Historically High - The History of American Football and the NFL

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

With the Super Bowl fast approaching we decided it was probably time we figured out how American Football and the NFL came about. As two life-long football fans we were pretty surprised to find out how this nationwide and global reaching phenomenon got its very humble start. The first recognized college football game took place just 4 years after the end of the Civil War. The game then would be almost unrecognizable to fans today. Well how do we go from the Ivy League to creating a professional league that is now the most popular and riches sport in America, you just hit that play button and let us take it from there. Support the show Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What is going on, ladies and gentlemen, take your seats. We're back at it again for another week. Before I get into it, got to introduce, as always, my co-host, this guy, he's the sand to my Frodo, the cheech to my Chong, the screech to my Zach Morris. Hey, I didn't do a porn. I only did it because Cheech and screech actually rhymes, so that was what was in there. Professor Adams, ladies and gentlemen, I'm fucking excited. Yeah.

Yeah, this is. I don't really know how to start off with this episode besides just we did the history of the NFL that we as two ardent lifelong NFL fans just didn't really know existed. Yeah. The connection of like names that you were like, well, this award is this guy, but what did this guy actually contribute to the game? Or was he just some guy that was rich and had his name placed on it and everything. And not only that, but just what's insane to me is, and we were just kind of talking about this. how when we were old enough to start getting into football, football was such an established part of, you know, culture in America

that there was already Pop Warner football set up. There was already football in elementary school, football, middle school, football. There was an establishment of football at every level. And so the thought process is like, it's always been like this. There was never any thought, even as adults, when we got older, we just watched it progress and we watched it go from this. already established thing and we would see some rule changes and like tweaks and everything

to what the NFL is today but there was never any interest to go back aside from you know watching like an ESPN NFL films present but it would go back and do like the game where the Immaculate reception happened or like the

ice bowl or stuff like that you never even thought about like what was American football before anyone even fucking knew what American football was. It turns out that during all these fantastical highlights that happened during

these seasons back in the 70s, like all that stuff that you see, the Immaculate Reception, they played a whole season before that emaculate reception. You don't really think about that whole season before that one catch. It's just like an isolated moment in time. You just fed snippets of like the classic, like

classic instances and games and everything. So before we get too far into it, just a reminder guys, read, rate, review, subscribe, all of that stuff. We love that, you know, we can tell you guys are listening. We can tell more of you guys are listening. It's got us fucking excited.

It's let a fire under us for keeping this thing going, doing more topics, and just entertaining you guys as much as we possibly can. You got anything you want to add before we get into the theme? There's something to play that. Are you ready for some football? It was a very important man that I feel like we just need to get out the top before. We'll just, I'll say his name, hit the music. Ready? Pudge Heffelfinger.

Pudge, you say, Pudge, I don't know if you could get more of a collegiate athlete. Like, extra, extra, read all about it. Pudge, Hefflefinger runs for 300 yards. Pudge Hefflefinger. William Pudge Hefflefinger, that sounds like a guy who probably never had a callus on his hand in his life, until football came along for him. Like he was probably Ivy League educated. And really, that's kind of the story of how football starts.

There wasn't another educated. Yeah. At this point, you were Ivy League educated because that was the only fucking colleges that apparently existed at this time. Yeah, you could either go to colleges that were way too expensive for you to get into or you could go work at a factory. Or Oxford. Somehow you can make it across the pond and go to apparently the only university that anybody

knows about in England, which is Oxford. the origins, and I mean, when we started reading the history about it, when you go back and you hear the origins, you're like, well, of course it came from that. But everybody that makes the comparison between, you know, first of all, it's called, you know, it's American football, but it's called football. And looking at the modern version of the game,

you're like, the only time anyone's touching this motherfucking ball with their feet is to start the game or after a score or to just kick a field goal or the point after. like, why is this game called football? Like, there are so many other names. Of course, it sounds like it could be named nothing else at this point. But, like, this, that game, that's the furthest thing you would name it if you came up with the rules today.

We're actively trying to get rid of the parts of the game that involve your foot connecting with the ball because people hate kickers. They think kickoffs are too dangerous. Like, anything that involves a foot besides maybe punting, they're like, can we do without this? Can we just do an automatic one point after you can try? for two. And I mean, so it comes from almost a combination of rugby and soccer. And these being very old world established sports and everything, it was kind of an amalgamation with when they first came up

and started football. And the origins of it date back to, I think it was what, November 6th, 1869, is what they kind of recognize as that first football, the first game of American football. was Rutgers and Princeton, right? When you think about this, I'm going to tell you someone, what does this do? The Civil War was four years, ended four years prior to this. The soil was still fresh on A. Lincoln. Yes. But like, four years after the American Civil War, we get the invention of American football.

That's fucking nuts. There's a lot of things about football that I never really, because you hear all the terms, you're going to war, you're out on the battlefield. field and all that kind of stuff. Football almost feels like it was an outlet for people to get out their angst. Because like you said before, it's nothing like it was now. I was literally just thinking about it. I was like, do you think that this was an outlet for somehow?

Because in any war throughout history, it's not like PTSD is a new thing. Yeah, no. War is just, well, traumatize and it ruins people that are involved in it. Four years after the Civil War, you have an entire generation. of young men that were used to like doing battle and trying to get a physical outlet out. Like it's just, it's weird that like this game comes along so close to to that time in our country. Well, they were playing it before the Civil War happened. They were still playing it at these universities.

They were trying to sort of figure out a way to make it like everything that comes to America. We try to spin it a little bit to Americanize it. And I don't know where rugby started. I wish that I could get in. into rugby because it feels so cool, but I don't think I understand what the exciting parts of rugby are. Yes. It's so football is something that you can, there's stoppage.

Yeah. And you can look away for a second, but then you can look back at the play. The thing about rugby that is so impressive is the constant fluidity of it. It's always moving. There's not a whistle. Like, or, I mean, there are, but like, it's constantly moving. like a solid play up the field, whereas football is like, okay, the average play is what, like three to five seconds?

Probably somewhere along the lines. Yeah. There's so much more awe in football than there is in rugby, I think, because when you see some guy just lay back and throw a ball 35 yards down the field, assuming that there's going to be a guy underneath to catch it or that the defender put himself in the right position to get in front of that ball to catch it themselves. like every part about a pass is just cool. Yeah.

Whereas rugby, I don't really, I think they do laterals. Yes, it has to be, the ball has to be going behind you and the whole point with like, and that's where football differs so much from when it was founded to today is that initially, so the ball was, the game was emphasized on kicking. Yeah. And so basically a touchdown, and the reason it's called a touchdown is in a rugby, I guess, and we're going to get Stewart here, people are shooting from the hip.

Exactly, but what I want to say is that when you go into what we would consider the end zone in rugby, you have to touch it down. Really? And then that allows you the opportunity to score points by kicking. It was the same type of thing

where points were awarded kicking it through goalpost. And the ball wasn't even the traditional football shape, even the rugby style shape. They said it looked more like a volleyball. It was like a big brown leather volleyball. There was no forward passing. And so basically what this game was and how it kind of related to rugby is the whole point was it was nothing but running. It was just advancing the ball. And then a lot of it was about like strategic positions by

punting and trying to set up field position and trying to get your opponent back far enough to where then if you could get the ball from them, you would be in an advantageous field position. A little bit like a battlefield. field. Yes. To bring it back to the post of the wars, though. And so, you know, rules as, you know, as colleges are playing this game, you basically have these rules where it's like someone coming over in your neighborhood to play basketball, like these are the rules we play by. It was the same thing. You would go to these universities that started playing this version of American football, and it would be like, we're playing Columbia rules, we're playing Yale rules, we're playing Harvard rules.

This is essentially what happens in modern day beer pong. If kids, still play beer pong. Whatever house you go to, it's always house rules. They might suck. You might not like them. Double bounces might count for something different instead of what it should count for,

but at the same time, you are enjoying it enough to still continue going to these other colleges to play these teams. Well, and what's crazy is really early on when it was first started, you had like 20 or 25 people on each team on the field at a time. It was so spread out.

It was more like rugby, where the whole point was that like you couldn't, you were trying to advance the ball, you know, against another team, but it couldn't be technically carried or thrown, but you could, like, slap it with your hand or strike it with the body part, and you were basically trying to bat the ball downfield to try to get it into these areas. And you basically had it evolving to the point where you started to be able to carry the ball. And so carrying the ball became a thing. And I think it was in, it was, it was when Walter Camp came in, and Walter Camp, in case anyone's not familiar, and you may be listening

to this if you're not a football fan because this is interesting as shit, or if you are an NFL fan, you've heard the name Walter Camp. The Walter Camp Award is awarded in college football, you were telling me, to the best college athlete, best college football player, as determined by the coaches, the people that know what they're doing, versus the Heisman, which... We'll talk about is volleyball. voted on by the media. So Walter Camp is known as the father of American football. And through, you know, playing against these schools and everything, there is really not a football,

there's no football league outside of college. That's your opportunity to play it. Once you're out of college, this comes into the thing we've talked about is you don't get recreation until you have enough luxuries where it's not just all about surviving and working. So as soon as you left college, guess what? You're getting a fucking job and you don't have time for that frivolous football shit anymore. You're building a workforce. You're in the workforce.

You're building a family. You're trying to buy a house for $600. Like your goals in life are to survive. Exactly. And if you're coming off of these campuses, chances are you're probably going to be making a little bit more, or you're going to have a little bit more money in your family. And Walter Camp was a Yale student. And just to go prove how far into the Blue Blood Ivy League this was,

Yale, Rutgers, Rutgers always seems weird because Rutgers isn't an Ivy League school, but back then it was such a new school. The eight schools. Yeah, like they're kind of like the blue collar Ivy League, you would say, now. Besides them, Princeton and Columbia all made the standardized set of rules for what they had believed in after they'd watched. I believe it was a Yale game where they traveled up to McGill University in Canada

on the premise that they would play one under Yale rules and then one under these Canadian rules. Well, they still ended up beating McGill in the Canadian game, but they were so much more enthralled by how this Canadian game was played that they're like, that shit was way more fun. What were the differences?

Carrying the ball was one of them. Okay, so no longer slapping the ball down. Yeah, they also had less players on the field because if you think about it, 22 players on a field now and everywhere can be covered by the defense by 11 guys. Think of having twice as many people on the field. And so I think this is where you're having less players.

And so this was before, and this is at a time when the game of football, there's no line of scrimmage, there's no plays really. Basically, you're just trying to advance ball down field. And the way to do that is to spread the field. So you have guys, like in a rugby match that are just like spread equally down, each side of the field and then the ball is trying to kind of work to the outside. And as you're kicking it in the American game, it's not going to go as far. But when you can start actually picking the ball up and running with it,

if you have that many people out there, you're probably not getting far on runs. But boy, if you break one or you're even moving a little bit faster, it changes everything. And these standardized rules that they kind of came up with also introduced like the early downs where you would have three downs to get five yards. and you would be able to continuously hold the ball. Because like you were talking about earlier, it was kind of a position war.

But the deal was, was there was no real way to turn the ball over. So if you didn't score, you could hold on to the thing for the entire time. There was a game that really helped him kind of progress. And we'll keep kind of going back and forth a couple years within this early set of time when it's being developed. It was an 1881 called the Block game,

and it was a Yale Princeton game. Both of them had undefeated records. And in order not to surrender their undefeated record, it was called the block game because what they did, there was no loss of possession. Regardless of how many downs are non-advancement of the ball. So whereas in today's modern football, you have four downs to progress the ball 10 yards. At this point, you could literally just run a play or what they consider to play and just back yourself up, back yourself up, back until you're close and then punt. And then what would happen is after you punted it, you know, Yale punts it to Princeton.

Princeton does the exact same thing. back up, back up, back up. So all it was was just basically just this shitty war of attrition that people are looking at and being like, this sucks. Yeah. Like this has to change. And that's what kind of spurned those changes. So kind of going back to Walter Camp, so he finally kind of sits down and puts pen to paper to establish like an established set of rules. And that's like what you were saying.

So basically we get snapping. So snapping the ball, now we have the concept of plays. Yeah. or a designated time in which the play is going to be occurring. We have the line of scrimmage. Explain the snap first before we go on. So a modern day snap now would be the center holding the ball and either pulling it up and handing it to the quarterback

or in a shotgun, he's going to be throwing it off the ground. Between his legs. Yes. The way that Walter Camp said that there was a version of hiking would be for the center to stand on the ball with his foot and then kick the ball back to the quarterback. That was what the first snap was. So the ball was just rolling on the ground back there.

Because it wasn't a situation. The whole point where the ball is, you know, snapped out to the quarterback is so he can get back into a position to pass. Passing does not, is not even, it's not existent. So you're just rolling it back and then someone literally picks it up and tries to advance it forward at that point. And they considered this whole snapping idea because they needed something to get away from the scrum. Scrums were very dangerous. Walter Camp thought that scrums were like European rugs. be like Neanderthal designs where you needed to change that.

So that's where the line of scrimmage comes in for where the ball can be hiked from to make sure that one team stays on one side of that line and the other team stays on the other side. 11 players on each side. The concept of downs was created. And I think it was three downs initially. Walter changed it to four, I believe. So that was a little bit later. Oh, was it?

So the establishment was, I think, three downs to get five yards. Yes. And then the. the concept of possession, a team actually having the ball, whereas in soccer, like, and in like European soccer and everything, you have possession being more of a fluid, like a time of, it's like a time of possession different from how we have possession. So in American football, the team possesses the ball and gets to make those downs until they can no longer make them or until they have to punt the ball. Or they score. Or they score. In soccer, it's so fluid that like someone can just take the ball or you pass to someone and then they,

it changes possession to the other team. So it's not like there's not a cutoff as far as the change of possession goes. And so Canadian football, kind of like you're talking about how we borrowed a lot of that style, it develops at the same kind of parallel to American football, but kind of had its own inspirations and everything. It's not like we inspired Canadian football in some ways. And I think some of you guys may have, if you watched the Super Bowl, Esther, there was that commercial where I was thanking Canada for things.

Yeah, it was Dave Grohl, wasn't it? And Dave Grohl was like, yeah, you can thank Canada for modern football. Well, this is exactly what he's talking about, where we adapted things like the ball, things like an oblong ball from the Canadian style of football. I really like Canadian people and I've tried to watch a lot of Canadian football. I don't understand it. Like, I get the concept, but I don't like the whole three-down system. Three-downs is just not enough. Do they still do that?

Yeah, there's still three downs. their goalposts, much like this time, they had actually said that I don't remember if it was camp that did it, but they had moved the goalposts from the backline to the goal line to make it easier to kick the ball in. Insane to think about that. That's still in Canada. It's still on the goal line in Canada. So can you run pick plays with the goalpost? I mean, if it's good enough, if you're good enough.

God. It's just like having the most dangerous thing that you can put on a football field is a steel pole, and it's just right at the goal line. I don't know if you knew this. Okay, so when Camp developed the three downs to progress five yards, they needed a way of tracking the five yards. So they started adding the line. They didn't need to have lines before.

So they started adding the five yard lines to it. And after they added the five yard lines to it, apparently they did five yards forward up and down, you know, from in zone to in zone. But then they also did five yard lines the other way to. This is where we get the term grid iron. it's because the field looked like a gridiron. Do you know what they use, what substance they used to paint the lines on the field?

Oh, fuck, I heard what it was. Lime. Lime. Lime. Yeah. So then you said like getting tackled in that shit and getting it into cuts, like in your eyes and stuff. Just the dust kicked up if you were to go down

because at this point in time, helmets, not a thing. Yep. Again, not a thing. A lot of stuff, not a thing at this point. We also get a couple, changes to the rules. And so this is where it's going to differentiate itself from European football, soccer, and rugby is now we have a touchdown.

It's worth four points. So taking the ball into your opponent's end zone, four points. You get two points for a safety, two points for your point after, which is still in effect today, but not for the field goal point after, for actually the two point conversion. Yeah. And then we get, it still, field goals, or goals from the, field are still worth five points. So there is still the kicking emphasis on it?

Yeah, because a kick is worth more than a touchdown. Yeah, which is crazy to fucking think about it is. Can you imagine if that was still the case how like, do you think if that was the case that field goal kickers would be the highest paid football players? Probably pretty close. Yeah, I would say probably pretty close. I think quarterback's still getting you into range would be important. But if your range is like fucking Justin Tucker or something.

Sebastian, where, like, you can nail him down from 50 yards. You don't need your quarterback doing a whole lot of work. No, yeah, you just got across the halfway line. Yeah, you're pretty much there. Especially if the field goal is moved up in front of the end zone. Also, the other weird thing, I don't remember the years on this, and I am shooting from the hip on this one. The guy that had the longest field goal record before from back in this time,

Jack Dempsey, Tom Dempsey. One of them was a boxer. Yes, I think Jack Demper. Dempsey was the boxer. Okay. So Tom Dempsey, I believe, was the kicker. Okay. Half a foot. Yeah.

The front of it was just literally, like, it looks like if you cut off the last three inches of your foot, and wasn't his shoe just flat across? He was just toe-punting, what would be considered had he had toes? Uh-huh. Toe-punting it. Yeah. He would just line straight up behind it and kick it that way. But that was how important it was to have a good kicker back then because the games were

pretty dependent on it. you just had guys with half a foot that could kick it like a hammer. Such an unfair advantage that it's such a flat level surface. Can you imagine going out and being like you can kick a really far? How married are you to that last half of your foot? Like if we were to go ahead and cut it off, give you know, a season or so to heal up,

you think you could start knocking these field goals a little more accurate? Yeah, we'll pay for everything. Don't you worry about anything. Just you give us the first 30 of your foot. I mean, chances are there's a 50-50, an infection could kill you. But if not, be you're going to be a star and after that that's kind of how football went was there were just

these little advancements that would happen um and like we talked about walter camp the walter camp award is arguably more important than the heisman award because it's the best division one football player that's followed on by the coaches to the general public you wouldn't think so but based on the fact that the walter camp award is provided by the coaches the people that like that's those of the the guys paying attention living, eating, breathing, this kind of stuff versus the Heisman that's voted on by the Associated Press and everything where that's like, I'm not saying it's not prestigious, the Heisman, you know, is as big as it is for a reason. But those are the people that like are making your ESP in top tens. Yeah. Putting up insane numbers and everything. You can get,

you can get guys in the Heisman race from smaller schools technically, just because they're putting up insane numbers. That's the cool thing about this, though, is exactly what you just explained, that's exactly how everything goes. Because you're talking about the flashy guys that are making ESPN. John Heisman, the guy that the Heisman trophies named after, was also one of the guys that got the forward pass legalized in 1906. So to go along with this whole flashy Heisman is that they have the glitz and the glamour and the award shows for it. John Heisman advanced football enough to the point to where it becomes like the biggest thing ever to be able to pass a ball. You're doing something that nobody has ever seen before in the game that wouldn't be like a broken rule.

Well, and think about it. It's look at it today. Running the ball, you know, people love watching fucking long bombs. Yeah. Like any passes and saying catches and everything. Like imagine if that aspect never being president of football. Like it would be kind of hard to watch. Well, and even during this time.

after the forward pass has been legalized, there were rules before that as far as like how a pass would happen. Like if you were to throw a pass and it was caught, it was okay. But if you drop the pass, then you would have to be penalized and move backwards for a drop pass. If you threw a pass and nobody touched it and hit the ground, that was just a turnover. So they were making it so risky to move this game forward with this forward pass that once all that stuff is dropped and you can actually start moving on

with offenses, being able to pass, the game totally changes. It's like someone didn't want to make the forward pass legal, but they were overruled, so they're like, fuck you then, I'm going to make this. It's like that meme that has Jane Lynch where she's like, I'm going to create an environment so toxic. That's exactly what he's like,

I'm going to create a rule so shitty that you will never want to fucking even pass this ball. And the forward pass sort of was a savior for football, not only in that it's just so cool, but in 1905, the year was real, real bad for football. So I wanted to touch on something right before this because this leads into 1905,

which is fucking insane. So when you had just as a running game and you start to get advancements in the game where you're starting to get possession snapping the ball, it completely alters the way the game is played, where instead of spreading it out throughout the entire field, you start to condense the game more towards, where the focal point of the ball is.

And you start to get these teams. And again, we're still talking about we haven't even broached into branching off for even amateur football. This is still the development during college when you're in college football. You get these things called mass formations. And basically, it's exactly what it sounds. You don't have receivers. So you don't have to have guys on the wings.

You just basically take all your guys and you pack them together and you're basically trying to create a massive people running down the field, protecting on the inside the ball carrier to push all these guys out of the way. It's a convoy. Exactly. So you imagine like everyone, you know, you're getting ready to snap the ball. You have everyone up on the line. You have a few blockers behind.

You literally snap the ball. And it's just, it's just like a, it's the Philadelphia Tush push or whatever it is. Everyone just moving forward. Now imagine every play is like that goal line play where you're advancing literally two in three yards. That's why you get the saying, I can't remember which college football. It's three yards in a cloud of dust. Yeah.

Because it was just hike, moving forward, and eventually the running back trips over the guys in front of them would get knocked down. You then get them designing these things called flying wedges. And imagine, so you're like, well, we can't, like, how are we going to get through the defense?

You would have the quarterback or whoever the position getting ready to snap the ball was. And you could actually snap it to yourself. Like someone could just, you would have two groups of five guys on each side of the field

back about 15 or 20 yards, take off at a sprint from the sidelines, running at an angle to converge where the ball was going to be snapped. And as they converged, the quarterback would snap the ball and take off running,

you would have a wedge of these guys converging where the ball was and basically running into a standing still defense at their full speed. no fucking pads you're getting a 20 yard run as fast as you can

and as soon as these guys get close to you you hike it and just they meet in front of you to go along with that do you know when leather helmets were first really introduced into the game of football I know they weren't popular I just don't know the day the 1920s is when they were widely used

so you're talking about at the time 30ish years maybe 20ish years before that where they're creating these wedges and they're running that distance just head on into each other without so much as a leather helmet. Yeah.

And they said the most you could do for these defenses is literally just try to kind of like throw your body sideways toward the legs of the wedge to try to trip up enough people to where someone could actually get in there to tackle. So you're just, you're sacrificing yourself

to take maybe a knee to the face while potentially blowing out two different people's knees. Oh, by the way, at this point, the games are 90 minutes long and they're two, 45 minute half. in the tradition of actual European soccer. That's a lot of time. And there's no subs, by the way.

You're playing, and you're playing both sides. Yeah, that was the other thing that really kind of surprised me was they were going through that much pain. Because at that point in time, if you're just a lineman and you don't ever touch the ball and you're just a blocker, when you switch over to defense, you're going to just do the same thing. Yeah. So you're doing the exact same thing. The guy with the ball maybe changes a little bit, but he's not getting taxed. tackled to trying to tackle, but the other guys are just running into each other.

He's the guy that they're using as a last resort. They're like, you're the fastest guy. Please don't like hurt yourself because then we're fucked. Yeah. We're going to need you on the other side. Maybe just stand behind everybody else. All right. So take us to the faithful year of 1905 when all of this finally comes to a head.

Yeah, 1905 was so important because between high school and college, 19 people died. 19 players died. There were 159 people that were seriously injured. in just this one year alone playing football. 19 people died. Can you imagine if anything, aside from a school shooting, killed any like recreation, killed 19 kids technically. Yeah.

With an audience? With an audience. And like you said, the serious injuries and everything, there are injury reports from like college newspapers and everything. This was before. they had a really a grasp on concussions. That's, concussion protocol is something that's even new kind of by NFL standards, but this was where like you got your bell rung.

And that's what it was. They had people breaking legs, concussions, playing. Like, these are, these fatalities are just the ones like, that ended up being fatal. There were so many fucking injuries. So much so that in 1905, like you were talking about, it attracted the attention of fucking Teddy Roosevelt, who was basically like, fix this or I'm shutting this shit down. Well, I did see that part of it for Teddy's getting into it, I don't remember, I think his son played for Harvard, but his son had just started at Harvard or whatever school he was

going to, and it joined the football team. So I'm sure there was probably a little bit of Teddy that was like, hey, I'm shutting this down. He goes to one game and he's like, what the fuck? somebody comes off like missing the lower half of their leg from a wedge block. I've rafted through the Amazon and seen some shit and this is even brutal by my standards. I've wrestled bears for fun. Yeah.

And this is even too much for me to grasp. So they had to come up with something. They had to create rules that are going to make this all safer. And 60 schools at that point had met, 60 colleges had met, and they just tried to formalize a safer set of rules so they could continue playing the game. That whole meeting that happened that established these set of rules became the framework for the NCAA, the National Collegian Athletic Administration. That's fucking crazy. By studying this, this is what the creation of the NCAA. So it was initially the intercollegiate athletic association of the United States.

That was basically like, that was the precursor of what morphed into the NCAA. Yeah, this is where the money hungry bastards started exploding kids for money. NCAA created by American football. Yeah. And to think at this time, I think from what I had heard, oh, I don't remember where it was, but they were getting routinely very large crowds at these games. Like they were making money selling tickets to these things. Well, even think about it, you have initially, and we're now just up to, what,

We go from basically what it started out of just Ivy League schools. And this meeting roughly 40 years later after that initial one now has like 60 universities that are now coming together because they have teams that are going to be competing. So it's growing that fast already. And so kind of like we were talking about, we get into 1906, that's when the forward pass. I'm quoting that is legal, but made technically unusable. They dropped the establishment of, like, that you weren't going to be penalized anymore. Okay, they made it, they made it more to where it would now be a focal, not a focal point, but a usable play during the game.

We had it dropping sometime during prior to 1906, it dropped from 90 minutes down to 70 minutes. So then it drops from 70 minutes down to 60 minutes as we know it. the first down is moved from five yards to 10 yards and then we get you get fourth down too right I think that comes a little bit later that's actually another six years so now they're just saying you've got to get five yards double the distance in three downs um and now we have which is hilarious they create a neutral zone and why do you ask they created the neutral zone okay so they had to add initially I think there were two um two refs they had added at some point what they considered the lineman

ref, the guy that stands behind the defense. The original purpose of that position was to keep the lineman from punching each other in the face like pre-snap because they would be elbowing and throwing fucking hits and everything. They had

to have an official come in there to make sure that didn't happen and it got so fucking bad that they're like, God damn it, we need to create a tiny buffer zone where these fucking two rows of monsters are not allowed to like swing at each other's faces. We need to make it six inches past armed length.

So that made the guys with the longer wingspan even more desirable because they could reach across the neutral zone. So you're getting this establishment of rules, like even as early as like 1906, to basically be like enough punching each other. You guys have to respect this area. 1909, we get the adjusted scoring for field goals down to three points. So now touchdowns still being at four points are actually. worth more. So it's starting to move the emphasis more toward the actual act of scoring.

And like you were talking about earlier, we're already trying to take the foot out of football. Yep. Yep. And then in 1912, we get the TD's being pushed up to six points. It only makes sense. A touchdown has to be twice as hard as a field goal. because if you're getting halfway down the field, two thirds of the way down the field, it's pretty tough. Just to kick a field goal,

it's way tougher to get that extra 30 yards. Exactly. Or extra 40 yards now to get in the end zone. Also in 1912, along with the six points, field length is set to 100 yards with two 10 yard end zones. Prior to that, it was like 110 yards by 53 yards. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. No.

and then we get the four downs now instead of three in order to go and gain a first down. And they finally brought in roughing the passer to protect the guy that they were... Two years later, yeah, they're like enough. Okay, so we've stopped the lineman from beating the shit out of each other, but the quarterback is still getting the shit kicked out of it. We need to establish a rule to protect that guy. The guy that everybody's coming to see throw the ball down the field, we probably need to protect them. Well, and what's nuts too is, I mean, this is all under the precursor, we'll just refer to it as the NCAA.

these schools are all coming together and like having to develop and like change these rules like a couple you know every couple years to to progress this game and they for as far as the game advances it is sort of player driven to advance the popularity of it because they're fine-tuning things they're making it better they're making the game probably more fun to watch and safer at the same time but you still need people to show up to watch these games so you continue to make money off of it because what's the point of making it safer if it brings less people in?

Exactly. So you get a guy who comes along. This man's going to get his own episode. There's so much to talk about with Jim Thorpe. But Jim Thorpe played his college football at a place called the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Why is it in Pennsylvania, you might ask? Because that's far away from tribal land.

Jim actually was born on a... Oklahoma. Yeah, it was Oklahoma. I don't remember for it as a reservation. Probably at that time would have been. But he had gone to this industrial school essentially because he was a very good athlete, but he had had a brother before that.

I don't really want to get into the story because it would be important for the next episode about Jim Thorpe. But his brother was the Brainiac. and he was the athlete. His brother loved the school. He didn't really like it. He rebelled against it because it was a school,

much like we'd talked about with, oh shit, what episode was it? Geronimo, with the kids being pulled into, like, other schools that assimilated? Yeah. They were basically taken away from their people. They were stripped of their, basically every definitive thing that they were told to be proud of before. At this industrial school, though,

Jim Thorpe was a super athlete. He was a track star. He ends up later on in his life, and again, we'll cover this in another episode, goes to the Olympics and wins gold medals in the decathlon, in the pentathlon, I believe, yeah. So, like, the greatest all-around athleticism event at the Olympics, he's winning gold medals. One of the most widely known, like, American Olympians. Yeah. Ends up getting those two medals stripped from him because he was found out that he was playing baseball for money.

in the offseason from school. And you had to be an amateur. Yep. To compete in the Olympics. And this wasn't uncommon. He went there with a lot of the guys from his team at this Carlisle School. But since he took money to play a game, he was stripped of these gold medals. There's another very famous game that he plays against, I think it's Navy or Army.

It's got to be Army. He plays a football game. against Eisenhower. And he ends up taking Carlisle Indian school and beating Eisenhower and I believe it's Army. That's fucking crazy. They played against each other on the same field. And basically Jim Thorpe wowed Eisenhower so much that they came out of it. And Eisenhower was like, he's the best player that I've ever seen.

He's regarded as one of the greatest athletes ever. He was coached by somebody that you had mentioned earlier. earlier, there was something that I learned that was completely new about this when you were talking about Pop Warner. Pop Warner is essentially like a children's... It's football 101 for kids. Yeah. They're leagues. They teach them the fundamentals of the game kind of just like the first introduction to football. When you see children running around with the insanely large-sized helmets and everything like that where they look like bubbleheads, that's Pop Warner football. And Pop Warner is named after Jim's coach.

at this Carlisle school, Glenn Pop Warner, he was an innovator of offense. He did some pretty crazy things on a football field. One of his most famous, like, escapades into changing how football games were played. He only ran this play once, and it was on a kickoff. And the kickoff came down. He had actually sewn, like, elastic at the bottom of these guys' jerseys. So they could slide the football up in.

to their jerseys. So the kickoff happens. Everybody gathers together to pass out the football, whatever. One guy slides it up his shirt. Everybody else fakes like they do and then runs away, like cradling their stomach. And the guy that has the football in his jersey is the only one that's running not protecting his stomach. So they think that...

So of course he doesn't have it. Yeah, so he doesn't have ball. How's he holding it? He was doing different things on the football field. Of course, that's only used. once because you know that that was made illegal? He said that he felt bad because he was tricking the other team so much.

We got trick plays. That's why you have the turn trick plays. He only ran at one time. But he was an innovator. He brought sweeps to the game. He brought passing kind of to the forefront by using guys like Jim Thorpe, who was incredible running the football. You needed something else to do when everybody was going to key on Thorpe, so you start passing the ball.

So much so that he took the Carlisle, industrial Indian school in Pennsylvania to the 1912 National Collegiate Championship and won. That would be like even more so than like, you know every year how we get like Appalachia State or something. We'll make a run. That is even more. That's like saying like the polytechnical, technical institute has filled it a solid team. Now, college football was a little bit different back then because you had sort of. of like now we just got done at the national championship we're rolling into the

super bowl i promise we're getting to the super bowl stuff in the NFL soon but we have to set up this college of how this whole league this is the this is how the sport even gets to a professional level so they would big colleges such as michigan congratulations michigan you're all kind of dicks but enjoy this one um they would bring people in from different schools and teach them the game of football. And then after they taught them the game of football, they would then play a game against them. And they would just beat the living hell out of them because they just taught them football. Tun up games. Yeah, basically what it was. But then they would put them in the record books as wins. So Michigan has wins from like holy mothers of the Catholic Trinity that they taught football to

and then played them in a game and smoked them. The sisters are getting smoked out there today. Yeah, like it's pretty crazy how these old school records and these old school teams, they would just bully these smaller programs in order to become these prestigious universities with all these college football wins when really it was just like picking on kids that shouldn't have been out there. So, and this is kind of where it deviates and splits. So, and this makes perfect sense when you think about it this way. Okay, so you have football is now developed and is widely recognized as a collegiate sport. It's gaining popularity. What do you do if you're a college athlete? You get done playing football, there's not an avenue for you to play anymore, but you still have love for the game.

Somehow, you have to continue doing that once you leave college. So it starts to gain traction outside of colleges as the sports club and companies start sponsoring teams. So I was trying to think about this. Like you could be at like, and a lot of this, most of the early origination of football all takes place kind of in the northeast. Northeast and then kind of Midwest, because Ohio is Exactly, that whole stretch along from like Illinois over to like the East Coast, everything. Because that's where the majority of colleges are and everything at the time. So you would have companies like the, a steel company in Pittsburgh, fielding a team. And it would be made up of people that work there.

It's like when you, I don't know if anyone plays softball, just like rec league softball, but it would basically be like a company you work for being like, hey, I think we're going to do a softball league. this year do you want to play on the team except for fucking at this point it's not considered professional football because there aren't any professional football players but amateur football teams that start competing against each other you look at that now like when we see the weird leagues that pop up around here about the guys that go by their own pads and do all that kind of stuff and you look at it in a mock sense and you're just like what the fuck are these guys doing like they got to get up and go to work on monday yeah football started out by being played

those guys. Well, and it really to me makes sense that this is kind of the natural progression. It looks like you say, you have these guys that are playing in college. But when you go into these factory jobs, who else is in the factory? The guys that went and watched you play the game in college and were like, man, I wish that that was around when I was in college. Or I might have just played it a few times back before all these rules and before it got cool. And then I ended up having to live a life after that. And you're one of these rich business owners or factory owners and everything like that. You would, you know the other rich fucking assos and everything. It's like, hey, I bet the guys in my factory can beat your guys in football. Like just the conversation getting drunk, drinking scotch and being like, oh, did you see the college game last week and everything? And be like, yeah, I actually have some college players working in my factory. It's like, I do too. I bet my college players could actually beat your college players in a football game. Like, fuck, you know they couldn't. He's like, you want to bet. I got this riveter. We're forming a fucking team. And so you start getting sports clubs opening. There's even one called the Allegheny Sports Club.

that's in Allegheny Athletic Association that like fields of football teams So it's in Pittsburgh, huh? Yeah. The Allegheny River, the Steel City. But that's crazy that it starts out as strictly, In fact, it starts out so strictly amateurish that the concept of paying someone to play football,

these guys are not being paid. These guys are like, there was talk about like payment would be in forms of like, you get free membership to the sports club. Oh. We can help get you a job, things like that. but the simple fact that there was this weird stigma of paying players to be professional football players that it was like, well, those, nope, get those guys out of here.

We want guys playing for the love of the game. So one of the first ways that they had figured out how to kind of quote unquote pay them under the table was they were given watches to participate in games that then they would go pawn at the pawn shop and get money for. and then the owners of these teams or these clubs would then go to the pawn shops and buy the watches back to then give to the next players that played in the next game. So it was like they created this ecosystem of,

I don't know if the pawn shop is like, hey, we're going to charge you a dollar more for each one that we sell back. But they created a financial ecosystem to give these guys like checks in the form of watches that they could then go catch. It's my game watch? Yeah, they'd go catch the pawn shop. What would be fucking sick?

is, Super Bowl winners always get rings. The rings are fucking insane. I got something about that at the idea. But what if someone took it back to this and was like, we're doing Super Bowl watches? It'd be fancy. That'd be fucking cool. And you'd feel real cool because if you win rings,

you have to win more than five to fit them on one hand. You only got to win three to have a lot of watches, to have too many watches. Too many watches to wear, yeah. Until it looks ridiculous. You only have to win three before it looks ridiculous. but we run into

these weird little interstate rivalries that have these companies and these sports clubs that are sponsoring these teams Canton Ohio, surprisingly enough, is one area where you have it's Canton, Ohio, and

do you remember the other team? Columbus. I know there was some stuff in Columbus too. Yeah. Decatur? Decatur. That I believe is what it is. No, because Decatur's in Chicago. Yeah, there's a bunch of Albany?

Is it in Ohio? Let's take a bathroom break and reassemble, and I'll come back with the name. Sounds good. Well, hey there, all you sexy historians, how are you guys doing? It is time for socials. Where can they find us on Instagram? If they want to follow us, they can find us at historically high pop. on Instagram.

That goes the same for threads as well. You can also find us on Twitter. Tell them about Twitter. Historically high. That's historically H.I. on Twitter. And if you want to email any of your comments or suggestions, where can they find us at Adam? Historically High Podcast at gmail.com. Gmail.

All right. And back to the show. All right, and we're back, freshly drained of urine. Yeah, yeah. So big, big football rivalry, and you're going to understand once you hear where these two cities are. The Canton Bulldogs, Canton, Ohio, used to play against a team called the Masselin Tigers, Masselin, Ohio, two just football powerhouses, if there ever were to. They played this game in Ohio constantly back and forth, and Masselin being the smaller,

town over Canton just would get their ass kicked every single year. Canton, it was like a rivalry game between two cities that was always built up that Canton just absolutely dominated. And I really didn't know the significant. I mean, of course I knew that the Hall of Fame was in Canton and all that kind of stuff, but I always wonder, I was like, why the fuck is this and is it because it's centrally located? Like, I never really looked into it, but it literally, when you think about where football

was centered and where the founding of professional football was really centered and kind of where it took its cues from. It was that Ohio area that we were kind of talking about. And Canton was a really significant place in the official formation of, you know, when it becomes officially formed as a professional league. Yeah. And these rivalries in these little towns, Maslin and Canton brought everybody in these towns out.

So you had thousands upon thousands of people showing up to these games. That was so insane. They're all small towns. Uh-huh. They are like, okay, I'm just going to read. read through some of the names so you can see where the teams were from. So these were like once the league is formed, these are going to be like the original teams, the Akron pros.

And again, they're going to be all located around this area. We got the Akron pros. We have just Buffalo, Canton Bulldogs, the Chicago Cardinals, Chicago Tigers, Cleveland Tigers, Columbus Panhandles, Dayton Triangles, Green Bay Packers. We got the Rock Island Independence, the Toledo Maroons, the Kenosha Maroons. Apparently, maroon uniforms were very easy to get, very cheap. We have the Decatur Staley's, Detroit, the Hammond Pros, the Muncie Flyers, the Racine Legion, and the Rochester Jefferson's. Any major temp besides like maybe Columbus, Chicago?

Yeah. Do you think the owner of the Rochester Jefferson's last name was Jefferson? 100%. Probably had to be, right? 100%. They weren't moving on up. But these rivalries that were, would pop up would be like pride for these small towns they didn't have colleges to be able to get

behind there were no harvards in canton ohio i see it as texas high school football yes very much so yeah that's very very true you have these guys that are except for these are adults that are working in factories being these big strong athletes like they're famous on the field and then the next day or for five days a week they're working in a factory then on saturday they're doing a walk through before the game. Then on Sunday they're like the most glorious people in these small towns. And then on Monday they're right back into the factory. You got to imagine that those guys that played for those factory teams, some of those guys had to have had Monday's like light work. Yeah. Like hey, Thompson, good job rushing for those 150 yards. You know what?

Why don't you just go take it easy in the office? Maybe rest. You're probably sore from all that. Just take it easy today. There's a ham and bread sandwich in there with your name on it. Yeah, exactly. So you have this rivalry between Canton, and Maslin and Maslin ends up figuring out something that a lot of these other towns do along the way is you can bring in ringers because there still really aren't any professional rules beyond the college game setting up the rules on the field the rules off the field the shit's Wild Wild West you can do whatever you want oh yeah that's why like it was just amateurism for love of the game and it didn't take long for someone to come in and being like I mean that guy's pretty good on that team like it was like you said the Wild Wild Wild Wild West of like people seeing different players from other teams and being like, do you think he was ever like, we should hire that guy at our factory so he started? Do you think there was ever poaching like

that where it was like the actual jobs if they were playing for these like factory teams or anything like this? I don't think it mattered at that point. Like you were saying, as far as poaching goes, these guys, they said that there were guys that would make loops where they would ride into town on a Sunday, play a game for a team, and then hop on the train and go to, two or three days to another city, get prepared, play another game for that team, and they were just hopping teams left and right. Football mercenaries. Yeah, they were football hobos.

And Maslin became a powerhouse too, so much so that they played this game against Canton, and it was the first time that Maslin was ever really going to avenge themselves. The game ended up coming down to a tie, and it kind of spoiled the taste of football. football for the fans because they didn't get an outcome to this thing that they built up and waited for all season. They were playing different teams, but there were no affiliations beyond who you could get on the schedule. So you weren't scheduling more than probably like two weeks out for a game. Oh, definitely. That's the thing too. This is not like a well fun. This is a collection of privately owned teams, which I mean they're still privately owned now, but there's organizations behind them.

These are not organizations. This is the guy owning. the team maybe having his like secretary being like, hey, did you guys that football game? What was that boss? The football guy, you know, the football guys that I pay for. Can you schedule it with like John's factory or like John's team that he owns over in fucking Decatur? And so like the schedules of trying to organize.

Try organizing stuff with your friends when it's just trying to organize you guys all hang out together. Now imagine you have to organize fucking football games between like interstate rivalries and everything. So it wasn't exactly like you said. They're like sparse schedules. It was like hard to get people excited because people didn't know if they had to travel in for a game or if they were going to know that it was a game going to be happening like two weeks in advance. It's still so much in like a precarious basically like third grade student taking care of an egg when it comes home situation or it does it's not going to take much to just this thing to.

fucking fizzle out. All in the hopes of making $2 a head to bring in a thousand people to watch this game. Yeah. And bragging rights against the guy in the town next to you. Yeah, that's all that you're doing this for really and probably just the love of seeing it all happen. So jumping back to 1892, we're coming full circle back to the beginning of this. We get Pudge Heffelfinger becoming the first known football player to be paid to play big Pudge. He was paid 500 bucks to play. He was paid 500 bucks to play, mentioning it again, the Allegheny Athletic Association against the Pittsburgh Athletic Club. And what was that like in today's $16,000?

For a game, for the single game. A lot of money for something back then. For like, and imagine that. You hiring just a playmaker. And the guy that you hire his name is Pudge Hefflefinger. Like nowadays, if you were to be like, hey, we went out and hired a guy to run the football, his name's probably not going to be Pudge Hefflefinger. Yeah, exactly.

and you have these people once it kind of comes to light. This was kind of in the, he's the first known football player. You would have situations where college students were actually being paid to actually then come play for these teams. You had it situations where guys were trying to wear masks in these games and not expecting someone to either pull down the mask or like the guy crossed the line from you having played against you at some point. Being like, don't you play for that school?

And he's like, no, no, no idea who you're talking about. That guy doesn't have a mustache. As you can see, I clearly have a mustache. Oh, my brother Brad. You played against my brother Brad? That's cool. We're twins. But again, it was that, like, purity and love of the game.

So paying for good old pudge was frowned upon by the NCAA, basically claiming that amateurs care more about the sport than just money. What they were also worried about at this point is you got to understand football was exclusive to college. Yeah. And people really wanted that hardcore national football fix. that applied to a larger region, they had to go to these colleges. It was a huge, like it is today,

an insane source of income. You now have this league that is threatening to make it appealing for these players to maybe not play as much college football or to go play on the side and get injured and then not be able to play for the school. So this whole love of the game cares about,

this is bullshit by the... The NCAA did not take long to start spinning the bullshit. This is kind of something that ran through my mind, and this is maybe just towards the upper echelon. It kind of makes me wonder if this is sort of what helps them. Ohio State has the shoe. Are the Ohio State? They have the shoe. Is that right?

Yes. And it holds like 100,000 people. I want to say the record in it is 105 or 110. I know that Michigan holds an insane amount too. Oh, in Ann Arbor. The big house. Yeah. I think probably the biggest NFL stadium is, what, like 65, 70,000?

Somewhere in that range, maybe one of them might be a little bit bigger, but it's definitely more of a focus on, you're spending more, first of all, for the NFL game and everything, so you don't have to maximize that. But it's just, I guess, it's college's way of always trying to kind of have something a feather in their cap. I'm not saying in some ways college football is more fun to watch them pro football. Yeah, I don't.

Yeah. I think you can get a little more excitement. Teams can be closer in playing each other. I don't know. The rivalry of colleges against each other is fun, but I mean, in some ways. I'm not saying in most of the ways. But you have to, I just think about it as like a team in the NFL is a salary cap. Yes.

So they figure out we can put X amount of seats in a stadium to where we'll cover everything for the salary cap and then we'll make our net. College doesn't have a salary cap. So the fact- Obviously. Yeah, the fact that their stadiums are so much bigger to take so much more money from people and then not have to pay the players, it's like, whoa. That's why the big house is 100,000 people. I just thought of that when I was thinking about the money thing.

You also have to understand that you're giving away a large number of seats to people that are already paying tuition. Yeah. So maybe that's what factors are like, we can afford a stadium that we are getting money out of 70,000 seats. We have to take 30,000 student seats. So fuck our stadium has to be 100,000 cedar just to get the 70,000 paying people in there. Okay.

Yeah, maybe that makes more sense. Excuse me, it just seems like the bigger college football programs. It's a flex. It's got to be a flex. The massive size stadiums. So Pudge really opens the door to this idea to paying players. And with this idea opening, you start to see this little bit of empowerment, but it's also a really big problem for these NF, or not,

NFL teams, but professional teams, because you're not signing them to contracts. You're basically just paying them per game to come play for you. And you get guys that are just jumping from team to team, like mid-season. They'll play two or three games. They'll collect a check. They'll get a phone call or probably a telegram at that point from somebody from Kenosha, Wisconsin, that wants you to come play. And they're like, how much you're making there? This is a four-game deal. Yeah. How much are you making there? 200. We'll give you 250. It's like, peace. I'm going to go play for them. I'm going to go make some more money. Bus Fair.

Yeah, they were just, they were like football mercenaries. And they had to figure out a way to stop this from happening. A guy, just to show you how kind of carny and crazy this beginnings of professional football were, this guy named Joe Carr. I believe he ended up taking over the Canton Bulldogs team. That's like one of the Joker from Batman's alias is Joker. So every time they said Joe Car, I just kept seeing the fucking Joker from Batman. He was a guy that was just like You're Everyman

And he ended up getting a hold of And running the Canton team He found a I don't remember the guy's name But it was a Guy who worked for the Railway Oh that's right yeah

And they worked for the railway And he was a big dude Very strong guy He probably played a little bit And Joe was like I need to make a team We need to field some guys He's like hey I got a brother that can do this

I got a brother that can do this. There ended up being eight of them that played on this team. And they were all railway workers. So as they were railway workers, he was able to save money transporting them further because they got free fare on trains to be able to travel to these far off cities to play these teams. That was how hokey it was, he had guys that were able to get free fare. So it was like, if I can cut out my transport costs, we can travel further and play these different teams and make more money. Have you seen the underrated gem Major League 3 back to the

minors? Wasn't that Major League 2? No, Major League 2 was also the one that had Charlie Sheen and everything. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I don't think I've seen the third one. Okay, it's about like a minor league team. This is exactly what it is. It's like taking the bus that starts breaking down. This is a Flint Tropics, Jackie Moon situation in which, you know, we traded our washing machine for this guy. He punches in bunches. Some of you've had your collar bones broken. buy him. But yeah, so you're getting these guys that are basically like wheeling and dealing in order to field these teams and try to keep this league afloat. And we come to, basically in 1920, we come to a meeting that takes place at the HupMobile dealership in Canton, Ohio. So this is again

why Canton is so significant in the world of the NFL and American football. At this meeting, it's, and the way that they described this meeting, so it's like a five-story dealership. And so basically, like, you have these representatives from all of these teams. I think there were like 11ums. So you have like owners and maybe a manager or coaches or something like that, depending. And our meeting at this dealership just hanging around, leaning on the cars, they said there were beer and buckets on ice and then they were just hanging out. What year was this?

1920. 1920. What was going on in America during 1920? Is this prohibition? Yes, it is, sir. Well, these are obviously men of means. Oh, yeah. Yeah, but you're breaking prohibition.

Well, you're not breaking it. You're just consuming it. It's there. Someone is breaking prohibition by getting it, but you're not breaking it by distance. Not everybody, just one person. And you have, so representatives of 11 teams, 6.15 p.m., all of a sudden this meeting takes place, and these guys end up forming the American Professional Football Association. And Jim Thorpe is elected.

president of this thing. Is he still playing at this point? Yep. It's a Jackie Goddamn moon situation. It's like owner, player, halftime entertainer, Jim Thorpe is the president of the newly formed APFA. Plus he's playing for this team. Yeah, Thorpe wasn't an owner. Thorpe just played on a team. I think you might have played for Canton. We'll see later on. I haven't written down on another board. But yeah, he was the player basically like player commissioner. So he was in charge of everything that was going on. He was in charge of the own game, his own game.

Can you imagine during the game, be like, commission suck? Across the line. You're just finding people that tackled you too hard. A little question for you, and you probably know the answer to this. Do you know the two original founding members who still exist in the NFL's teams today? It's got to be the Maras and... I don't know if the Maras owned this was... The New York football giants were not a team yet.

Oh, so they weren't in there. The original 11. And it was the ones that I read a little bit earlier. It's got to be the old lady in Chicago. Mm-hmm. And... It was two Chicago teams. The Decatur Staley's.

Yep. Who are today the Chicago Bears. And then the Chicago Cardinals. Oh, the Arizona Cardinals. Who are now the Arizona Cardinals, are two of the original founding members. of what became the NFL. That's, like, I did not, like, I know the Bears had a storied franchise and everything like that.

But fuck, man, can you imagine, like, that's got to be something about being a Bears fan and being like, do you realize our franchise was literally one of the original franchises? We should be better. Yeah, exactly. Arizona's the same way. Man, back before the formation of this bullshit league, the Decatur Staley's were just beating everyone's asses. That'd be a fucking cool thing for Chicago. They probably do that, but can you imagine buying like some Staley's gear?

Yeah. I think it would look really, really cool. And I'm sure they have, we'll talk about their kind of big claim to fame with George Hallis, but they have Hallis Hall there, which is basically almost like a second Hall of fame. Because Hall has to be the oldest, most history NFL, like sanctuary. Is that in Soldier Field? I think so. It's got to be close.

It's got to probably be on the. campus, which will be interesting because if they are going to move the bears out of Chicago out to Arlington Heights or wherever they are out of the city away from Soldier Field, does Hallis Hall move or does it stay? Yeah, what do you do with that? What do you do that field? I don't know. You can't get rid of it.

But this AFPA, the AFPA, AAPA was what was officially formed after the AFPC on September 17th, 1920. The team reps were from four different states now. So this is like the growing of the AFPC to the AFPA, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and New York. So you're getting teams all the way from New York. And again, maybe this is just being on the west coast of the United States. It feels like Ohio and New York are pretty far away, right? But aren't they just like a great lake away? Ohio was considered west. Somehow that was considered west. As far as like the go and everything like that because again you had to have cities that could support but like especially adding in teams from New York that's got to be a place where there's got to be a lot of

money yeah so you're hoping to have that kind of funding to kind of basically float and keep this fledgling thing alive and so the inaugural season gets kicked off the highlights of the inaugural season this guy named uh he was a back for the Akron pros his name was fritz Pollard was a African-American man. The only reason that I bring that up is because we're talking about 1920 in America, that you have a black man playing professional football when I don't think football was desegregated until the 40s. It is, it was after that. No, no, no.

You are correct in that it was the 40s. I did not know this, and this makes this point even, like, more important. But from 1933 to 1945, there were no black players within. what would be the National Football League. Can you imagine watching a league in which there are no black athletes? No. It doesn't seem like it would be enjoyable.

Like, just imagine when it was, and we're going to talk about kind of how it was integrated a little bit, but all I'm thinking of, and this is not a racial stereotype, because there's a reason why there's more black athletes in the NFL than anybody else. But like, can you imagine not like being one of these like racist team owners.

I'll mention one by name later when we talk about him. But and being like, no, we don't want these guys playing and then playing a team. I just think of it, remember the Titans. Yeah. When these like white, non-segregated or segregated schools start playing against the Titans and just start getting their shit pushed in. It's fucking hilarious. I just see that in the same way of being like, we're not going to let blacks play on our team.

And then they play against a black team and just get fucking steamrolled in the next press conferences. we're letting blacks play on our team. Yeah. When did I say that? When did I say they're not going to laugh? It was two days ago. I do not recall that. I was on opium.

And the other kind of nuts thing is not only is Fritz Pollard, a star, and he, rightfully so, is he's a running back that bounced around to different colleges. And he ended up just being so good at football that he wouldn't even enroll in these schools. He would just go show up at the practice facility. and he would practice with the team. And eventually they'd be like, hey, do you go to school? He was like, no, I just came to practice.

They're like, ooh. You do now. Yeah. And he bounced around a little bit. There were places that just wouldn't bring him in because he was a black man trying to go to these schools that are still pretty Ivy League. He ended up landing, I think it was at Brown.

And he was on the practice squad, basically. He was a backup guy. He never saw a game, never saw a game. Finally gets his opportunity to play. in practice and they say, okay, we're going to have you return a punt, returns a punt, scores on, in practice, and like, you can't do that again, right? I was actually going to say you can't, someone had to have been like, because that probably never happened before.

They're like, wait, can you score on a punt? Yeah. Like, hold on a second. We, this, this has never happened. No one's been fast enough or athletic enough to get through all the other players on a punt. We need to check to see if this is a legitimate. Touchdown. It is. All right. This counts. Yeah. Make him prove it again. He ends up proving it again and becomes a college star. Is this the clip of Tyreek against the girls' flag football team? A lot like it, probably. When he's just running him in circles and everything. I'm sure. Yeah, he's probably doing 360s out there on the field. He's just doing whatever he can to get in. Probably showing everybody up. But there's this kind of thing that I think gets lost in today's line, or like,

delay the land for today's NFL is Fritz Pollard didn't go from college into this AFPA. Fritz Pollard ended up like going back to a end of or a HBCU, a historically black college. Yeah. I think Brown is one, right? Grambling. Grambling. Okay. I think. But he was back there coaching. And so he was out of football when they went and found him. They were actively looking for guys that they knew were very good and not playing college football anymore. to come play in this AFPA. That's how you would have to do it because there was no draft. There was nothing established between you think today and as far back as you can remember,

it seems like the NFL and college football are intertwined. One is essentially a farm system for the other. That's really how it works. There was not this relationship. There was still this standing between them that like, we don't like this professional football because you're going to be taking our players from us. Yeah, and taking our money. So there was no pipeline or established draft or anything like that.

So like you would have to go out and being like into a small town and being like, hey, do you remember that guy that used to play football? I heard he was living around here and you would go try to knock on his door and being like, hey, we'd like you to come play for us. Can you still run like you used to? Jim Thorpe was the same way. He was out of school for a while in doing other things before. He was the fucking president.

Before they came calling. Yeah. So they're coming in at like 26, 28, 29, and only playing. a few years, but also they're the stars of the league. The other, one of the ends that played for the Decatur Staley is George Hallis. George Hallis is football royalty. He ends up buying the Decatur Staley's and then moving them to Chicago after playing for them once the team goes up for sale.

So he is in it. Jim Thorpe, the commissioner of the league, the president of the league, whatever, is still playing for the Canton Bulldogs. It's hilarious because the offices for the league are in Canton. He's like, I can't, so I can't play for any. other team, obviously, because I have to go my 8 to 5 is the commissioner of this league, and then Sunday, I just

have to be able to drive down the block and play for the team. Can't practice today, assload of paperwork. But to think that the president of the league, Native American, and Jim Thorpe, and Fritz-Pauler, the star of the league being black back in 1920, 1922 was probably

a pretty big shock, but at the same time, they were giving people what they wanted to see. So it really didn't matter from the fans' perspective, I'm sure. I think from Jim Thoris, perspective because he was an American hero with the Olympics and everything like that. Yeah. I think he was kind of given a pass probably from any.

I mean, sure, he's, I'm sure he still faced discrimination 100%, but I think that probably didn't have a lot of blowback because they're like, imagine the legitimacy that also lends to your league. Yeah. Like, he's been shown worldwide on the Olympics. He's an Olympic hero and one of the best athletes of all time. And he's playing for us in our league. People are going to be like, oh, fuck, Jim Thorpe is playing.

wait, professional football? What is this? Like how many eyes that would get? It's the same thing as it would be the equivalent or even more so of like when David Beckham got brought onto the galaxy. Yeah. And signed. And then when Messi just got brought to Miami, all of a sudden now American soccer is now worldwide because of these superstars.

It lends legitimacy just by signing these players. And so you have these big names playing for these teams. No official standings were kept for this first season that they had played. But the Akron pros ended up undefeated, but they did have ties back then. I think they had won like nine games and had three ties. The Staley's were the other team. The Staley's being George Hallis' team that he was playing on had lost a couple games, but he had claimed that they had won their division.

There weren't divisions. This wasn't like a set-up league like that. There weren't enough teams to create divisions. Yeah. So him saying that they won their division that Akron won their division, he's like, we have to have a championship game. It has to be this way. So they play the championship game.

They end up tying, since they tied it, Akron still didn't have a loss. The Staley still had a loss, but the Staley said since they tied the team that was undefeated, they won the championship. So George Hallis starts parading around that he won the first championship. Well, then they go into meetings and they say, we can't really pronounce that you guys are the league champions. We need to figure this out. So in the meantime, they have their off-season meetings. They decide that Jim Thor never was like an accountant or anything like that. So his way to run the league is just based out of a player.

Imagine a player running the NFL. Probably not going to be great. No, I mean, you have guys, the equivalent now is you have players that run the NFL PA. Yeah. And these guys are also, like, imagine it this way. These are also guys that went to college for, like, business and accounting and stuff like that and that, like, have set themselves apart academically. when you have a fledgling league like this just trying to get off the ground,

Jim Thorpe is a fantastic point of this because it's like, this guy is running our league. This is like he's playing and running it. You got eyes on it. But after a little while, when all of a sudden the business aspect of it kicks in and you need to make something that has longevity, you're probably looking at Jim Thorpe being like,

fantastic or carrying the ball, fantastic athlete, probably not the guy we need running this from a business standpoint. That's also why when you, look at guys like Roger Goodell and when you look at guys like David, is it David Stern? Now it's Adam Silver. Adam Silver. Adam Silver, Gallum, it looks like he's never fucking played basketballs in entire life,

but at the same time he knows how to run a business. That's why those guys are fucking hired there. So who ends up, who comes back in to replace him? Joe Carr, the every man that could never play football would love the sport so much that he'd owned himself a team one day. excuse me is he comes in as the replacement

he looks at the whole idea of what happened in this championship game that they had played now the Ackron Proes didn't lose so we're going to go ahead and award the championship

to the Akron Pros he sets it up he makes sure to note that they have a champion in the first season then unfortunately after that they run into some issues that

everybody in the country sort of runs into to the Great Depression really messed with the league's growth. Teams were folding, plans for expansion, were going by the wayside because there was just no money. From 1929 to 1932, they had retracted from 12 teams to 8 teams. Well, I forgot to even mention this.

World War I. It's coming. Oh, yeah. Because essentially, this thing survives. Like, that's, can you imagine trying to create something where a large portion of like players and like your workforce and people to even come to the games are just busy for like three years with you know the war over in europe and then to come back inside it's kind of like the spanish flu too yeah like a league of their own like trying to keep baseball

interest in baseball life throughout the country during i think it was world war two but yeah to survive this and now right after you know nine 10 years later and everything you're maybe starting to build a little bit more and then the great depression fucking hits So yeah, they go from 12 to 8 teams. They're just absolutely trying to figure out how to stay alive for this great depression that's affecting everybody. It's affecting all country. It's affecting every business.

People don't have money to go out and spend to go watch these games. We can eat or we can go watch the football game. Yeah, that's a pretty easy choice. 1936, the league's kind of starting to come back into play. 1937 is rather when they find their footing. with 1936, February 8th, 1936, the first NFL draft takes place. And this to me is absolutely incredible showing the differences between what the NFL was and what the NFL is. The first pick in the NFL draft of the first NFL draft goes to the Philadelphia Eagles.

They choose Jay Berwanger. Jay Berwanger won the, I believe, the Walter Camp Award and the Heisman Award back then. best football player coming out of college football. What does Jay Berwanger do? Jay Berwinger goes, thanks, but no thanks. Not playing for your guys' league. I'm actually going to go make more money doing something else. So officially the first person...

A little bit of a twist on an Eli Manning situation. Yeah. But that's how much money these guys were making playing in this NFL now is they're making money that they can go make other places by doing other things than just playing a game. And not have to worry about pop. possibly getting hurt and stuff like that. You also have, so I think it was two years before that,

is when they started switching from the business standpoint, everything, Joe Carr probably having a hand in this, they started moving out of these small towns that they were originally based in and developed in and started moving into larger markets. So that's why you don't have a team that's in Akron right now, and you don't have a team in Muncie or anything. Those teams moved to areas where it was more financially advantageous

and they can make more money, hire more, you know, get better, hire more or hire better players. And so that's why you don't have small to market teams anymore. Yeah, I mean, it's just not possible. The only one that's still alive is just Green Bay. And Green Bay is only because it's close enough to places that, you know, it can be completely filled on Sundays. That and I feel like they have to give Green Bay sort of its own past just because of its history of. winning and I mean the Lombardy trophy is named after their coach.

I think Green Bay was one of the original teams, the 11, or maybe came in in 1919 and it was formed, but they didn't play their first game until like 1922 for the league. So there was something about that, but they are the longest, the oldest team that has never relocated. That's insane to be in such a small town for so long. But yeah, you have this situation where these people, or there's spread. What is the guy's name that started the Washington football team? Oh, that would be George Marshall.

George Marshall was a very influential man. It's incredible how far back the Redskins just dushbaggery goes. I guess the Washington commanders now. But the name Redskins comes from this gentleman that Chris just mentioned. The most ironic thing about this is he fought against the desegrovales. of this football league. He named his teams the Redskins, but he only allowed exclusively white players up until 1962.

That is like, are you trying to be double racist? Are you just trying to hit as many ethnic groups that you're racist against as possible? Like, so here's the fucking deal. I named the team the Redskins. And then I don't let any black players play on it. So I'd get them both.

You got to wonder, too, if Jim Thorpe saw this Redskins team come on. He's like, the fuck, guys. Yeah. It's going on. Did you not have at least a monocum of respect for me? What team were you before this and did I beat you a lot? Yeah. So these larger market teams are coming in.

Like Chris said, the Redskins have sort of this push on the NFL teams to stop employing black players. And that's where you get this segregation of the league from a league that was. formerly somewhat segregated. Scoring plummets. Yeah. Yeah, you've got to think that everything really fell

by the wayside at that point. Go watch basketball in Lithuania. See what's exciting as the NBA. So yeah, we go back up to 10 teams in 37. 1943 season hampered by, who would have guessed it,

World War II, as most adult males were called to service. The Cleveland Rams, again, just another, this is a time when there's such a weird mishmash of names because we had the Rams now and we had the Cleveland Browns, but they just would move.

And at one point when these teams were moving into larger market teams, baseball had already been established at this point. So football was also a competitor against baseball. You had the football teams just naming themselves the same thing as the base. So like the town would have a theme. So you would have like, oh, fuck, what were the Pittsburgh Pirates? Yep. But you would have the Pittsburgh Pirates football team and the Pittsburgh Pirates.

baseball team. There was no differentiation. It was all like the Detroit Tigers and the Detroit Tigers. Like everyone had to just stay within the same animal. When you would think to the reason why that probably changed up was they realized that you could get somebody to buy two shirts if the name was different as opposed to one shirt. They had to change their outfits depending on the season. Yeah. God, imagine how nice that would be if you were a fan from the same and you just got to wear the same shit year round. You never had to worry about changing it. They're like football or baseball are like both. We got a basketball team too

What's their name? Same thing? Perfect. And so at one point When this is happening You get the Philly team Philadelphia team and the Pittsburgh team To combine teams

And I think at this point Wasn't Pittsburgh now renamed the Steelers, correct? Yep. So you get the Steelers and the Eagles And for an entire season This team operates as the Steebles Just the dumbest shit. Like the fact that

that you couldn't just like agree on a separate name. Well, the fact that... Johnson and marketing came up with a brilliant idea. They just argued so much about if they were going to be the Steelers and the Eagles. They've coined flipped between the Eagles and the Stegals to see whose name would take top billing. So you have situations where some goofy shit like that is going on, but the league survives. The league just continues to survive and it continues to grow because it comes out of the lulls in a better financial situation because you have people exactly like we talked about before

when you're at war you're not going to be able to spend money because you have to get things done but when the doldrums of relaxation in life and things are going better come along you reach back out to him so is the world pulling themselves out and we arguably got out of world war two much better financially than we were going into it like that's probably not even arguable that's a fact oh that's a fact so When you have time after World War II, you get all these guys back who are probably still wanting to hit some people after World War II because you weren't going to get it out. And then went to college and played football. And now we're coming back.

So you see how the league can keep coming back stronger and stronger. And through the 30s and the 40s, the NFL not only ruled the roost, but you had three different AFLs, three different American football leagues come through. you had one All-American football conference that came through and none of these teams survived or none of these leads survived We still see that today. Yeah. We have the like XFL and the XFL that now form the UFL. Yes.

And it makes perfect sense. If you're looking, if you're thinking about it now, it seems almost ridiculous to try to even start. Like you look at like the rock with the XFL and the UFO and the joining together. And you look at that and you're like, how is this ever going to compete? I get that it can be exciting. It can give you football when there's not football.

But like you're going against something that is, and it happens in business for everything. You see a product succeed. It's making a ton of money. You're going to try to have offshoots to siphon off a portion of that. And so when you see the NFL start to build itself, and in 1922, they actually take the name of the National Football League. So just jumping back a little bit,

that's when they officially go from the American Professional Football Association to the National Football League. So now you have all these guys trying to kind of get a piece of the pie with all these AFLs, the All-American Football Championship or Conference, whatever it was. And in 1959, we get another AFL, the American Football League, comes through and is started by Lamar Hunt. Name might be familiar and associated with the Kansas City Chiefs, but Adams, anything related to today.

Not that I know. Bob Howsome. Another name. Max Winter and Bill Boyer. So basically, I'm guessing a bunch of rich white dudes. Yeah. And Lamar Hunt family still owns the chiefs today. They had made their money in the oil fields.

And Lamar had gone to the NFL. It wasn't ketchup money? It wasn't that sweet, sweet tomato dough. Are they Hans ketchup? I thought that was the whole thing with like Mahomes and ketchup and all that kind of shit is because he was playing the Hunts. I thought it was Hunt's ketchup. Oh, from what I had. red and seen was the Hunt family had made their money in the oil industry down in Texas.

That's maybe they came back in the catch it. And they were like, listen, I got to get out of this oil game. We're going to get into the tomato business. I'm sick of this black blood, this black oil money. This black blood from Mother Earth, we're going to start selling that red gold. So Lamar came to the NFL. He says, hey, Lamar Hunt, being a white guy's name still throws me off too. Lamar doesn't really strike me as such. But he says, I want to form a team down in Dallas. And they say,

sorry, no luck. It might not have been Dallas, but just down in Texas. They said, no luck. We're not going to grant you ownership to create a team down in Texas. They were still that whole market, that whole area. You got to think there were no West Coast teams. Well, it was like three years later that the NFL introduced an expansion franchise in Dallas. Yeah.

So I think it was more so that they wanted someone that they could control, whereas Lamar was an outside force that they didn't. know. If this businessman thinks that Dallas can support a team and be profitable, maybe it's something we need to look into. They look into and they're like, well, what do you know? It can. So Lamar helped form this AFL, this fourth iteration of the AFL. You done fuck with Lamar, and now Lamar's pissed, and now he's going to go start his own shit. He's going to get his buddies like Al Davis. I believe this is, this might have been where the Maras came in. They might have been the Giants at this point in time. The New York football.

Giants. Yeah. Yeah. Because there was a New York Giants baseball team. Yeah. The league

survived and expanded pretty rapidly and they did it using players that just didn't make NFL rosters. And so they're using players that are

deemed less talented by the NFL but are coming into the AFL and they're putting on a good show. They also expanded into new territories.

This is where the West Coast kind of comes alive with the AFL because they're looking for new markets and untapped resources because these cities in the

West are getting bigger. They're becoming major metropolis. And there's no competition. Yeah. You guys want to keep the NFL over there on the East Coast and everything. How are people going to come to your games if they're living out west? I'll just go start the shit where you have no presence. And also, national TV is not really a thing. No, not at all.

Regional. Yeah. This is the territory-ish days of wrestling. It's just, you kind of have your markets, and you know that you're going to play in those markets, and you don't really care about anybody else. And their exciting style of play that they had was so much different because the NFL was still sort of like a ball control.

We're going to punt a lot. We're going to move it on the ground. The old guard. Yes, exactly. And Lamar and everybody in the NFL are like, let's air it out a little bit. Let's see where this can go. Let's see where the past can take us. And it turns out the past took them pretty fucking far. NFL or the NBC. Wow. NBC. The NBC. Broadcast the first major network NFL game. On October 22nd, 1939, it was against the Philadelphia Eagles and the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Brooklyn Dodgers. We had a NFL team in Brooklyn named a baseball team that is now in L.A. Yes. It's just so weird to think about these random combinations.

Going along with that, there was a very important and pivotal game that happened. I think it probably was right around there. the little something called the greatest game ever played. The 1958, it was the NFL championship game. The Baltimore Colts versus the New York Giants. And this is where we have Johnny Unitas take the stage. Now, is this a NFL or is this a NFL? This, I believe, it was the NFL.

Okay. Because it was the Colts and then the New York Giants. So yeah, the Giants must have been the NFL. Okay. So I don't know who. I think maybe Buffalo might have been the team that came into the AFL. Okay. Because they're in the AFC now.

And I'm not sure, don't quote me on this, but I think after the merger, the NFL is the NFC now, the national football conference. Yeah, three teams had to, three teams to make it even for the conferences. Three teams from the previously established NFL had to move over to the AFC, which is the AFL. Yeah, okay. So you have this game where Johnny Unitas comes out. It ends up being 23 to 17. It goes into overtime. There's a ton of turnover.

There's a lot of excitement. And this is really where this game is televised. and it brings a national audience to being like, this is fucking cool. We really want to watch these games. And this is where broadcasting rights become huge for these teams. Because in 1959, the NFL was broadcast by CBS to air games for 11 of the 12 teams. The 12th team was the Cleveland Browns who had a contract already with a provider.

I think it was a local channel. It wasn't a national network. but they were fighting for these rights because they saw the ad revenue that would be brought in from these people that were watching these NFL games. And that sort of becomes, still today, the reason the NFL can go out and spend a billion dollars on players is because they have these big TV rights that are bringing in all this money. You don't make the money at the gate, even though it seems like tickets are a million dollars and everything in a stadium. That's sort of like pocket change compared to what these broadcasting deals are bringing in. Well, like you look at the city that and think of the area that fans will travel into. You can fit, like, let's just say, 70,000 fans in an NFL stadium.

You're charging tickets, prices, whatever. But that means that everyone in your surrounding area, if you kind of go along and you're not a transplant and everything, people geographically tend to then be fans of that team because it's like a hometown, home state pride type thing. Those are the millions of people that you're making your money off of. That maybe at one point during their life or another, we'll go see a game live. but there's probably most fans, the largest percentage of fans, never get to go to their team stadium

and watch a game. I would say that's probably really accurate. So the NFL gets their broadcasting deal with ABC in 1959, 1960 comes along, the AFL signs a five-year TV contract with ABC, and the NFL was so pissed off at ABC that they told CBS to not run the ticker scores for the...

NFL? Yeah, for the... AFL games because that was how pissed off they were that the AFL got a TV contract. Part of the thing that we see today as far as players being miced up and like the goofy ass the sky cam that's on the wires that goes over the top of the field, these were all sort of created out of the AFL starting to have moving cameras on the sidelines to follow plays and to actually mic up players that are out on the sidelines and share that.

That's that exciting aspect of it. It's like it's the old guard, the stuffy shit, the traditionalism of what was the previously established NFL. And then you get the AFL who's like the young hip fucking cousin that comes in and is like, oh, you're doing that. You just have one camera angle. Well, we got moving cameras. We'll take you behind the defense, behind the offense.

Yeah, it's a cool way to show off sort of the beauty of the game. 165, we see escalation as the NFL has paid $14.1 million measly in today's money as far as what their contracts look like, but by CBS for broadcasting rights to all the NFL games. And in that same year, the AFL slaps its hog down on the table with NBC and signs a $36 million contract for the AFL game. That's cute. It's a hell of a lot of money. So you start to see the NFL's like, shit, we might be in trouble here. The AFL starts to use that money the best way possible because their owners are already fairly rich and well established. You start to spend that cash.

Any money that they're getting, they're going to look to make their product better. This is where we see, oh, it was the New York Jets that came in with him because it was Broadway Joe. That's right. It was Joe Namath that showed up in New York. And he was the man. He helped propel the game of football so much further back then because he wasn't a part of the NFL. He was somebody that was threatening the NFL by playing in the AFL. Here's something also that really contributed to the AFL being more fun to watch and more essentially building its success.

The NFL is still essentially the top dog. It's still got the most power. But the AFL is challenging them because they're on the rise and they got a lot of momentum. One of those reasons is in 1960, the NFL starts recruiting from Black, colleges. Ah. Interesting. So you get these teams.

I think they said that at one point the Kansas City Chiefs during like a team photo was like even back then was like 45%. And so you get these. I mean, it's you're looking at these players and you're looking at all. It is honestly a comparison that you're able to just look side to side and contrast me. Like man, these guys are running a lot faster than the guys in the NFL like what is going on here? just much more exciting to watch this speed and like this athleticism. Yeah, guys are getting more than a foot off the ground to catch passes. Guys are catching passes. Yeah. It didn't just bounce off his face mask. But yeah, you're talking about in 1965. So the NFL was supposed to be

where the top people coming out of college would go. And you get the, you know, NFL gets a fucking slap on the face when Joe Namath, who at that point is like the college player, guy coming out Was he a Heisman winner? Had to have been, I'm sure. And ends up signing with the AFL and the New York Jets. You're pulling what would be a major moneymaker from the NFL and putting him in the NFL. This is your messy.

Yeah. But like if they would have got messy before any of the European, had him for the prime of his career. So in true American form, what does the NFL do to a rival who is growing larger? than them. They go ahead and they talk merger to try to buy them. Yeah. Instead of trying to compete, instead of trying to put a better product out on the field. A couple more years than it would have been the other way around. Or the NFL was happened to probably hope the AFL would offer them a merger to survive.

Could you imagine if we just had the AFL today because the AFL didn't take the merger and ended up outpacing the NFL? They're like, come, we'll talk to you again in three years. Yeah. Yeah. So June 8th, 1966, the merger between the NFL and AFL, announced, full integration of the leagues will happen in 1970. In between these years that the merger happens, you have the teams playing their regular seasons in the NFL and the NFL, and then you have what comes together as the Super Bowl of sorts that wasn't named the Super Bowl yet. So you got to play against interleague teams during the preseason. So that would be like exhibition games and everything like that. Oh, by the way, prior to this merger, the commissioner of the

was Al Davis. Oh, was he? Yes. And he was not happy about the merger because Lamar Hunt and an owner of an NFL team apparently kind of went behind us back to start kind of brokering it. Oh. And I think Al Davis was just kind of of the mindset as like, we're on the upswing. If we hang on for a little bit longer, we'll get more favorable terms.

Plus, I think he liked being, I'm a fucking Raiders fan. But like Al Davis had to be the guy. And so the thought of being in a merger and knowing that the NFL was probably bigger at that time and the info would be absorbed, he wasn't going to be that top dog. I'm trying to remember who the commissioner of Salacuse. Matt Salacuse? Why would I be thinking of that name right now

if that wasn't the guy that was the commissioner of the NFL? But yeah, so you get them to play exhibitions. Then for the entire regular season, they go and play in their own leagues. And then, yeah, how do you settle who's the actual champ, The true champion. Got to have a championship game. You got to figure it out.

Lamar Hunt, I believe, was the man who coined the term Super Bowl. I think it was after the third game. So the first game that they had played, the AFL NFL NFL championship that would become the Super Bowl was January 15th, 1967. It was between the Kansas City Chiefs who won the AFL Lamar's team and the Green Bay Packers. Isn't that weird that instead of going back down to Texas to form the team that Lamar wanted to form, me, just parked him in Kansas City. He's far enough. Yeah, like you just...

The barbecue's really good here. That's what stopped him. So he liked Kansas City barbecue more than Texas barbecue, so he stayed there. How did I get the name Salicue? Were we talking about it? I don't even know who that is. Who is that? That's the producer on We Might Be Drunk.

Oh, is it really? Matt's Aliquette. Oh, my God. Never mind. Sorry, it was fucking Pete Roselle. Pete Roselle. I was like, I knew was that... Yeah.

So Pete Roselle was the commissioner at the time of the NFL at the time of the merger. And then who ended up being the commissioner of the NFL. NFL once the merger occurred. So who won the game? The Packers ended up winning the game. They played 35 to 10 was the final score. They had played at a neutral site. And this is where the famed Vince Lombardi,

the coach of the Packers, gets his name enshrined on the championship trophy because they won the first one, then they won the second one. But then the Redeemer came home and Broadway Joe, guaranteed the win for Super Bowl 3 to show that the

AFL was still not only just as good as the NFL. It wasn't just the little brother anymore. Yeah, that was their arrival on the stage. And going from 1967 to today, the way that the Super Bowl is blown up is just absolutely incredible. In 1967, a 32nd commercial

cost around $40,000. A spot for a 30-second commercial in 2023-3, he cost about $7 million. Can you imagine there was a time where commercial breaks happened? You were like, fuck! And usually you're like that during any other NFL game.

But then like, even during the Super Bowl, you were probably like, boo. Now it's like people will actually watch that aren't even interested in football and be like, I'm going to do stuff, let me know when the commercials come on it. How many times do you hear somebody say that they're only watching the game for the commercials?

Yeah. Like it's big business. it's something that draws everybody's eyes because you see commercials that kind of come out of nowhere. And we had a weird sweet spot, I think, like late 90s, early 2000s, with like the Budweiser frogs

and the What's Up and all that kind of stuff. Or those commercials became so ingrained in pop culture that What's Up happened for like three or four years to the point to where it had enough time to go from funny to annoying to ironic and then sort of funny again. And this all just was... And you can still say it now

and everyone knows exactly what it's... And this was just spawned by a commercial during a Super Bowl. Like it's probably more well known, maybe not for people who really enjoy football. And being a guy who enjoys football, I don't remember what Super Bowl it was. But people will remember that Super Bowl for spawning What's Up or the Budweiser frogs. You see different things that have stood the test of time. I love the Coke commercials with the polar bears. The Budweiser commercials with the Clydesdales.

Like shit that's. just happened for so long. You have, so it's the most watched event. Is it the most watched sporting event in the world? Super Bowl 49 between the Patriots and the Seahawks was the most watched U.S. telecast of all time with an average viewership throughout the game of 114.4 million viewers. Okay, so not worldwide with the United States. It's the most watch event in the United States and isn't the day after the Super Bowl the most

called in day? Yeah. Yep. We see, there's, they've been able to put out. studies of how much GDP our country loses because of people calling in sick the day after the Super Bowl. Just how much money we don't make because people go out and they celebrate it. And this, it's crazy to me the way that it's set up because President's Day, I believe,

is like the next Monday after the Super Bowl. So why not push it back and just give everybody that day? Did you imagine how much better the Super Bowl would be if you didn't have to go to work the next day. Oh, 100%. Isn't that why they also moved up the Pro Bowl to before the Super Bowl now? So, like, people, so there's not a week off of football where, like, no one can lose interest that, like, it's not just interviews where it's like, no, no, no, no, we still have a game. Yeah, this Sunday. We're still doing some stuff. Yeah, this is all your favorite players, doing all types of crazy challenges and shit. Nobody who's playing in the important game is going to play in this one, but everybody else is pretty good. Which means the majority of people's fandom and we'll see their player at least be like, hey, but my player made it there. That's my guy.

Still watching. The most played in is the Patriots with 11. The most wins is a tie. That's why I glossed over it very quickly. Most wins, the Pats and the Steelers with six. Double gross. Most losses are the Broncos. And then again, we're going to come back and the Patriots.

Well, yeah. I mean, the Patriots losing five is way more important than playing in 11 and then winning six. Yeah, well, a 60, you're what, like maybe a 60% success rate? That's not great. No, it's really not. Those five are way more important. You were talking earlier about Super Bowl rings and just how crazy nuts they've gotten. The NFL will pay them up to 150 rings $5,000 per ring.

Is what the NFL allocates to teams to spend on these rings. The average cost per team ring now, they don't put out like the solid concrete numbers probably because they're just fucking stupid. People would stop buying jerseys. Fuck. Uh-huh. Yeah. The average cost for these rings, they say, is between 30.

and 50,000 per ring. And you're going to think about that. That is chump change to how much that team is going to make from visibility and from winning a championship and from merchandise sales and all that kind of stuff. That's just ridiculous. Yeah. Even lowballing. Say every ring is $30,000. You buy 150 rings.

That's what, $44.4.5 million, something like that. Somewhere around there. Sure. We're so far along in this. You can't ask me to do that. I'm going 4.5 million. Somebody check me on that. And we would be doing ourselves and all of you out there a disservice

if we were to dismiss February 1st, 2004. The coming of age for many young men. Yes. This was a year at a high school for me. So I was very familiar with a woman's anatomy, or at least I thought I was. We have a situation in which pop supergroup in sync is performing on stage. Was it Justin Timberlake by himself,

or was it in sync? I think it was J.T. You think it was just, okay, so sorry about the other four members. This was when Justin Timberlake had branched off and was being extremely successful.

You have him and Janet Jackson performing. I can't even remember the song and I can't remember who was playing in the game, but I will remember that faithful moment in which he rips off part of Janet Jackson's costume to reveal the bare breast

with the weird star nipple, circular thing that goes around it. And for those 1.7 seconds before that TV feed and that camera cut away, when nobody knew what the fuck was going on, but the world was looking at Janet Jackson's nipples. Like you said,

many a young man became a man that day. A lot of questions before bedtime from children, too, I'm guessing. Oh, a ton had to have been. But this is, I believe, where they actually decided to go ahead and put the most watched US event on a delay. Yeah. Because why would you not have a delay for really any myriad of reasons other than seeing it. Yeah.

Yeah. Like we're not going to do it for the fact that maybe some guy has a life-ending injury on the field. We're going to put the delay on because we just saw Janet Jackson's titty. Yeah. That to me feels like a seminal moment in this whole pageantry around the NFL. It was probably a seminal moment for other people. A lot of people. A lot of people.

So this episode is so much, it was so much fun to do because, Chris and I are very big football fans. We're very big sports fans. And to be able to look at something that we really thought that we knew everything about just existing. There's such a history to it. And there's such a carny aspect of being able to field teams. It started out as a rich person sport. It started out as something that was going on at Ivy League schools.

Board hobbyists. Yeah. That wanted to go ahead and say that their club or their factory had better employees that were able to play this game that they saw. in college. And just to like, this gets me excited for going into things like Major League Baseball to do an episode on that. But yeah, just to think of like, this is the most like successful sports league in America. Hands down.

I'm not going to say the world because I'm not sure about that. But from like the sheer amount of money it makes, it's the number one sport in America. And to like understand that this came from like hobbyists and at certain points for a lot of years was just this niche thing. And then it just grew into this. It's really weird to like ever think that it was not as big as it was and how it's grown. And like it's it's a fucking religion. Yeah. Yeah. Sundays are in this country really like going to church and then there's a large sect of the world that or there's a large set of the country that doesn't really go to church on Sundays. But for five months out of the year, there's now this weird church that last from 11 o'clock.

to the end of Sunday night football at 9.30 or 10 o'clock. And you get church on Mondays. A little bit later in the week, you get church on Thursday sometimes too. And church on Thursdays usually sucks. It's not a great day. No one else to go to church during the week like that. No good sermons. It's still somebody up there preaching in the language that you understand.

And to know just how big the NFL has gotten from coming from car dealerships to forming this league, to doing what they do now, to just hope and, pray that your team, the team that you scheduled two weeks ago on the fly is going to show up to the game so you can sell a thousand tickets and you can pay the players and make a little bit more money to having to charge insane amounts of money for tickets. To buy that coveted from ball mercenary that you've had your eye on that's been playing against you the last couple games. It's just incredible that something so meager can grow up and be something so massive to just take over an entire country. I feel like this one was a little bit of a selfish episode.

because we enjoyed doing this so much. And especially with the Super Bowl coming up, it's a great time to kind of learn the facts behind everything. But it's just, it's from a historical perspective. It's very just interesting about how something could really come from nothing to be just this juggernaut that it is. Regardless of how you feel about it, if you're not a football fan, appreciate it for the fact that it's just a cool piece of history

about something that's very popular in culture and that a lot of people follow and are behind. Well, and it has a history. It is history. This is ingrained in America. It dates back four years after the Civil War. We have Teddy Roosevelt interfering in football. We have a president that's acknowledging it every year.

I don't know if they do it anymore because I think it kind of became weirdly political, but you used to go to the White House to go meet the president after you won the Super Bowl. It was desegregated by the JFK administration. The government took this privately owned entity and was like, nope, they're playing too. Yeah. And for the better. You have so much history that's just built. into this, that it has to be a topic. It's something that has spanned a very long time. And it may not be the

most important thing that's happened in the world, but in America and just as a whole to be able to see such a story is very historic. It's a day that we revere so much that it forces us to buy more buffalo wings and fucking beer than any other day of the year. So if you learned anything, take that home. Yeah. Maybe this is something. that you can use to share some fun facts at your Super Bowl party. Yeah, when you're forced to go to a Super Bowl party, even if you're not there, enjoy the food, enjoy the drinks, and drop a few nuggets, not during the commercials breaks because you'll get your ass be.

And then always pay attention to halftime because you never know when someone's going to get derrobed. All right, you got anything else, man? No, I think we're good. All right, guys. Well, thanks again for joining us. Remember, rate, review, subscribe, all that good stuff. We love hearing from you guys.

Thank you for listening so much. Love you all. Base. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thanks for joining us for another episode. If you like what you heard, hit that subscribe and like button. Follow us. If you didn't like what you heard, still hit that anyway, because we'll probably cover something in the future that you do like.

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