Remember the AFL

      
Of all the
leagues
that have attempted to challenge the dominance
of an established league, the American Football
League was the only one to be truly successful.
The American Football League was the only league
in North American pro sports ever to have merged
with another major league and have all its teams
continue to exist. No AFL teams folded and only
two teams changed cities during the league's
10-year existence. Further, the league that
merged with it adopted many of the innovative
on- and off-field elements introduced by the
AFL, including names on player jerseys, official
scoreboard clocks and gate and revenue sharing.
The AFL's challenge to the NFL also made
possible the only four World Championship Games
ever played between the champions of two major
football leagues.
      
Lamar Hunt's vision brought a new
Professional
Football league not only to
California and New York, but to parts of the
nation that did not previously have the sport:
New England, Colorado and Texas. It would later
be brought to Missouri and Florida. The AFL also
adopted the first-ever cooperative television
plan for Professional
Football, in which the
league office negotiated an ABC-TV contract, the
proceeds of which were divided equally among
member clubs.
      
An AFL legacy seldom acknowledged is the fact
that four cities obtained NFL franchises
as a direct result of the competition the old
league was forced into by the AFL: Dallas'
Cowboys were created to drive the AFL's
Texans out of business; the Minnesota
Vikings were the NFL franchise given to Max
Winter for abandoning the AFL (the AFL franchise
later went to
Oakland); the Atlanta Falcons franchise
went to Rankin Smith to dissuade him from
purchasing the AFL's
Miami franchise;
and New Orleans was given a franchise to repay
the Louisiana congressmen who supported the bill
permitting the AFL-NFL merger. It is most likely that if
the AFL had never existed, neither would the
Dallas Cowboys, the Minnesota Vikings, the
Atlanta Falcons, nor the New
Orleans Saints.
      
The AFL's more liberal policies towards black
players and its rigorous recruitment of players
from black and small colleges revealed a new
source of talent for Professional
Football. 
AFL scouts, including blacks like Tom Williams
and the first full-time black scout, Lloyd
Wells, recruited and opened the gates for the
hundreds of talented blacks who subsequently
contributed immeasurably to the sport, following
in the footsteps of
Abner Haynes,
Buck Buchanan,
Lionel Taylor and the like.
      
The AFL's free agents came from several sources.
Some were players who could not find success
playing in the NFL. The sports media in
established NFL cities called them "NFL
rejects". But the success of men like
the Oilers/Raiders'
George Blanda, the Chargers/Bills'
Jack Kemp, the Texans'
Len Dawson, the Titans'
Don Maynard, the Raiders/Patriots/Jets'
Babe Parilli, the Pats'
Bob Dee and many others, made that sobriquet
questionable. Another source of free agents was
the
Canadian Football League. In the late 1950s,
many players released by the NFL, or un-drafted
and unsigned out of college by the NFL, went
North to try their luck with the CFL, and later
returned to the states to play in the AFL. In
the league's first years, these included the
Broncos' Frank Tripucka, the Pats'
Gino Cappelletti, the Bills'

Cookie Gilchrist and the Chargers' Tobin
Rote, Sam
Deluca and
Dave Kocourek. Finally, there were the true
"free agents", the walk-ons, the "wanna-be's",
who tried out in droves for the chance to play
Professional
Football.
      
The American Football League took advantage of
the burgeoning popularity of football by
locating teams in major cities that lacked NFL
franchises, and by using the growing power of
televised football games (bolstered with the
help of major network contracts, first with ABC
and later with NBC). It featured many
outstanding games, such as the classic 1962
double-overtime American Football League
championship game between the
Dallas Texans and the defending champion
Houston Oilers.
It was the
longest Professional
Football championship game
ever played, and is still considered one of the
best.
      
The AFL appealed to fans by offering a flashier
alternative to the conservative NFL. Team
uniforms were bright and colorful. Long passes
("bombs") were commonplace in AFL offenses, led
by such talented quarterbacks as
John Hadl,
Daryle Lamonica and
Len Dawson.  While the old league kept
its time on a watch in the referee's
pocket, occasionally announcing the time
remaining, the AFL put it on the scoreboard
clock, for fans to keep track of at a glance. 
While CBS had a fixed camera on the fifty yard
line for its NFL coverage, ABC and the AFL had
moving sideline cameras and were the first to
"mike" players during games.
      
Another attractive feature of the American
Football League was its competitive balance. In
the original eight-team league, in a fourteen
game schedule, each team played every other team
twice. Every team had the same "strength of
schedule", so the division champions were
clearly the best teams in each division.
Further, the league championships were evenly
divided: five were won by Western Division
teams, five by the Eastern Division; and of the
original eight teams, all but two (Denver and
Boston) won at least one AFL title, and only one
did not make the playoffs at some time during
the league's ten-year existence.
      
The AFL clearly matched or outshone the old
league in many cases. Examples abound:

Lance
Alworth of the
Chargers was arguably the best receiver of
the 1960s;
Johnny Robinson
of the
Chiefs, although he has been ignored by the
"pro football" hall of fame, was the equal of
any NFL defensive back of the era; and the
1964 Buffalo Bills defense allowed their
opponents only 300 rushing attempts and held
them to a Professional
Football record 913 yards rushing,
while recording fifty quarterback sacks in a
fourteen-game schedule.
      
The AFL achieved its success in spite of sparse
coverage by the print and electronic media.
CBS-TV, which then carried NFL games, refused to
give AFL game scores on its football broadcasts.
William N. Wallace of the New York
Times and Tex Maule of
Sports Illustrated ridiculed the new
league, and even after the AFL was established,
SI gave full-page color action shots of
the NFL, while it used black and white photos in
its AFL coverage.  This bias is in many
cases still evident today: in the reporting of
AFL players' experience as "NFL experience"
(e.g.
Ron McDole is called a "17-year NFL
veteran", when in actuality, he played eight of
those years in the AFL); in the restoration of
the Browns' name, colors, and records to
Cleveland after the team moved, while
Houston, the city
that hosted the first two AFL champions, is forbidden to use the name
"Oilers"; and in the inexplicable absence of AFL
stars like Haynes and Robinson from the "pro
football" hall of fame.
      
These pages are meant to right the wrongs that
American Football League fans have had to put up
with ever since the AFL blew up its first
"Spalding J5-V".  Enjoy the photos and
stories, check the links listed below, and above
all,

Click on the
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