Pro football is nearly back for the regular season, and it’s your annual reminder that the professional game once struggled mightily… especially when up against the college game.

Case in point, a hundred years ago today, a sportswriter watched a professional football game in Los Angeles and wrote that he was “more convinced than ever the pro game would not survive.” He wasn't reacting to bad football. Red Grange, the most famous player alive, was on the field. He just wasn't buying what he saw in the stands.

By the end of that same year, Grange was saying almost the same thing himself.

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That August, a brand new professional league did something bold. It scheduled its games in the same cities, on the same Saturdays, as the biggest college matchups in the country. A direct test, head to head against the sport it was competing with for an audience.

A reporter covering the announcement called it exactly what it was. A magnificent gamble, one whose success or failure might decide the future of the sport built to challenge it.

Grange's own team had already given the league a warning sign months earlier. Chasing box office off Grange's popularity, his club played eight games in twelve days that winter. The pace broke him. His arm was in splints by the time the team reached Detroit, forcing him out of a game that would have drawn the largest crowd ever to watch pro football in the state. Detroit had to refund about $18,000 in tickets.

The league's response came fast. By February, the National Professional Football league adopted a rule limiting clubs to two games a week. The lesson had been written plainly enough that nobody needed it explained twice.

By September, the trouble had reached a courtroom. A group in Chicago, the Disabled Veterans of the World War and the Chicago Marine club, filed a $10,000 suit seeking an injunction to stop the league's clubs from playing at all, pending settlement. The suit named C.C. Pyle, Grange, and the league's president directly.

I didn’t look into the specifics of the grievance, but the headline alone tells you something. By September, the new league wasn't just fighting for an audience. It was fighting in court.

That fall, Ernie Nevers, the other player being billed as the game's best, brought his Duluth Eskimos through St. Louis to face the Blues. Nevers' team won 48 to 0. Attendance came in around fifteen hundred people.

The Blues' own captain ended up in a hospital bed with two broken ribs, still trying to make sense of the empty seats for the promoters gathered around him. The headline put it plainly. Even Nevers failed to draw.

By December, Nevers headed west for a run of games through San Francisco and Oakland, still drawing writeups calling him the greatest fullback in the history of the game.

Pyle was reportedly planning to bring Grange to the coast too, hoping a full season of games through January might finally turn things around out west.

Whatever hope was left didn't survive the year. Just before Christmas, reporters caught up with Grange in Port Arthur, Texas, mid tour, and asked him directly what he thought the future of professional football looked like.

"Well, I'm just about disgusted with the whole thing," he told them. He'd lost money that season. He said the future of pro football wasn't bright, and that he'd made up his mind the movies offered a more lucrative field.

The same week, an Oakland paper previewing another Nevers game described the season that was ending in four blunt words. An alleged flop in other states in the union that fall.

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The following August, it was over. The league Pyle built to prove pro football could stand next to the college game folded, and Grange's team was absorbed into a twelve team merger with the older National league instead.

Thirty five years after that, the same sport signed a two year, $9.3 million television deal with CBS. Each of the fourteen clubs took home roughly $300,000 a season just from the broadcast rights, a sum that would have sounded like fiction to the promoters counting fifteen hundred paying customers in St. Louis.

Grange was right about 1926. He just wasn't right about what came after it.

See you tomorrow. – Chris

Sources:
The Evening Star, August 26, 1926
The Saginaw News, February 14, 1926
The Kansas City Journal, September 19, 1926
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 8, 1926
San Francisco Bulletin, December 9, 1926
The San Francisco Examiner, December 24, 1926
The Oakland Post-Enquirer, December 25, 1926
The Marion Star, August 18, 1927
Enterprise-Record, April 27, 1961
The Buffalo News, January 9, 1926
The San Bernardino County Sun, January 18, 1926