American Football League (1936)

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 1st of November, 1936, the players of the Syracuse Braves walked onto the field at Red Wing Stadium in Rochester and refused to start the second half until someone paid them what they were owed. The delay lasted 40 minutes. The game eventually finished. The franchise folded immediately afterward. That afternoon captures something essential about the American Football League of 1936: a league held together with little more than ambition, raided rosters, and borrowed stadiums, competing in the shadow of the National Football League while most of the country's newspapers barely noticed it existed. Yet this league, which lasted just two seasons, left marks on professional football that took decades to fully understand. It gave the West Coast its first professional football home games. It launched a franchise that still exists today. And it produced the first professional team in history to win a league title without losing or tying a single game, eleven years before anyone else managed the same.

• 2. Harry March's Vision

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  Harry March, the former personnel director of the New York Giants, announced plans for the new league on the 12th of November, 1935. Fifteen cities put in bids for charter franchises. On the 11th of April, 1936, eight cities received charters: Boston, Cleveland, Jersey City, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Providence, and Syracuse. Almost immediately, the roster started shrinking. Jersey City, Providence, and Philadelphia withdrew within months, and Rochester was granted a replacement franchise. Two weeks after that, the Rochester franchise was transferred to Brooklyn, even though no stadium was available there at the time. March had shaped the league around a specific idea: that veteran players would be involved in the management of the teams, making it a kind of players' league from the ground up. He served as the AFL's first president but resigned in October 1936, before the first season was even over. James Bush, president of the New York Yankees AFL franchise, stepped in to finish the job. The raiding of NFL rosters for talent was a defining feature of the league's first season. The New York Yankees and the Pittsburgh Americans both pulled players from their crosstown NFL rivals, the Giants and the Pirates. Cleveland's approach was more targeted: the Rams hired Damon Wetzel, pulling him directly from the backfield of the Chicago Bears.

• 3. The Boston Shamrocks

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  George Kenneally led the Boston Shamrocks to the 1936 championship in a three-way race that came down to the final weeks of the season. Boston beat both Cleveland and New York on consecutive weekends at the end of the year to claim the title. The Shamrocks played home games at Fenway Park and Braves Field, and their attendance figures were strong enough to rival the NFL's Boston Redskins next door. According to the source, the Shamrocks' gate success was actually a factor in George Preston Marshall deciding to relocate his Redskins to Washington. That influence, exercised at the box office rather than on the scoreboard, gave the Shamrocks a legacy that outlasted the franchise itself. Their 1937 season was almost the opposite story. Player defections drained the roster, and the defending champions stumbled to a 2-7 record. Owner Bill Scully later said the team lost $37,000 in 1937. The rest of the league, with one notable exception on the West Coast, fared even worse.

• 4. The Cleveland Rams

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  Homer Marshman owned the Cleveland Rams, who played their home games in Cleveland Municipal Stadium and finished the 1936 season with a 5-2-2 record, good for second place. The Rams had the AFL's stingiest defense and shared the distinction of one of the league's two most productive offenses with Boston. Among the players on that 1936 roster was Sid Gillman, a rookie end playing his only professional season as an active player. When the NFL signaled it was willing to expand, Marshman applied for a franchise in the established league alongside representatives from Houston and Los Angeles. The NFL accepted Cleveland. As a result, the Rams left the AFL after just one season, and the Los Angeles group whose application the NFL had turned down took their place. The Rams are the only team from the 1936 AFL still in existence today, now playing as the Los Angeles Rams.

• 5. The Los Angeles Bulldogs

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  Before the Bulldogs ever joined the AFL, they were already making a case for themselves as an independent team. In 1936, still operating outside any league, they defeated the Philadelphia Eagles. When the NFL turned down their application for the 1937 season, they joined the AFL instead and changed professional football's geography in the process. Playing home games at Gilmore Stadium, the Bulldogs averaged 14,000 fans per game, roughly twice the attendance of every other team in the league. Gus Henderson led the team through the 1937 season without a loss or a tie, completing an 8-0 record. This made the Bulldogs the first professional football team to win a league championship with a perfect record, a mark that would stand for eleven years until the Cleveland Browns of the AAFC matched it, and thirty-five years until the Miami Dolphins of the NFL did the same. The Bulldogs played all of their away games in the first half of the season and then locked in their title at Gilmore Stadium in the second half. Five players from Los Angeles were named to the 1937 All-League team: Bill Moore, Pete Mehringer, Harry Field, Al Nichelini, and Gordon Gore.

• 6. Survival and Collapse

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  To open the 1937 season with any confidence at all, the AFL made a series of moves designed to signal permanence. The league named its third president in under fourteen months, J. J. Schafer, and added Jack Dempsey and Bing Crosby to its board of directors. Cincinnati received a new franchise, playing at Crosley Field, filling a vacancy in a city where an NFL team had failed just three years earlier. Hal Pennington originated the Cincinnati Bengals, serving as the team's first head coach and general manager. Despite a losing record, the Bengals drew steadily at the gate. Pittsburgh, by contrast, folded three games into the season. Boston, gutted by player defections to the NFL, was in no condition to defend its title. The Brooklyn Tigers limped through the year before fading. The league's structural problems were real: out-of-town newspapers almost never covered the AFL, and when they did, it was a bare score buried as page filler. The Bulldogs' dominance, paradoxically, accelerated the end. With one team winning everything while the eastern franchises crumbled, competitive balance was gone. The second American Football League closed at the end of the 1937 season.

• 7. The Longer Shadow

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  The Cincinnati Bengals of the 1937 AFL continued as an independent in 1938, joined the minor American Professional Football Association in 1939, and became a charter member of the third AFL in 1940. The Los Angeles Bulldogs followed the same path through the APFA before becoming a charter member of the Pacific Coast Professional Football League in 1940. In 1968, twenty-seven years after the third AFL collapsed, Paul Brown revived the Bengals name for his Cincinnati expansion franchise in the fourth AFL, a team that went on to join the NFL and plays there still. The AFL of 1936-1937 had also introduced major league football to the West Coast in a meaningful way. The Los Angeles Buccaneers, an earlier NFL team nominally connected to the city, had actually been a traveling team based in Chicago. The Bulldogs were the first professional football team to genuinely play its home games in Los Angeles, laying ground that later franchises would build on for decades.