Founding
The AAFC was founded by Chicago Tribune sports editor Arch Ward on June 4, 1944. Ward was also the originator of baseball’s All-Star Game and football’s College All-Star Game.
Ward brought together a number of wealthy pro football enthusiasts, some of whom had previously attempted to purchase NFL franchises. Ward had previously encouraged the NFL to expand, but now he hoped to bring about a permanent second league and a championship game with the NFL, similar to baseball’s World Series.
On November 21, 1944, the AAFC chose Jim Crowley, one of the "Four Horsemen of Notre Dame", as its commissioner. Not coincidentally, the NFL commissioner at this time was Elmer Layden, another of Knute Rockne's legendary 1924 backfield.
During the next months, the AAFC’s plans solidified. The league initially issued franchises for Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco. Brooklyn and Miami were later added. A group representing Baltimore was considered for admission, but could not secure a stadium. The league planned to begin play in 1945, but postponed its opening for a year as World War II still raged.
As the eight franchises built their teams, no move was more far-reaching than Cleveland's choice of Paul Brown as its head coach. Brown had won six Ohio state championships in nine years at Massillon High School and the 1942 national championship at Ohio State, and had also coached successfully at the military’s Great Lakes Naval Station. In Cleveland, Brown would emerge as one of the game's greatest innovators.
Read more about this topic: All-America Football Conference
Famous quotes containing the word founding:
“... there is no way of measuring the damage to a society when a whole texture of humanity is kept from realizing its own power, when the woman architect who might have reinvented our cities sits barely literate in a semilegal sweatshop on the Texas- Mexican border, when women who should be founding colleges must work their entire lives as domestics ...”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.”
—John Updike (b. 1932)
“The responsible business men of this country put their shoulders to the wheel. It is in response to this universal demand that we are founding today, All-American Airways.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)