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The owners of early NFL teams were not bland types. They were scoundrels when they had to be, benefactors when they needed to be. They scrapped out the funds needed to continue by any means necessary and they faced great risk. More than one went bankrupt (sometimes more than once in the case of Leo Lyons) One owner lost his franchise when the stadium they played in burned down. Many faced low turnout or games cancelled because of weather or opponents that weren't able to field a team. They stole players off other teams, hired college students (and gave them fake names) or simply didn't pay the players what was promised. They used the teams to promote businesses far outside the scope of football and named them after more famous MLB teams in hopes that would bring crowds in. One would tell the story of firing two future HOFers in the morning for fighting and then hiring them back at noon because he had no one else to play the game that afternoon. Very often they played for the team themselves or were former players. They were pioneers in an uncertain game. One of these was Dan Blaine, he organized and played for a local team, the Staten Island Stapletons. They played in, and were named for the Stapleton neighborhood of Staten Island, NY. Initially they played the other NY teams more for fun than money. Dan had become wealthy running what became a chain of restaurants (some say they were really illegal bars.) Over time team had gotten more serious and improving became important. In 1924 they won the New York Metropolitan championship. The next year though the Stapes found themselves as the biggest midget standing next to a goliath. The NY Giants were formed and joined the NFL. The year they came in the Giants had by far the highest home attendance of any NFL team. In one game against Red Grange and the Chicago Bears a mammoth 68,000 people showed up. The Stapleton home stadium held 8,000 and averaged 3,000 for a game. The Stapletons had an interesting set up. The locker rooms were a series of sheds just outside of the fence surrounding the field. Blaine owned a restaurant next door to the stadium and after games the fans and players would meet up for beers. In the new home of the Minnesota Vikings, U.S. Bank Stadium, the home team walks past the Delta Sky360° Club on their way to and from the field. Imagine Harrison Smith grabbing a beer and shooting the breeze after the game. The next season was a little crazier than normal as the first serious league to rival the NFL started up, C.C (Cash & Carry) Pyle and Red Grange's AFL. The Stapletons played the Newark Bears (one of the AFL teams) and got beat 33-0. After the game Dan Blaine walked up to the opposing team and offered the players a job. All of them. They weren't getting paid so most of them accepted his offer. So the Newark Bears of the AFL went out of business and Staten Island had one heck of a roster turnover. In 1928 the Stapletons went 10-1-1, including 3-1 versus real NFL teams. The next year they joined. Their best season was 1930 with a .500 record. They survived for four years but the Great Depression ended a number of NFL teams and the Stapes was one. Despite the financial difference they had always played the Giants well. BTW, There are still restaurants run by the Blaine family in Staten Island.  The Stapletons had a deep blue jersey and a simple "S" logo that was on their shoulder sleeve.) They also had three gold stripes close to the cuff, so they had something of a naval theme on their jersey. Since Staten Island is famous for their Ferry, that was appropriate.  This is the design I came up with. The Main logo is a pair of interlocking letter S's for Staten Island and Stapleton backed by a captain's wheel. The design borrows from Navy's 2012 Helmet. 
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Jun 22, 2021 02:26
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As someone born on Staten Island, as cool as it would have been for the Stapes to survive, it was probably impossible. Despite being a part of NYC, the only bridges at the time crossed over into New Jersey. The only way for people to get to the Island from the City was via the Staten Island Ferry. Stapleton was close to the Ferry at St George, but nowhere near the bridges. When they finally built the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in the 60s, which went into Brooklyn, the population exploded. But still to this day it's got the smallest population, the only borough with less then 1 million people (by a lot, last census was 476K). Just to add a little more to this, in League of Their Own, Rosie O'Donnel's character wears a uniform for the "Staten Island Stevedores" unfortunately it was a fictional team.
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Jun 22, 2021 04:49
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It's kind of wild that we live in a universe where the Green Bay Packers stayed put throughout the 20th century.
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Jun 22, 2021 18:29
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The Packers are basically all these defunct teams but they didn't go out of business. The fact that Green Bay avoided the effects of the depression because people still pooped and needed toilet paper kept the Packers solvent.
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Jun 22, 2021 18:54
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Washington was the only team throughout the South until the 60s expansion, wasn't it?
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Jun 23, 2021 02:10
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Yeah, they were the southern most team until Dallas in 1960, along with the AFL that same year. Atlanta and Miami started in ‘66, and New Orleans the following year. Even though the Baltimore Colts weren’t that far away, Washington and their old racist owner at the time (George Preston Marshall) marketed them toward the south, recruited a lot of white players from the south, and the fight song at the time included references to Dixie and such poo poo. I wouldn’t be surprised if their resistance toward integrating and it only being done by force got them some fans in the Deep South in the 60s.
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Jun 23, 2021 02:28
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Not the NFL, but the Miami Seahawks were in the AAFC in 1946. They lasted a single year and went massively in debt.
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Jun 23, 2021 04:18
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RC and Moon Pie posted:Not the NFL, but the Miami Seahawks were in the AAFC in 1946. They lasted a single year and went massively in debt. Ah, you're right. I think they lost every home game (or close to it) to hurricanes. That plus the travel costs (if memory serves, the AAFC put franchises coast to coast even before the NFL did), and...them just not being very good. And the Browns basically being out of everyone's weight class.
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Jun 23, 2021 04:25
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I'm going to start the story of the Oorang Indians in the strangest place possible considering who they were and when & where they played. We're going to start in the White House. That Richard M. Nixon had the greatest presidential hard on for football is well known. The man famously called the coach of the Washington Redskins from the White House during a playoff game to ask him to run a reverse to a wide receiver. As much as Nixon loved football, the man that was President when Nixon was Vice President could always one up him. He played football. He played football against Jim Thorpe. Jim Thorpe was a half-breed in the truest meaning of the word back when people still used that term. His father was Irish / Sac and Fox, and his mother was French / Potawatomi. He did not have a happy childhood by any means. His twin brother died when he was nine, his mother died a couple of years later. As a troubled teen he bounced in and out of school until ending up in Carlisle. The Carlisle Indian School was founded to "de-indianize" Native Americans. The coach there recognized Jim's athletic talent and gave him an outlet for his aggression, football. In 1912, Carlisle played Army. Pop Warner was Carlisle's football coach (Yes, THAT Pop Warner) In the pep talk before the game he said “Your fathers and your grandfathers, are the ones who fought their fathers. These men playing against you today are soldiers. They are the Long Knives. You are Indians. Tonight, we will know if you are warriors.” Carlisle won 27-6. The Middle Linebacker for Army was Dwight D. Eisenhower. Omar Bradley was also on the team Eisenhower would later become the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe; he had responsibility for planning and supervising the invasion of North Africa and D-Day. In 1951, he became the first supreme commander of NATO, and the 34th President of the United States. Thorpe became one of the faces of Professional Football. From 1920 to 1928 he played for six different teams. He coached for the Oorang Indians. This is where the story gets weird. Oorang is not the name of a Native American tribe. It's not a city, county, state, association or athletic club. It was the name of a sub-breed of dogs. Walter Lingo owned the Oorang Kennel, specializing in the Airedale breed of dog. The Oorang breed or Airdales were a little bigger than the regular. Both the breed and name were invented by Walter. The "Indians" part of the name wasn't just a "tribute" like Cleveland Indians, Atlanta Braves and such. The roster really was made up entirely of Native Americans. Walter Lingo wanted to promote his kennel and he decided the NFL was the way to do it. He also, for whatever purposes, decided to have it made up entirely of Indians. He traveled to Canton, Ohio and purchased an NFL franchise for $100.00. Jim Thorpe served as a player-coach and recruited players for the team. In keeping with Lingo's wishes that franchise be an all-Indian team. Indians came from all over the United States traveled to LaRue to try out for the team. Many of the prospects were the same guys who played with Thorpe's back in 1912 at the Carlisle Indian School. Several had not played in years and were older than 40. The club performed almost exclusively on the road, as a traveling team, where it could draw the biggest crowds and best advertise the dogs. The same dieticians and the same trainer who fed his Airedales and cared for their well-being, also tended to the Indian team members. Walter Lingo's son, Bob, later reflected that the team practiced every day, depending on the workload at the dog kennel. However training for an NFL season was only a secondary mission for the players. They did everything at the dog kennels, from training the dogs to building crates to ship them in. They held the first halftime show. Rather than retiring to the locker room at halftime, the team showed Lingo’s Airedales to the crowd. It was debatable, though, whether the Indians were there to play football or give Airedale exhibitions at halftime. In addition to the exhibitions with the dogs; the Indians, including Thorpe, participated in helping the Oorang Airedales perform tricks for the crowd. However, it was their halftime entertainment that made them such a huge attraction in the early 1920s. There were shooting exhibitions with the dogs retrieving the targets. There were Indian dances and tomahawk and knife-throwing demonstrations. Thorpe had a history of repeatedly drop kicking footballs through the uprights from midfield. Indians player, Nick Lassa (also called "Long-Time-Sleep") even wrestled a bear on occasion. The players knew that Lingo's only goal was to advertise his Airedales and that winning football games wasn't important to him. Therefore the players spent a lot of their free time partying and drinking. They won 4 games and lost 16 over two seasons. The Oorang Indians are also believed to have the highest percentage of Oklahomans on its roster than any other NFL squad before or since. Finally the club was also the first NFL team to have a regular training camp during their short existence. The "Home town" for Oorang was LaRue, Ohio, which has never had a population over a thousand. It is the smallest town to ever be the home of an NFL franchise. I really do feel like these guys got the short end of the stick and would love to see them included the next time throwbacks come in. If I were to ever travel back in time I'd buy this team and let them play some serious football. This is what I came up with for an update on their jersey. I went away from the maroon/ red that every one of these teams seemed to be using and went with an offshoot of their secondary color, gold. Thinking about it, the TV number is probably too big. Original Jersey  The team  Thorpe is in the back row, third from left. Like all of these, the design has been changed by bits from one version to another. 
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Jun 24, 2021 14:11
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The Oorang Beige Lanterns
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Jun 25, 2021 06:06
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In Brownest Shirt, In Thickest Fog, Can Interest You, In an Amazing Dog
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Jun 25, 2021 06:25
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A like a lot of these but i feel like you have to incorporate a triangle into the jersey for the triangles. it's one of those things a putative fanbase would riot over if they designed it out
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Jun 25, 2021 23:17
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You mean as a large shape? There's s triangle on the helmet and sleeve.
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Jun 25, 2021 23:44
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Darth Brooks posted:You mean as a large shape? There's s triangle on the helmet and sleeve. I mean apart from the logo. I feel like they’d have preserved some element of that chest triangle, which also made them look like football superheroes
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Jun 26, 2021 19:26
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There's an old football saying that goes "The most popular guy on every football team is always the backup quarterback." There are some reasons for that, especially if the team isn't doing well. in 1925 the Milwaukee Badgers found out just how disastrous it can be to listen to a backup quarterback. The Badgers were formed in 1922 because two Chicago sporting promoters, Joe Plunkett and Ambrose McGuirk thought there would be support for a pro football team in Wisconsin. They knew that the Packers would be their natural rival and they set out to build the best team they could. The first season was not great, they finished 2-4-3. The second was much better at 7-2-3, they were tied for third in the standings at year end although it stung that the two losses came against Green Bay. From their they regressed, going 5-8 and then 0-6 in 1925. After that, the team shut down and the players went home for the season. Then Ambrose McGuirk got a phone call from Chris O'Brien, the owner of the Chicago Cardinals. The Chicago Cardinals were trying to set up a match with the Chicago Bears. The Bears had Red Grange and that would have been a great box office draw. Remember now that the players had gone home. Some came back but they were short four players. This is where Art Foltz came in. He was the backup QB for the Cardinals. Now, there were two amazing things here. First, that a football team in 1925, where most rosters were 15 players, had a backup QB. Second he recruited High School players to fill in the roster of the other team. He went back to his old school, Englewood High and talked four students into playing in a Pro game. He also told them it was practice and wouldn't affect their eligibility, and oh by the way, your name is Smith, and you over there are Jones. Yup, he lied. The Cardinals beat the sorta Badgers 58-0. The game was enough of a stinker coming in that O'Brien didn't charge admission. The Cardinals didn't get the game against the Bears that they wanted. They did get the NFL Championship when the NFL Commissioner got pissed at Pottsville for playing a game in against Notre Dame players in Philadelphia rather than near Pottsville. Pottsville thought they either had permission or could get away with it and when Frankfort complain the crap hit the fan in prodigious amounts. Pottsville had their previously won NFL Championship taken away from them and got kicked out of the league. The Cardinals were fined one thousand dollars, the high school students were banned form playing in Big Ten colleges and Ambrose McGuirk was ordered to sell his team. And he was fined five hundred dollars for good measure. The commissioner eventually had a change of heart. The fine against the Cardinals was rescinded, the kids got their eligibility back and well, by this time McGuirk had sold the Badgers so he was out of luck. As long as Chris O'Brien owned teh Chicago Cardinals he refused to accept the 1925 NFL Championship. His team had lost to Pottsville so the felt they deserved it. It wasn't until the Bidwell family bought the team that they took credit for the '25 championship. The Milwaukee Badgers limped along one more year. The fine did irreparable damage to the team. The Badgers had a great mascot. I was able to find this.  PowderedWater on the sportslogos.net forum found this one but I'm almost certain that the green was wrong.  It did help me in rebuilding the logo. This is the logo cleaned up and rebuild in Flexisign.  ZionEagle on the sportslogos.net forum took what I made and made his own take on modernizing it.  I think it would work as a modern logo. It's clean. Ironically this is one of the times I didn't use the logo on the helmet. I had been using a previous drawing of the logo and popped it into the helmet template to see how it would look. The logo was a great deal larger than I expected and the helmet shape was filled by one portion of the logo. It looked interesting, more interesting than having the logo centered where it would be normally. I used more of the shapes on the jersey but if you notice on the white the pattern is only on the body and on the dark jersey it's only on the sleeves. The pattern was going to distract from the numbers so I split the pattern up that way.  Incidentally, Milwaukee was not the only Wisconsin team to get kicked out of the NFL because they used players they weren't supposed to. The Packers were kicked out in in 1921 for using college players. They had to re-apply to join the NFL and paid the League entry fee again. The entry fee was $50.00
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Jun 28, 2021 00:05
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I cannot wait for the PROVIDENCE STEAMROLLER 
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Jun 28, 2021 01:02
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Assuming if they survived they didn't let a PR firm touch that logo any further than slight touchups, that would have been one of the most iconic logos in American team sports.
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Jun 28, 2021 01:26
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Dr_Strangelove posted:I cannot wait for the gently caress what? How did I never hear of this? I just wanna see the Hartford Blues.
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Jun 28, 2021 01:28
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Dr_Strangelove posted:I cannot wait for the OK, I'll do them next. Still have no idea where this came from, other than it's apparently real. 
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Jun 28, 2021 02:40
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As far as I understand it, that was the official team logo. The much cooler Providence Steamrollers logo was the basketball team that started and folded right after WW2  I would strongly suggest going ahead and just stealing the basketball team logo, who would know?
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Jun 28, 2021 03:34
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Darth Brooks posted:OK, I'll do them next. Still have no idea where this came from, other than it's apparently real. That is some serious UConn dog.
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Jun 28, 2021 05:05
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My favorite thing about Providence is that they were never sure if they were the Steamroller, the Steamrollers or the Steam Roller.
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Jun 28, 2021 05:16
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Darth Brooks posted:OK, I'll do them next. Still have no idea where this came from, other than it's apparently real. Where the Wild Mascots Are
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Jun 28, 2021 16:09
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GD_American posted:That is some serious UConn dog. It's the prequel to Ennui Husky, before he went to the Great War
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Jun 28, 2021 16:15
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Darth Brooks posted:OK, I'll do them next. Still have no idea where this came from, other than it's apparently real. Makes me think of that picture of Einstein sticking his tongue out.
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Jun 28, 2021 16:48
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The Steam Rollers were started by 3 reporters from the local newspaper, so they probably got the political cartoonist to draw them a logo as a favor.
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Jun 28, 2021 16:50
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I thought maybe at one time that it was a military unit insignia that someone borrowed for the team but none of the insignias used in WWI were close. If it came from a newspaper cartoon there may be context that's missing with just the logo.
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Jun 28, 2021 17:50
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I really thought I had posted up Providence by now. I had it all typed up but must have been so tired that I closed the window without hitting post. sheesh... what a logo. Providence was a fairly typical early NFL team. Like most of the teams they began in local leagues but in 1924 they played some NFL teams and won enough that they thought about joining. When they did they cleared out their roster first and it took a couple of years for them to get on track. In 1927 they went 8-5-1 and in 1928 they went 8-1-2 and won the NFL championship. It was awarded based on percentages rather than most wins because in those days the teams didn't play the same number of games. Providence were the last of the now defunct teams to win an NFL championship. A combination of roster shakeup and the effects of the great depression hit the team and they folded after 1931. The team name is "Steamroller", "Steamrollers" or "Steam Roller". The team was owned by the Providence Journal's sportswriters. (How's that for having a friendly relationship with the press). They played in a stadium designed for bicycle races but when one of their scheduled games was rained out they rescheduled for an evening game and hosted the first NFL game under lights. One of their players was Fritz Pollard, who had been the first black NFL coach in 1921. He was a star halfback and like a lot of the star players of the day he moved from team to team depending on the year and the salary. Players would move from team to team and would often use fake names to get more games (and game checks) in. The team sent a cable to a player named Perry Jackson, inviting him for a try-out. He was sick so a friend of his took up the invite, introduced himself as Perry Jackson. The friend, Arnold Schockley, made the team and continued to play under Jackson's name. The real Jackson played as "Arnold Schockley" for a pro team in Boston. Now about that logo.  This is the original and for all intents and purposes the official logo. I suppose it could be a husky but it looks very much like a Dog-Man. I debated back and forth between using a version of it or making a new one. I'd love to know the history behind the dog man but haven't seen anything. I came to the conclusion that eventually a different logo would be used (the Dog-Man surely would have been a secondary logo. It's something a fan base would utterly run away with.) Part of the conceit behind this project is projecting what the teams would look like if they had survived. Surely as the Providence progressed through the 40's and 50's they would get another logo. They main tool you use to do a design, be it logos, typeface, furniture or whatever, isn't Photoshop. It's a pencil and I drew up some ideas before hitting one I liked.  Became:  and,  The main logo had the Providence skyline as the "shadow" on the roller part. After all that I ditched the idea. The logo was really complex in a way that NFL logos usually aren't. I went back to the Dog (man?) and came up with logo made of the letter "P" with a red streak for the tongue of the old logo. I may go back and make something out of the dog or a different steam roller logo in the future. 
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Jul 3, 2021 06:59
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Now for the team I had planned on doing, syzpid posted:Just to add a little more to this, in League of Their Own, Rosie O'Donnel's character wears a uniform for the "Staten Island Stevedores" unfortunately it was a fictional team. Another of the NFL teams had a tie to All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. In Racine, Wisconsin there was a small stadium know as Horlick field. During the 40's it was the home of the Racine Belles, made famous as one of the teams in "A League of Their Own." Earlier it was the home of The Racine Legion, of the NFL. The field predated the team by eight years. The team evolved along with their name. First calling themselves the Racine Regulars, then Racine Battery C, Then the Horlick-Racine Legion, they were the first semi pro team in Wisconsin. They joined pro football as the APFA changed it's name and became the the NFL. They had three seasons of above .500 play but couldn't stay because of finances. They did have a weird resurrection in 1926. When Red Grange and C.C. Pyle started a rival league the NFL reactivated Racine. Now called the Racine Tornadoes they lasted five games before money issues did them in again. In looking into the defunct teams, most went out of the league because of money issues. Today we're used to NFL franchises being worth enormous amounts of money. Television contracts, merchandise sales, giant full stadiums, all of this makes the game fantastically profitable. It didn't start out that way. When the league began teams averaged 2,618 fans per game. Most of the stadiums used by league teams had either 5,000 or 8,000 seating capacity. Tickets commonly costs a couple of dollars, so the teams would be splitting just a little over 5,000 every game. After inflation it works out to $65,898 in modern dollars as an average gate takeaway. That's money going in stadium rental, advertising, stadium security, paying the officials, and uniform upkeep. Some teams would do better than others, some worse. Part of the reasoning in creating the league was to keep expenses from getting out of hand. Of the fourteen original members of the APFA only two are still in existence. Most were gone in less than a decade. The Decatur Staley's played in Staley field in 1920. Seating capacity was 1,500 and ticket prices were $1.00 and company employees could get in half off. The next year George Halas bought the team and took them to Wrigley Field in Chicago were seating capacity was 20,000, Giving the Bears the largest stadium in the league at the time. In 1927, Wrigley was increased to 38,396 seats. as you can see, Horlick Stadium was never going to challenge Wrigley.  By 1929 the situation had improved and the league averaged 7,811 fans per game. The game was growing in popularity and having teams in New York, Chicago and Boston helped increase attendance as well. Stars like Red Grange and Ernie Nevers helped establish the pro game as more than a backwater sport. 7,811 paid tickets at two dollars apiece works out to $229,402.98 in modern money. By 1932, average attendance was 10,400. Racine does have a couple bits of trivia attached to it. One of the players to QB the team was Milton Romney. His nickname, and the given name of his nephew was "Mitt". Also, Racine is the only NFL team to score exactly four points in a game, in a 1923 game against the Cardinals. Btw, The Cardinals were originally called the Racine Cardinals  Racine had a logo, the letter R between two bars. Being by itself it seemed a bit simple for a helmet logo. I understand a lot of logos are simple but they also have decades of use behind them. When designing the Modern uniform I decided use the Roman legion for inspiration. The helmet is a steel color. The home and away are two grays, with red trim, representing the armor of the Roman Legion. The red trim represents the tunic worn under the armor. I don't know of any uniform that uses this kind of switch for home & away. This is the modernized uniform  Horlick stadium was reconfigured in 1960, Here you can see a semi-pro football team playing before the change. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYqJE5s5PoE
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Jul 3, 2021 07:07
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Darth Brooks posted:OK, I'll do them next. Still have no idea where this came from, other than it's apparently real. Proof that memes aren't anything new. 
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Jul 4, 2021 03:05
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Along with the Minnesota Vikings, the Buffalo Bills are seen as one of those franchises that came achingly close to winning it all multiple times, only to have a fate kick them in the cajoles once they got there. Unfortunately for Buffalo, that's been the story of the city longer than the Bills have been in existence. In fact, that's was the story of Buffalo for as long as the league has been in existence. The Buffalo All-Americans were one of the monsters of the early NFL. In the first season they went 9-1-1, losing out in a three way tie for the championship only because the Akron Pros hadn't lost a game, going 8-0-3. According to modern NFL tie-breaking rules, Buffalo would be co-champions. They would be tied with the Akron Pros in win percentage, 9½ wins to 1½ losses (.864), both teams beating out the Decatur Staleys, who went 10-1-2. All three of the teams wanted the championship but it took the league office to sort out who won. Schedules were ad-hoc at the time and there were no playoffs (for example, more games featured non league opponents than games where both teams were in the league.) The All Americans of 1921 were just as good as before, going 9-0-2. After the season the owner decided to schedule two exhibition games against the other two top teams, the Akron pros and the Chicago Staleys. They beat Akron but got beat up in the process. Taking an overnight train to Chicago they were in no shape to play a game. They lost 10-7 and afterwards George Halas decided that meant that his team had won the Championship. Buffalo protested but were eventually overruled by the league office. (It's a lesson Pottsville could have used. If you win the championship, don't play extra games or you may lose your championship to a Chicago team.) Weirdly the league decided that if two teams played twice the second one counted more in the standings. Buffalo was in Print the Hats mode and had that taken away. The whole affair became know as the Staley Swindle. Buffalo was never as good again. They won five games their next two season, then went 12-27 over the following seasons before folding. I hadn't done this team before this because they didn't have an authentic logo anywhere online, at least what i could find. The two images I found were wrong.  This one a different Buffalo team, one from the 30's.  This one was draw by Bob Carroll, the late Executive Director of the Professional Football Researchers Association, who felt that the Buffalo All Americans should have a proper emblem to represent it. I have no idea what is on his head. Then I saw this:  It was posted on a Facebook page devoted to the All Americans. The page manager verified that Buffalo had used the image on their 1925 letterhead, which made it the most authentic logo out there. I wondered where the image came form and spent some nights searching through old illustrations before finding this,  It was drawn by an English minister named Samuel Morrison for this book, American pictures drawn with pen and pencil. I'm not sure he really knew what American Bison looked like. Here's a link to the specific page] I did some redrawing of the logo, increasing the size of the head to correct the proportions and to add character. Which got me here:  I debated between these two as the modern version of the logo. I ended up using something else for the helmet and I may go back and rework this part of the team identity.   I had a "Yesterday" moment with a logo I made using a double A (for All-American), trying a different tack to the name and representation to the team).  It's one of those things where a design (or song, in McCartney's case) seems so familiar that you just Know it from somewhere, only to realize that it's probably original. The initial AA Logo There was a lot of drawing and redrawing of the elements of this design and of the Buffalo image. Speaking of which, This is the uniform design for the Buffalo All Americans 
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Jul 8, 2021 06:12
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Thank you from the bottom of my heart for avoiding this
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Jul 8, 2021 06:27
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That’s got a very cool mid-70s feel to it, like the old US Bicentennial logo you see in the highlights of Super Bowl X.
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Jul 8, 2021 13:47
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So who won the 1925 NFL Championship? Let's put it this way, the owner of the team who was finally awarded the championship didn't want it and would not accept it. For some background, these were the days college teams were thought to be as good (or better) than pro teams and sometimes the schedules got a little ad hoc. Like a number of teams, Pottsville started with a bunch of local guys playing together. They played independently, added a couple of NFL players and joined the Anthracite League in 1924. (Anthracite is a type of coal and all of this was happening in and around coal mining towns) They dominated that league but it collapsed at the end of the season, so they joined the NFL. They did fantastic in the NFL, going 12-2 and beating the number two team in the season finale 21-7. All well and good but the story doesn't end there. At the time the NFL encouraged teams to play exhibitions after the season for the gate money (every little bit helps, right?) Notre Dame scheduled a game against the best team in the NFL east. Frankford thought it was going to be them but Pottsville beat them in the second to last game and Notre Dame picked them to play the game. The problem was that Pottville played in a high school stadium and they expected a lot of people for this game. Their solution was to play in Frankford's home area. Frankford complained to the NFL front office and all hell broke loose. Pottsville was barred from playing a second exhibition game. Meanwhile the second best team, the Chicago Cardinals, scheduled a couple of games against teams that had disbanded. They won the two games 59-0 and 13-0 and were awarded the league championship by the NFL commissioner, Joe Carr. The Cardinals owner, Chris O'Brian, didn't want anything to do with it. His team had been beat fair and square and he wasn't willing to count any of the "postseason" games. He had his own controversy to deal with. One of the teams the Cardinals played "post-season" had already disbanded so they threw in some high school players in to fill the roster. It wasn't until Charles Bidwell bought the team they started laying claim to the 1925 championship. Pottsville went 10-2-1 the next season but begin to fade after that. 1928 was a bad year for them and the team didn't have the financial strength to endure tough times. Who won the 1925 championship is still a question. The players always thought they had won. The league officially considers the Chicago (now Arizona) Cardinals as the winner but as late as 2003 the league revisited the issue. They voted 30-2 to keep thing as is. Pottsvilles logo looked like this:  Which really doesn't lend itself to a helmet logo. The NFL put out some patches but the font couldn't have been used by the team, it's too new.  The logo and uniform look like this. I had an earlier one based on the patch that I didn't like. This "M" is my own design and is designed to fit with the football. 
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Jul 9, 2021 06:34
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http://www.rockislandindependents.com/ The NFL came about from the merger of two leagues, the Ohio league and the New York Pro Football League. Just as many early teams grew out of the merger of two good teams, the APFA combined the best of the two leagues, along with selected independent teams. Just as the formation of professional teams required the existence of semi-pro (and before them, amateur) teams, The NFL could not have emerged fully formed. It took having a structure of Semi pro teams in loose associations existing for early Pro teams to grow out of and it took those early pro teams existing in order to have something for the stronger teams and organizations to plant roots into. In 1920 the APFA looked like this: Akron Pros Four time Ohio league Champion Buffalo All-Americans 1918 City Champs, 1919 New York Pro Champs Canton Bulldogs Four time Ohio league Champion Chicago Cardinals Current Arizona Cardinals Cleveland Tigers Ohio League member Columbus Panhandles Ohio League member Dayton Triangles Ohio league Champion, three other league championships Decatur Staleys Current Chicago Bears Hammond Pros Independent Muncie Flyers Indiana State Champions Rochester Jeffersons 1916 NYPFL Champion Rock Island Independents Five unbeaten seasons Of the teams available in 1920 to form a league this wasn't a bad list. It's interesting that the surviving NFL teams didn't have championships to their name previously. In 1932 the league looked like this: Chicago Bears Green Bay Packers Portsmouth Spartans (Now Lions) Boston Braves (now Washington Football Team) New York Giants Brooklyn Dodgers Chicago Cardinals (Now Arizona Cardinals) Staten Island Stapletons The NFL was at it's lowest ebb. Only eight teams existed but Of these eight only two would fold. The Portsmouth Spartans would become the Detroit Lions, The Boston Braves would become the Washington Redskins. Teams would continue to join at a much slower pace but the core of the NFL was in place. Even during the Great Depression the NFL would add teams. No NFL team has folded in the last 50 years. Rock Island was another of those teams that bridged the gap between semi-pro and pro. The name "Independents" came from the fact that they didn't have either corporate sponsorship or membership in a league. The owner from 1915 to 1923 was Walter Flanigan, who has the distinction of being the only owner to fire a coach mid-game. He left to concentrate on his real estate and insurance businesses, and the team played a couple more years before jumping to a second league. The league was the first AFL, and it didn't pay as well as the NFL. With players leaving for better paying teams the Independents went semi-pro in 1927 and then folded. I had not intended on doing the Independents. They weren't one of the stronger teams or nearly as good a story as Oorang. The idea behind this project was to do teams that were champions, that looked as though they could have survived into the modern era. A team like the Canton Bulldogs or Frankford Yellowjackets were good bets at one point to be solid league teams for a long time. They were winners and had solid ownership but had one or more things go bad. Likewise the team needed a strong identity, something that would supply a direction to follow. Providence and Pottsville didn't have good graphic groundwork but their teams had been too strong to ignore. The team I was going to do was the Columbus Panhandles. They had a good logo and I got as far as putting together a helmet but I couldn't come up with what was next. That's really how it goes sometimes. The inspiration just isn't there and it's best to try a different direction. Rock Island had a logo and and a uniform with a lot of green stripes. In playing with it, a design came out that was nice looking and was unique. The original unis  The logo  From that I got this:  I've gotten more feedback on this design than any other which surprises me a bit. One of the great things that the NFL does in branding is keeping team identity strong. The logos for Detroit Lions, The NY Giants, Minnesota Vikings, KC Chiefs, Oakland Raiders, all look like themselves and nothing else. For the most part all 32 have very strong identities without repeats. That's a difficult thing to do. Occasionally even the NFL gets it wrong with the Jaguars gradient helmets or the Rams current uniform and logo.
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Jul 16, 2021 05:23
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Darth Brooks posted:So who won the 1925 NFL Championship? Let's put it this way, the owner of the team who was finally awarded the championship didn't want it and would not accept it. Lost track of this thread, but this is the one I was waiting for, they look drat nice. gently caress the Bidwells. I thought this was snuck into the Football Hall of Fame, but apparently it was donated: 
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Jul 30, 2021 17:09
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