Rochester Jeffersons

• 1. Introduction

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  The Rochester Jeffersons were at the founding meeting of what would become the National Football League, and yet most football fans have never heard of them. In 1920, their manager Leo Lyons sat in a Hupmobile showroom in Canton, Ohio, and helped create professional football's most powerful institution. Then he spent the next several years watching his team lose game after game, burning through his savings, and eventually seeing his own house foreclosed upon. How does a founding member of the NFL disappear so completely? The answers lie in the gap between Rochester's amateur football culture and the ambitions of one man who tried to bridge it.

• 2. Leo Lyons and the Jeffs

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  Around 1908, a teenager named Leo Lyons joined the Jeffersons as a player. Within two years he had taken over as manager, financier, and promoter, running the club as a full-time operation. The team itself had been around since at least 1898, formed by a group of Rochester-area teenagers. They took the name Jeffersons from Jefferson Avenue, where they played their home games. For their first decade, the Jeffs competed against other amateur and semi-professional outfits from upstate New York, including the Rochester Scalpers and the Oxfords. Between 1914 and 1917, they began facing tougher opponents from Buffalo and Syracuse. By 1916 they had won the New York State championship. That success emboldened Lyons to look further afield, both for opponents and for talent.

• 3. Canton and Jim Thorpe

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  At the end of October 1917, Lyons arranged a game against the Canton Bulldogs, regarded as the best team in the country. Canton's star was Jim Thorpe, one of the most celebrated athletes of the era. The Bulldogs crushed Rochester 41-0. The lopsided result was almost beside the point. The audacity of scheduling such a matchup at all earned Lyons and his club a measure of national notoriety. That notoriety paid dividends three years later when Lyons was invited to the gathering in Canton that established the American Professional Football Association. In two years that organization would rename itself the National Football League. The NFL has since formally recognized that 1920 meeting as its founding moment.

• 4. The Wrong Market

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  Rochester turned out to be a difficult city in which to sell professional football. The region had a thriving sandlot circuit, and local fans preferred watching familiar players from their own neighborhoods. The Jeffersons tried to recruit leading college players from across the country, but those same fans stayed away when the roster was full of strangers. By 1922 the team occupied an awkward middle ground: good enough to blow out local semi-professional competition but not good enough to win consistently in the NFL. Either outcome gave spectators little reason to buy a ticket. The local semi-pro teams kept drawing better crowds than the NFL franchise did, and the gate receipts reflected it painfully.

• 5. Decline and Folding

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  From 1922 onward, the Jeffersons did not win a single NFL game across their remaining four seasons. The team did beat the Pottsville Maroons of the Anthracite League in a 1924 contest; the Maroons were considered the class of that league and moved up to the NFL in 1925, where they contended for the league title. Notable players passed through the roster during these years: John Barsha in 1920, and Doc Alexander, a two-time First Team All-Pro selection, from 1921 to 1924. In a final attempt to revive interest, Lyons tried to sign Red Grange for Rochester. Grange instead signed with the Chicago Bears. The Jeffersons suspended operations after the 1925 season. The franchise had been a traveling team for 1924 and 1925, unable to fill a home stadium. By then Lyons had poured virtually all his personal assets into the club, and his house had been foreclosed upon. The team remained technically suspended through 1927 and let its franchise expire in 1928.

• 6. What Remained

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  After the Jeffersons folded, Leo Lyons stayed connected to the league he helped found, serving as an unofficial NFL historian. Rochester never hosted another NFL franchise. Since 2000, the Buffalo Bills have held their annual training camp in the Rochester suburb of Pittsford, at St. John Fisher College, keeping professional football in the region's orbit if not quite in the city itself.