, the Boston Patriots, the Buffalo Bills, the Houston Oilers, and the New York Titans for in the East and in the West they had the Dallas Texans, the Denver Broncos, the Los Angeles Chargers, and the Oakland Raiders. Now they would go on to expand. In nineteen sixty six they would add the Miami Dolphins, and in nineteen sixty eight they would add the Cincinnati Bengals, giving them ten total teams by the time they merged with the NFL. And each of these teams needed a coach, and of course they looked for former NFL players and coaches former college coaches, and they came up with some good ones. This included Hall of Famer who coached the Dallas Texans which became the Kansas City Chiefs where he won a Super Bowl. Sid Gilman who coached the Los Angeles Chargers, who later became a Hall of Famer as well, and Hall of Fame quarterback Sammy Ball who coached the New York Titans. And what they did before the season started was one of the main reasons that kept afloat is they found revenue besides ticket sales to help them. Each season, they signed over a ten million dollar TV deal with ABC. And what they did different than other leagues is it was an equal share, so every team got a little over a million dollars from this TV deal. WOHILD helped them stay afloat continue to grow. And what really was the reason why they were able to sustain themselves and compete with the NFL as the average player wasn't making as much, but they could play bigger name players a little bit more. And then also they changed how you watched football. They didn't just have a single camera like the NFL had previously. They had multiple cameras, some on the sidelines, some up in the air, and microphones on the field so you got the ambiance of what was going on. It made TV watching more similar to what we watched today and was a more enjoyable thing to watch. Then. On September ninth, nineteen sixty the AFL held their very first game where the Buffalo Bills faced off against the Boston Patriots, where the Buffalo Bills won thirteen to ten, starting getting the league off to a great to start to historic league in that first year. The La Chargers would go against the Houston Oilers for the first AFL Championship played on New Year's Day nineteen sixty one, which at the time was the first time a professional football game was played on New Year's Day, where the Houston Boilers won twenty four to sixteen, ending a strong, respectable first year for the new league. Now it wasn't the NFL yet and wasn't really on the radar yet. Has the NFL averaged more than forty thousand fans than the AFL did that first season, as the AFL averaged about sixteen thousand fans where the NFL would see about fifty thousand fans per game, and many of the league owners needed loans which needed help through next season. The Raiders actually got a four hundred one thousand dollars loan from the Bills owner Ralph Wilson to help stay afloat as they had lost over five hundred thousand dollars that first season. But it was important to the league that they did not have teams fold, as you lose that continuity and you lose and you lose fans. And that's what kept them afloat, as they didn't lose continuity, and they kept going until they would eventually merge with the NFL, changing the NFL forever in American football in the United States forever. And that's just how the AFL started. There's way more involved in how they actually got into the NFL, and we'll get to those in another episode. And I hope you join us again tomorrow for more daily sports history. And did you catch the answer to today's trivia question how many AFL teams joined the NFL when they merged. The answer was ten after the AFL expanded from its original eight teams,