I never knew about the controversy of the 1925 NFL Championship -- a controversy that lives today -- until former SI-turned-ESPN writer David Fleming's book The Breaker Boys (ESPN Books) showed up on my desk this fall. It's about one of the most colorful teams in history, the 1925 Pottsville Maroons. In the days before formal championship games, the teams with the best two records in the league sometimes met at the end of the season to determine the informal league champion. In 1925, that was the 10-1-1 Chicago Cardinals and the 9-2 Pottsville Maroons.
Fleming writes that the game was reported in sports pages as the NFL title game, and they met at Comiskey Park where, during an ice storm, Pottsville beat the Cardinals, 21-7. Because college football was the premier game and pro football was trying to catch up, Pottsville agreed to play a challenge match against Notre Dame before a big crowd in Philadelphia. Pottsville shocked the Irish, 9-7. A week later, the Frankford Yellow Jackets (the team that later became the Eagles) protested that the Maroons had played the ND game in their home territory, and the league suspended the Maroons from play -- though there was no written rule on the books preventing such an exhibition.
At the next league meeting, the NFL tried to award the title to the Cardinals, but the team refused to accept the tainted title, so an official league championship was never awarded. And Fleming writes:
"Cue the Bidwills. When they bought the Cardinals franchise in 1933 the Bidwills began to claim the 1925 championship as their own. And when the Pottsville Maroons petitioned the league [for the title] in 1963, Charles "Stormy" Bidwill Jr. wrote to sportswriter Red Smith poking fun of little Pottsville and saying his family had no intention of giving away their title ... In 2003, Dan Rooney, Jeffrey Lurie, Governor Ed Rendell and Pottsville Mayor John Reiley had come up with a solution that had then commissioner Paul Tagliabue's blessing: share the title. Tagliabue had even begun to make plans to come to Pottsville to give the town its title back. Instead, Rooney and Reiley say that Bill Bidwill used his influence behind the scenes to squash the Maroons petition. The owners never even discussed the case. They voted 30-2 against even talking about it. Bidwill has since refused numerous interview requests on the topic. "What's been done to this town and this team -- it's not right," says Rooney. "It needs to be fixed."
That's living history right there.
