The Birth of the NFL: The 1920 Origins of Professional Football

On September seventeenth, nineteen twenty, a group of football teams get together in former league, naming it the American Professional Football Association, focusing mainly with teams in the Midwest and Northeast. With eleven founding members and American sports icon Jim Thorpe elected president, this was the beginning of what would become what we now know as the NFL. Today, we're going to dive into the history of how the NFL started with this one league back in the nineteen twenties, over one hundred years ago on Daily Sports History. Welcome to Daily Sports History. I'm Ethan Reese, and I'm going to help guide you as you learn and relive sports history to daily grow your sports knowledge. And today's trivia question is what too original teams that played in the nineteen twenty American Professional Football Association are still in the NFL today. Now professional football actually goes back until night goes back to Gwinn, Pudge, Heflinger, and Ben Sports not only each received money to play for different football teams, making them the first professional football athletes, a new concept at the time, and over the years, as football continued to grow in popularity, so did the possibility of a football league outside of college because at this point in the early nineteen hundreds, college was the mainstay for football. Everyone that was anything in football was a college player, and after that many of them went to go live regular lives, or become Olympians or try for other different sports, and some sports leagues did pop up. In nineteen oh two, there was a New York based World Series of Pro Football tournament that disbanded after a couple of years. They didn't get the interest they wanted as college football was the key at the time. Then there was an Ohio league that popped up and they were able to get athletes such as Jim Thorpe to try out, but again it would fizzle out, especially during World War One when a lot of these players that would be playing in these leagues went to war. But after World War Two is when football really started to grow at the professional level. And then in August of nineteen twenty at a car dealership in Canton, Ohio, the league was formed known as the American Professional Football Conference and initially just consisted of teams in Ohio. So there's the Akron Pros, the Columbus Panhandlers, the Dayton Triangles and the Toledo Maroons. But less than a month later, they held another conference on September seventeenth, and we renamed it the American Professional Football Association, and they added some other teams from New York such as Buffalo and Rochester and even Detroit and and Hammond, Indiana, which is just a suburb of Chicago. So that first season they had the Akron Pros, the Buffalo All Americas, the Canton Bulldogs, the Chicago Cardinals, the Chicago Tigers, the Cleveland Tigers, the Columbus Panhandlers, the Dayton Triangles, the Decatur Stanley's, the Detroit Harolds, the Hammond Pros, the Munsie Flyers, the Rochester Jefferson's, and the Rock Island Independence for a total of fourteen teams that would end up playing. But a lot of these teams moved and transformed into other teams throughout the years. So at this meeting they introduced a salary cap for teams to keep teams with richer owners from paying more than smaller teams, and they could not signed college players. They had to be a graduate or not in college at all, and they could not sign players under contract with another team and their idea was college football was so popular at the time that these players needed a place to go after college to show their skill to get even better, because as we know now, your prime in your athletic career is in your late twenties and early thirties, not when you're twenty two or eighteen. So you get better play the more you do it. And so after all the teams were conducted, they actually elected Jim Thorpe as the president of the league, pretty much the commissioner today, although Jim Thorpe actually coached the Canton Bulldogs as well, But at the time they didn't worry about conflict of interests and each team created their own dynamic schedule, meaning there was no minimum or maximum games they needed to play, and at the end of the year, each team would vote to determine the winner of the league instead of having a playoff or a championship game. So that first season in nineteen twenty was rocky. But on September twenty sixth was when the very first game was held, where the Rock Island Independence beat the Saint Paul Idyls forty eight to zero. Now this was just the first game featuring one of the teams as you noticed, the Saint Paul Idyls were not in the APFA. Now, the first official game featuring two teams happened on a two third where the Dayton Triangles, who will beat you with their geometry, beat the Columbus Panhandlers who were begging for some points fourteen to zero. Yes, I'm making fun of these names, as they are hilarious to think about today. I'm just imagining the fans in the stands would be very different than what we have in Greater Nation or with the Packers g SAIDs, which is already a little bit ridiculous. But that was just the first game. Is there were six other games featuring APFA teams that same day. Now, some of these were playing other teams in the league. Some of these were playing other teams we've never heard of. And that's really what it was. It is more of a collective than a league. You didn't have to play a restrictive schedule. It was a lot like college, where you know, a college team can play whoever they want. It's kind of what it was like. A lot of these teams played other teams in their local area or nearby because they didn't really want to travel too far, as a lot of these people were factory workers, miners, all these blue collar jobs they had outside of this because they were not getting paid very much, and they would play out the year all the way till all the way through December, playing a total of thirteen weeks and by the time by the time the league was done. By the time the year was over, the team at the top of the standings was the Akron Pros, who went eight zero and three and beat six opponents in the American Professional Football Association. And because of this, the Akron Pros were voted the championships of the leagues and given the Brunswick Bulk Calender Cup, which was a silver trophy that was sponsored by the Bulkwin Bulk Calendar Company, which is still in existence today is now known as the Burstwick Company and is an SMP Top four hundred company. Now, this was some controversy as the Dakota Stanleys who went ten one to two and the Buffalo On Americans who went nine to one and one had more wins, so they should have been the winners, but they could not make the change and instead of each player getting rings, they actually got a little fob, a little key chain type thing, a golden cheek keach that said nineteen twenty World Champ with the first initial and their last name on it. And what's interesting is Akron actually had a non modern perfect season, as they did have ties, but they didn't lose a game. And this has only happened four other times in NFL history, with the nineteen twenty two and twenty three Campton Bulldogs, the nineteen twenty nine Green Bay Packers, in the nineteen seventy two Miami Dolphins, and since then, there have been ten players that played in the original nineteen twenty season that had been inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Now of that first season, only two teams remain in the NFL today, and as the Decatur Stanleys, who moved around and became the Chicago Bears, and the Chicago Cardinals who are now the Arizona Cardinals now. In June nineteen twenty two, the APFA changed its name to the National Football League and continued to grow. As teams continue to change throughout the years, some teams left, new teams were added, and it seemed like every year they got a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger and to what we know today as the National Football League, one of the most profitable sports league in the world, and what we love every Sunday to watch. Thank you for listening to today's Daily Sports History. If you like this, please make sure you're subscribed wherever you're listening. That way, you don't miss a single episode and you can come back tomorrow for more Daily Sports History and the answer to today's triba question what to Original teams that played in the nineteen twenty American Professional Football Association are still in the NFL today. The Decatur Stanley's which became the Chicago Bears, and the Chicago Cardinals, who became the Arizona Cardinals. The Painted and ten Painted Painted