1920 APFA season

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 17th of September, 1920, representatives from fourteen professional football clubs gathered in Canton, Ohio, and did something that would shape American sports for more than a century. They called their new organization the American Professional Football Association. Jim Thorpe, the Olympic champion and player-coach of the Canton Bulldogs, was named the league's first president. A franchise fee of $100 was agreed upon, though George Halas of the Decatur Staleys later recalled that no money ever changed hands. What follows is the story of that first, fractured, extraordinary season: who played, who won, and why the championship nearly disappeared from the record books entirely.

• 2. A League Unlike Any League

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  Writing in 1978, a team of football historians described the APFA as resembling not a league but a "professional association whose sole functions were membership and articulation of some general principles." They compared it to a weak form of the NCAA. The league set no schedules and exerted no influence over its member clubs. Each of the fourteen teams arranged its own slate of games independently, which produced startling variations: the Decatur Staleys and the Canton Bulldogs each played thirteen games, while the Muncie Flyers played exactly one. Of the ninety games played by APFA teams during the 1920 football season, fifty-one were against opponents with no affiliation to the association at all. The Rochester Jeffersons, for instance, played almost entirely against local sandlot teams, meeting just one fellow APFA club all season. No official standings were maintained or published while play was underway; historians assembled and published those records only after the fact.

• 3. Before the First Whistle

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  Before the September organizational meeting, the groundwork had been laid by four Ohio clubs at a smaller session on the 20th of August, 1920. Ralph Hay and Jim Thorpe represented the Canton Bulldogs, Jimmy O'Donnell and Stan Cofall the Cleveland Tigers, Carl Storck the Dayton Triangles, and Frank Nied and Art Ranney the Akron Pros. That gathering was held at Hay's own office in Canton. Those four clubs agreed on a salary cap, a ban on signing college players, and a ban on poaching players under contract elsewhere. The Canton Evening Repository reported their stated purpose: to raise the standard of professional football, eliminate bidding wars between rival clubs, and secure cooperation in building schedules. Word spread, and the four clubs invited the broader professional community to reconvene in September, ultimately drawing clubs from Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, New York, and Michigan.

• 4. The Season on the Field

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  Rock Island's Douglas Park hosted the first game involving an APFA team on the 26th of September, 1920. The Rock Island Independents defeated the St. Paul Ideals by 48 to 0. The first official game between two APFA member clubs followed a week later, on the 3rd of October, when the Dayton Triangles beat the Columbus Panhandles 14 to 0 at Triangle Park. The Triangles' Lou Partlow scored the league's first touchdown and George "Hobby" Kinderline kicked the first extra point; an historic marker placed by the Ohio Historical Society at Triangle Park in Dayton now marks the site. The Buffalo All-Americans proved the most prolific scorers all season, tallying 258 points, while the Akron Pros held opponents to just 7 points across the entire campaign. The final game of the year was a 14-14 tie between the Chicago Cardinals and the non-league Chicago Stayms, played on the 19th of December, 1920.

• 5. The Championship Dispute

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  Akron ended the season as the only unbeaten team in the association. Yet that distinction was not enough to silence rivals. The Decatur Staleys and the Buffalo All-Americans both argued they deserved the championship, pointing to their superior win totals and noting that neither had been beaten by the Pros. Because there was no playoff system in the APFA until 1932, the owners met to vote on a champion. At that meeting, held on the 30th of April, 1921, they awarded the Brunswick-Balke Collender Cup to the Akron Pros. The trophy was a silver loving cup donated by the Brunswick-Balke-Collender Company, and it was used in this capacity only that one year. Each Akron player received a golden fob shaped like a football, inscribed with "1920", "WORLD CHAMPIONS", and the player's first initial and last name. The team did not celebrate officially until October 1921, when most of the squad was welcomed at an Akron Elks Club event billed as "a grand homecoming celebration for the world's champions." Fritz Pollard was separately congratulated at a meeting of the Akron Merchants Association of Colored Business Men.

• 6. Lost and Recovered

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  Despite the owners' vote, the NFL lost track of the 1921 meeting and for a long time published in its own record books that the 1920 championship was undecided. It was not until the 1970s that the league rediscovered the early vote and restored the Akron Pros as official champions. That recovery matters in a specific way: the Pros became the first team in APFA history to complete what historians call a non-modern perfect season, a feat later matched by only four other teams. Those were the 1922 Canton Bulldogs at 10-0-2, the 1923 Canton Bulldogs at 11-0-1, the 1929 Green Bay Packers at 12-0-1, and the 1972 Miami Dolphins at 17-0-0. In 1972 the NFL changed its rules so that ties count as a half-win and a half-loss, a change that reframes how those earlier unbeaten records are read.

• 7. Stars and Survivors

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  Bruce Copeland, a sportswriter for the Rock Island Argus, compiled the first All-Pro list for 1920, drawing on games he witnessed in Rock Island, other newspapers, and his own recollections. Pro-Football-Reference.com uses that list as the official record. Twenty of the named players came from Illinois and thirteen from Ohio. The Rock Island Independents placed nine players on the list, the most of any team, while the Racine Cardinals placed just one. George Halas, named to the second team as an end with the Decatur Staleys, was among them; as of 2012, ten players from the 1920 season had been enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, joined by Joseph Carr, owner of the Columbus Panhandles that year, who later served as league president from 1921 to 1939 and was inducted in 1963. Of all fourteen founding clubs, only two survive in the NFL today: the Chicago Cardinals, now the Arizona Cardinals, and the Decatur Staleys, now the Chicago Bears.