All-America Football Conference

• 1. Introduction

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  The All-America Football Conference played its first game on the 6th of September 1946, before more than 60,000 fans in Cleveland. That crowd set a professional football attendance record. Cleveland beat Miami 44-0. Two players on that field, Marion Motley and Bill Willis, were the first Black men in professional football since 1933. The league hosting them had existed for barely two years. Its founder was a newspaper editor who wanted to challenge the most powerful institution in American football. What he built, and what it cost, are questions the following four seasons answered.

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• 2. Arch Ward's Gamble

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  On the 4th of June 1944, Chicago Tribune sports editor Arch Ward officially founded the All-America Football Conference. Ward was already famous as the creator of baseball's All-Star Game and football's College All-Star Game. He had tried for years to persuade the NFL to expand its operations, without success. Ward then assembled a group of wealthy investors, some of whom had previously tried and failed to buy NFL franchises.

  On the 21st of November 1944, the AAFC named James "Sleepy Jim" Crowley as its first commissioner. Crowley was one of Notre Dame's celebrated Four Horsemen. NFL Commissioner Elmer Layden was another of that same group. Both men had played in Knute Rockne's famous 1924 Fighting Irish backfield at Notre Dame.

  The investors Ward recruited were considerably wealthier than most NFL owners. Cleveland's Arthur B. McBride made his fortune in real estate and taxi operations. San Francisco's Anthony Morabito came from lumber. The Los Angeles ownership group included racetrack owner Benjamin Lindheimer, actor Don Ameche, and MGM's Louis B. Mayer. These men were accustomed to running profitable businesses, not absorbing losses year after year.

  Commissioner Layden's public response was contemptuous. He told reporters the AAFC should "first get a ball, then make a schedule, and then play a game." Washington Redskins owner George Preston Marshall called the new league a WPA project. Marshall's franchise had been one of football's top clubs from 1936 to 1945. After coach Ray Flaherty and many key players defected to the AAFC in 1946, the Redskins entered a decades-long title drought.

  Among all the choices made in those planning months, Cleveland's selection of Paul Brown as head coach proved most far-reaching.

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• 3. The National Stage

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  The AAFC opened its 1946 season with eight teams playing a 14-game schedule. The NFL's ten teams played eleven games, the standard since 1937. The AAFC chose larger stadiums than the NFL in Chicago, New York, and Cleveland.

  Los Angeles and San Francisco received AAFC franchises, giving the league teams in cities no NFL club had reached. Miami joined as well. NFL teams still traveled by train. AAFC teams flew, which made the California franchises viable in a way they had not been before.

  The 1946 rosters across the league included 40 of the 66 players from that year's College All-Star game. Two recent Heisman Trophy winners, Frank Sinkwich and Angelo Bertelli, were among them. More than 100 players with prior NFL experience also signed with AAFC teams.

  The Miami Seahawks were the AAFC's first cautionary tale. Two home games postponed by hurricanes, a 3-11 record, and losses of $350,000 ended the franchise after one season. In 1947, the Brooklyn Dodgers drew fewer than 12,000 fans per game, the lowest figure in either league. Competing against both the NFL Giants and the AAFC's own New York Yankees, the Dodgers attracted almost no one. The Chicago Rockets played before rows of empty seats in enormous Soldier Field, squeezed between the NFL's dominant Bears and a Cardinals team enjoying rare success. Multiple franchises changed ownership at least once within the league's four-year life.

  In 1947, a regular-season game in Los Angeles between the Yankees and the Dons drew more than 82,000 fans, setting a professional football attendance record. The AAFC's best teams drew crowds that surpassed the NFL, even as the weakest operated in near-empty venues.

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• 4. Paul Brown's Machine

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  Paul Brown had won six Ohio state championships at Massillon High School before moving to Ohio State, where he won the 1942 national college championship. After coaching at Naval Station Great Lakes during the war, he arrived in Cleveland with the most extensive scouting network in American football.

  Commissioner Crowley, rather than holding a draft, encouraged all owners to sign as many top players as possible. Brown's recruitment network made him the chief beneficiary of that open-market approach. Years later, Crowley acknowledged this was a fatal mistake, as it handed the Browns a head start they never surrendered.

  The Browns went 12-2 in their first season and won the AAFC championship 14-9 over the New York Yankees. In 1947, led by MVP quarterback Otto Graham, they finished 12-1-1 and won the title again 14-3. The entire coaching staff of the NFL champion Chicago Bears attended Cleveland's 1947 season opener to study Brown's methods.

  Brown introduced year-round coaching staffs, precision pass patterns, and the face mask. He was the first coach to have his staff film opponents and analyze that footage in a classroom setting. He also pioneered the practice of coaches calling plays through messenger guards. Teams in both leagues eventually adopted these methods.

  In 1948, Cleveland completed a 14-0 regular season, the second perfect record in pro football history. The Browns built an 18-game winning streak and a 29-game unbeaten streak. The Pro Football Hall of Fame later recognized the unbeaten streak as the longest in professional football history.

  Otto Graham and San Francisco's Frankie Albert shared the 1948 MVP award. The 49ers finished 12-2 but were kept out of the title game when the Eastern division sent the 7-7 Bills to Cleveland instead. The Browns won 49-7. Among the players Brown recruited for Cleveland were Marion Motley and Bill Willis.

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• 5. The Color Line

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  UCLA star Kenny Washington and future actor Woody Strode joined the Los Angeles Rams in 1946. The Rams signed them only after the Los Angeles Coliseum, their intended home venue, enforced its integration policy. Their debut in the NFL came several weeks after the AAFC's opening game in Cleveland.

  Marion Motley later credited two factors with establishing the legitimacy of integrated professional football. The first was the AAFC's aggressive penalizing of racist unsportsmanlike conduct on the field. That stance took shape through the hiring of Tommy Hughitt, a former player-coaching star poached from the NFL. The second factor was the embrace of Black talent by AAFC fans from the start.

  By 1949, the AAFC had twenty Black players on its rosters. The NFL had seven. Both Motley and Willis were later named to the NFL's 75th Anniversary All-Time Team in 1994 and to the NFL's 100th Anniversary All-Time Team in 2019.

  Jackie Robinson had not yet made his major league debut when the AAFC's first season began. He was then playing for the Montreal Royals, the Brooklyn Dodgers' top farm team. By the end of 1948, negotiations between the two leagues to end their competition had turned serious.

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• 6. Red Ink and Peace

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  By 1948, nearly every team in both leagues was losing money. The AAFC had out-attended the NFL in total fans across its four seasons, which should have put both leagues on roughly equal financial footing. But the AAFC's owners, accustomed to profitable businesses, were not willing to absorb losses indefinitely. NFL owners, whose primary assets were their teams, had fewer alternatives.

  Commissioner Ingram tried to redistribute talent by persuading stronger teams to share players with weaker ones. He succeeded in getting the Browns to send rookie quarterback Y. A. Tittle to the Baltimore Colts, which improved Baltimore's record. The effort was only modestly successful: the Browns still went 14-0 in 1948, while the Brooklyn Dodgers went 2-12 and the Chicago Hornets went 1-13.

  In December 1948, the NFL officially acknowledged the AAFC for the first time, as peace talks came close to succeeding. The AAFC wanted four teams admitted to the NFL. The NFL was willing to take only the Browns and the 49ers. Talks failed, and the war continued.

  For 1949, the AAFC shrank from eight teams to seven and consolidated from two divisions into one. The Brooklyn Dodgers merged with the New York Yankees. Los Angeles Dons owner Ben Lindheimer kept the Colts and the Hornets alive by subsidizing both. The Green Bay Packers issued new stock to remain solvent.

  On the 9th of October 1949, the 49ers handed Cleveland a 56-28 loss and moved briefly into first place. The Browns recovered, finished 9-1-2, and won the final AAFC title 21-7 over the 49ers. No MVP was named that season. Cleveland's final four-year AAFC record was 52-4-3.

  On the 9th of December 1949, two days before the championship game, both leagues announced a peace agreement. Three AAFC teams entered the NFL: the Browns, the 49ers, and the original Baltimore Colts. The Dons merged with the Rams, while the Bills, the Yankees, and the Hornets folded. George Preston Marshall agreed to accept $150,000 to waive his territorial rights regarding the Colts. Bert Bell then scheduled Cleveland's first NFL game as a Saturday night season opener against the Philadelphia Eagles.

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• 7. The NFL Reckoning

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  The press called it "The World Series of Pro Football." It was moved from Shibe Park to Philadelphia Municipal Stadium, site of the Army-Navy Game, to accommodate the expected crowd. Attendance reached 71,237, the largest east coast professional football crowd to that date.

  Eagles coach Greasy Neale had not scouted Cleveland's preseason games. Paul Brown spent his preparation finding weaknesses in the widely imitated Eagle Defense. The Browns ran up 487 yards of total offense, led 14-3 at halftime, and won 35-10. Quarterback Otto Graham was named the game's MVP, an award unheard-of for a regular-season game.

  Cleveland finished 10-2 that year and won the NFL championship 30-28 over the Los Angeles Rams on a last-minute field goal. The Rams had averaged nearly 39 points per game during the season, a record that still stands. Commissioner Bell called the Browns "the greatest team to ever play football." It was Cleveland's fifth consecutive league title, counting four AAFC championships.

  From 1950 to 1955, the Browns appeared in every NFL championship game, winning three of them. Brown declined efforts to draft him as the league's next commissioner. He went on to found the AFL's Cincinnati Bengals and served on the NFL's Competition Committee until his death in 1991.

  The San Francisco 49ers finished 3-9 in their first NFL season, though they grew competitive in the Western Conference in the years that followed. The original Baltimore Colts went 1-11 again and folded after one NFL season. A new Baltimore franchise was established in 1953 after the Dallas Texans folded. That team became one of the NFL's storied franchises before moving to Indianapolis on the 29th of March 1984.

  Y. A. Tittle's pre-1950 statistics with the AAFC Baltimore Colts were excluded from the NFL record book for decades. The AFL's pre-1970 statistics, by contrast, were accepted after that league provided its scoresheets to the NFL in 1970. A push to recognize AAFC statistics began in 2019. On the 1st of April 2025, NFL owners voted to officially recognize AAFC records, crediting Paul Brown with an additional 52 wins. Sixteen AAFC alumni are enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. A decade after the AAFC folded, the American Football League of 1960 faced the same contempt from the NFL. That league is now recognized as the genesis of modern professional football.

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