Opening Weekend
by Sam Monson
12/9/2009
This weekend marks the opening series of games in the 2009 NFL season. 49 years ago this weekend marked the first game ever played for the upstart American Football League.
On Friday, September 9, 1960, the Denver Broncos defeated the Boston Patriots 13-10 on the back of the first ever AFL touchdown, a 59-yard scoring pass from quarterback Frank Tripucka to receiver Al Carmichael. This was Genesis for the AFL, a league founded by a group of businessmen dubbed ‘the Foolish Club’ by the established league that had snubbed them.
This season the NFL is honouring the 50th anniversary of the AFL, and the only thing a lot of fans will know about the AFL will come when their favourite team dons some silly throwback uniform. But the AFL is more than just a quirky beginning to a few great NFL franchises, for a decade it was a fierce rival to the NFL, and the war waged between the two leagues helped shape today’s league, and was responsible for many aspects of NFL life that we take for granted.
In the space of a year, the 8 members of the Foolish Club had gone from forming their new league to putting on the field rosters of 35 men, pared down from epic training camps of more than 200. In order to compile these rosters the new AFL teams had to be extremely creative and accurate with their talent evaluation. They were in competition with the NFL for any college talent, so they had to ply their trade largely with players deemed below the level required for the NFL. AFL rosters were littered with ‘NFL rejects’ – guys deemed surplus to requirements by NFL teams. Guys like George Blanda.
The AFL also had to broaden its college scouting, focussing more than the NFL ever did on small college talent or African American colleges. The AFL also had a substantial number of ex CFL players, and even some complete walk-ons. Boston fan Mike Allen remembers when "they called one of the fans out of the stands to report to the Pats dressing room to get into uniform." Buffalo Bills' archivist Denny Lynch, who once worked for the Patriots, confirms that the event did occur, and the player was Notre Dame's Bob Gladieux.
The NFL had become complacent by 1960. Elitist, stuck in the mud, stagnant and happy to continue just the way it had been for the preceding years. The AFL was different. In order to compete directly with the established league it had to appeal to the people in different ways. It was not only going to challenge the NFL’s right to supremacy, but they were going to put out a superior product. Due to the 8-team nature of the AFL, the fans of each team were guaranteed to see every star the league had to offer. Each AFL team would play a 15-week schedule, comprising of a bye week, and 14 regular season games. This schedule meant that each team played every other team in the league twice – once at home, and once on the road, unlike in the NFL where teams might not play each other at all, leaving fans only to wonder how good other league stars were. The AFL fans got to see every star the league had to offer during a season. The other benefit to this of course is that every team has the same schedule; nobody gets an easier run to the championship (’72 Dolphins, I’m looking at you..!)
The NFL at the start of the 60s was 3 yards and a cloud of dust football, smashmouth, hard-nosed, muddy stalemates. The AFL took football to the air. Sid Gillman, Lance Alworth, Joe Namath, Lionel Taylor, Don Maynard, the AFL was presenting a different brand of football: things were going to get exciting again.
Joe Namath became the first QB to throw for over 4,000 yards in a season in US Pro Football, orchestrating an impressive deep passing attack. Lance Alworth put up monster numbers in San Diego under Sid Gillman’s tutelage. In 1961, George Blanda threw for 36 TDs; a figure that wouldn’t be bettered until 23 years later, when a certain 23-year-old quarterback named Dan Marino put the figure into the stratosphere with the greatest season a quarterback has ever known. The AFL wasn’t just replicating the NFL’s football, it was improving on it.
Original Chargers Head Coach Sid Gillman’s influence on pro-football was immeasurable. Al Davis, Bill Walsh, Chuck Noll, Bo Schembechler, Chuck Knox and Dick Vermeil all either coached or played with him, and 10 current NFL Head Coaches can trace their routes back to Gillman’s coaching tree. Gillman was also the first man to come up with the idea of the Superbowl, when in 1963 he approached NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle to suggest that the AFL and NFL should play a single final game.
So beyond exciting football and a third of today’s Head Coaches, what else do us NFL fans owe the AFL for? Well, the AFL was the first league to come up with the idea of the 2-point conversion, later adopted by more or less all leagues. It was also groundbreaking for the way it went about revenue sharing amongst the franchises. Harry Wismer, owner of the New York Titans, despite owning potentially the most lucrative franchise, in the nation’s largest media market, realized that in order for the league to succeed it would require ALL of its teams to be financially viable and successful, and so he devised the system whereby the TV rights were shared amongst the league equally. This groundbreaking TV deal with ABC-TV was revolutionary at the time, but is a cornerstone of today’s NFL, and one of the main reasons it became the global corporate juggernaut we all know today.
Despite the best efforts of former commissioner Bert Bell, the NFL had lapsed back into some bad habits by the early 1960s, and was not doing all it could to help its small market teams. The AFL went further than just the TV money, splitting home gate receipts 60/40% with visiting teams, to help teams trapped in a small market or a difficult stadium issue. This kind of thinking was fundamental to the way the NFL had been under the leadership of Commissioner Bert Bell, where the phrase ‘On Any Given Sunday..’ was coined, and when parity had been desirable and pursued, but it took the AFL to remind the NFL what it had forgotten.
Even the AFL’s TV coverage was more innovative and fan friendly than the NFL’s. While CBS was covering NFL games with a lone stationary camera on the 50 yard line, ABC was bringing fans of the AFL sights and sounds from up close with multiple cameras and sensitive microphones, allowing fans to hear for the first time what was going on down on the field.
How about Thanksgiving Day football? Six years before the Dallas Cowboys of the NFL played their first Thanksgiving Day game, the AFL’s New York Titans and Dallas Texans played the first Thanksgiving game, with the Titans winning a nail-biting 41-35 contest at the Polo Grounds.
So when you’re watching your favourite team pull on a silly looking jersey during this season’s throwback weekends, take a moment to remember what the AFL did for professional football, and for the NFL, and to be thankful that 8 men were brave enough to fight against the ridicule, and create a league that was successful enough that 50 years later the NFL remembers it with pride.
Visit www.remembertheafl.com for more information and history on the AFL.
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