Dayton Triangles

• 1. Introduction

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  The Dayton Triangles played what may have been the very first game in NFL history, a 14-0 defeat of the Columbus Panhandles on the 3rd of October, 1920. They did it at a little park sitting at the meeting point of the Great Miami and Stillwater Rivers in north Dayton, Ohio. That park gave them their name. It also, in many ways, defined their fate.

  How does a team that helped found the most powerful sports league in American history end up winning just five games over seven seasons and vanishing into obscurity? And what does it mean that the franchise technically lives on today, 117 miles west of where it started, as the Indianapolis Colts?

• 2. Before the Triangles

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  St. Mary's College in Dayton is where this story begins, sometime around 1908. A group of young men were playing basketball together on campus. They kept playing together after graduation, forming an alumni squad they called the St. Mary's Cadets. The Cadets eventually claimed the title of World Basketball Champions by defeating the Buffalo German Ramblers.

  In the fall of 1913, those same men organized a football team. Louis Clark, who also coached the St. Mary's college squad, took the sideline. Al Mahrt was elected captain. The team went 7-0 in that first season, won the Dayton City Championship, and then traveled to Cincinnati's Redland Park to defeat the Cincinnati Celts 27-0 for the Southern Ohio Championship. Two more city championships followed in 1914 and 1915, the latter under a new name, the Dayton Gym-Cadets, with Mahrt himself now serving as coach. Only the Columbus Panhandles beat them that year.

• 3. The Factory Team

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  In 1916, the team was rebuilt around the workers of three Dayton factories: the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company, the Dayton Metal Products Company, and the Domestic Engineering Company. Carl Storck co-sponsored this new version of the squad and drew players from those factory floors to fill out the roster. Storck would later serve as treasurer of the NFL and as acting league president from 1939 to 1941.

  Bud Talbott, a Walter Camp All-American tackle and team captain from Yale University, was named head coach. The team also got a new name that season: the Dayton Triangles, taken from Triangle Park, their home ground at the river confluence. They went 9-1 in 1916, beating teams from Cincinnati, Detroit, Toledo, and Pittsburgh. That same year the Canton Bulldogs, carrying the legendary Jim Thorpe in their lineup, claimed the Ohio League Championship. The Triangles challenged them to a game on the 10th of December, 1916. The Bulldogs never accepted.

• 4. A Championship in Wartime

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  The 1917 season was one of the most dominant in team history. The Triangles went 6-0-2, scoring 188 points while conceding only 13. Then 1918 brought two crises at once: American entry into World War I and the Spanish flu pandemic.

  Bud Talbott enlisted in the army, so the player-coach role went to Earle "Greasy" Neale. While some players left for military service, others were kept in Dayton because they worked in industries deemed essential to the war effort. That retention of talent allowed the Triangles to dominate a depleted field. They went 8-0-0, defeating future NFL franchises including the Toledo Maroons, Hammond Pros, Columbus Panhandles, and Detroit Heralds on the way to the Ohio League Championship. They were one of only two teams known to have finished that year with a perfect record of more than five games. The other was the Buffalo Niagaras, who went 6-0-0 against opponents drawn entirely from their own city. Greasy Neale would later be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1969.

• 5. Charter Members

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  Two meetings at Ralph Hay's Hupmobile dealership in Canton, Ohio, on the 20th of August and the 17th of September, 1920, established the American Professional Football Association. Carl Storck was there representing the Triangles. Jim Thorpe was unanimously elected president of the new league. A membership fee of $100 per team was set, though George Halas later stated that none of the charter teams ever paid it.

  The Triangles entered the APFA as founding members and opened the season with that 14-0 win over Columbus. The highest point of 1920 came in a 20-20 tie against Thorpe's Canton Bulldogs at Triangle Park. It was the first time any team had scored three touchdowns on the Bulldogs since 1915. Trailing 20-14 late, Thorpe kicked two field goals to salvage the draw. Six games into that inaugural season, Dayton stood undefeated at 4-0-2. But the final three games brought two losses to the eventual champion, the Akron Pros, and the Triangles closed at 5-2-2.

• 6. Road to Nowhere

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  By 1922, other NFL teams were recruiting top college players from across the country. Dayton kept drawing from local talent. The gap widened quickly. Triangle Park seated 5,000 and rarely came close to filling those seats. The combination of poor home attendance and the appeal of guaranteed payouts as large as $2,500 to play at venues like Wrigley Field, Comiskey Park, and the Polo Grounds pushed the Triangles toward life on the road.

  From 1923 through 1929, the team won just five of their 51 NFL games. Only road revenues kept the franchise alive. The broader league was also shifting away from the mid-sized Midwestern cities that had cradled professional football. The Triangles were one of only three original NFL franchises, alongside the Bears and Cardinals, to survive the entire decade, and the only Ohio League team still playing after 1926. On the 12th of July, 1930, a Brooklyn syndicate led by Bill Dwyer and Jack Depler purchased the franchise and moved it east as the Brooklyn Dodgers. Many of the 1929 Triangles could not afford to relocate because of the Great Depression. Those who did were mostly benched.

• 7. A Long Chain to Indianapolis

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  The franchise's journey from Brooklyn to Indianapolis is a tangle of mergers, sales, and renamings. The Brooklyn Dodgers became the Brooklyn Tigers in 1944, then merged with the Boston Yanks for 1945 due to wartime player shortages. In 1946, Brooklyn owner Dan Topping left for the rival All-America Football Conference, and the NFL canceled the Tigers franchise, redistributing player contracts to Boston.

  Boston moved to New York in 1949 and became the New York Bulldogs, briefly renamed the New York Yanks before being sold back to the NFL in 1952 due to financial losses. Those assets went to a Texas group who fielded them as the Dallas Texans that season. The Texans were sold back to the league midway through the year. Before 1953, a Baltimore ownership group received an expansion franchise and inherited the Texans' player contracts as the new Baltimore Colts. The Colts moved to Indianapolis in 1984. The NFL considers the Colts a 1953 expansion team, not a continuation of the Triangles. The Colts themselves do not claim that lineage. Had the franchise continuity been recognized, the Colts would hold the record for the longest postseason drought in NFL history: 38 straight seasons without a playoff appearance, from 1920 until winning the NFL championship in 1958.