1946-1949 жылдар аралығындағы Американ футбол лигасы

Professional American football league operating from 1946–1949

The All America Football Conference (AAFC) was a major professional American football league that challenged the established National Football League (NFL) from 1946 to 1949. One of the NFL's most formidable challengers, the AAFC attracted many of the nation's best players, and introduced many lasting innovations to the game. However, the AAFC was ultimately unable to sustain itself in competition with the NFL. After it folded, three of its teams were admitted to the NFL: the San Francisco 49ers, the Cleveland Browns and the original Baltimore Colts (not to be confused with the later Baltimore Colts team, now the Indianapolis Colts). The AAFC was the second American professional football league (the first being the third American Football League of 1940–1941) to have its teams play in a double round robin format in the regular season: each team had a home game and an away game with each of the other AAFC teams. The Cleveland Browns were the AAFC's most successful club, winning every annual championship in the league's four years of operation.

As might be expected, the NFL did not welcome its new rival. In 1945, Layden remarked that the AAFC, still a year from its first game, should "first get a ball, then make a schedule, and then play a game". This insult, often paraphrased as "Tell them to get a ball first", would be long remembered. Washington Redskins owner George Preston Marshall was perhaps the NFL's hardest liner regarding the AAFC. In 1945, he commented "I did not realize there was another league, although I did receive some literature telling about a WPA project". Later he declared, "The worst team in our league could beat the best team in theirs."

Dan Topping, owner of the NFL's Brooklyn Tigers, wished to move his team from Ebbets Field to the much larger Yankee Stadium. New York Giants owner Tim Mara used his territorial rights to block the move. He had good reason: the Yankees had displaced the Giants as New York's premier baseball team after moving into The House That Ruth Built, three rival football leagues had planted teams there hoping to duplicate that feat, and Topping (of Anaconda Copper) was significantly wealthier than Mara. Topping responded by buying into the baseball Yankees and transferring his club to the AAFC. Most of his players followed. His renamed New York Yankees were rewarded with $100,000 from each of the other seven AAFC teams while the AAFC's initial New York investor withdrew. It was unprecedented for the NFL champion to move at all, let alone partly to avoid an unproven rival. On the other hand, the NFL would now face the AAFC as a national rather than regional league, and the AAFC would not have a West Coast monopoly. Rather than hold a collegiate draft, Crowley encouraged his owners to sign as many good players as possible to compete with the NFL. However, this open market favored Paul Brown, who had built the most extensive recruitment network in all of football. He thus had a head start in signing top players coming out of the colleges and military. Years later, Crowley acknowledged this was a fatal mistake, as it planted the seeds for the Browns' near total dominance of the league.

In the AAFC's first game, on September 6, 1946, the Cleveland Browns hosted the Miami Seahawks, winning 44–0 before a professional football record crowd of more than 60,000 fans. This historic game would prove a microcosm of much about the league:
Largely thanks to Paul Brown's innovations in organization and coaching, the Browns were on their way to setting a new standard of pro football excellence. The other teams would have significant problems, but the Seahawks would become the AAFC's biggest fiasco. Along with two of their home games being postponed by hurricanes, they attracted poor home crowds en route to finishing last with a 3–11 record. These factors resulted in the Seahawks losing $350,000 for the year, and the AAFC shutting down the franchise after the season. The crowd was the first of many large gates that the AAFC's most popular teams (Cleveland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York) would attract, surpassing the NFL. The score, however, was the first sign of the AAFC's greatest problem. The league would have a wide gap between its best and worst teams, and its standings would be remarkably consistent from year to year. Finally, this game marked the end of pro football's color line. The Browns' Marion Motley and Bill Willis, both future Hall of Famers, became the first black players to play pro football since 1933 (the NFL Rams, who had also signed two black players, UCLA great Kenny Washington and future actor Woody Strode, opened several weeks later). Notably, this was before Jackie Robinson's debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, as Robinson was then playing for the Montreal Royals, the Dodgers' top farm team. In coming years, the AAFC would tap this talent pool more than the NFL, with 20 black players compared with the NFL's seven in 1949. Other than New York, all of the quality teams were in the Western Division. In the West, Cleveland led with a 12–2 record, three games ahead of San Francisco, followed by Los Angeles and Chicago. In the East, New York was the only team to win more than three games, finishing 10–3–1. Brooklyn and Buffalo were seven games behind, followed by Miami. Despite Brooklyn's record, its tailback Glenn Dobbs led the league in passing and was named the MVP. The title game was a tight affair, with the Browns coming from behind late in the fourth quarter to defeat the Yankees 14–9. Despite the fiasco in Miami, the AAFC had enjoyed a successful debut, establishing a high level of play and doing well at the gate. The NFL likewise set attendance highs for both its season and title game. However, as salaries shot up with two leagues competing for players: the only teams to make a profit were the two champions, the Browns and the NFL Bears. They survived unscathed, and went on to complete an unprecedented 14–0 regular season. The 49ers finished a heartbreaking second (and out of the postseason) at 12–2. Los Angeles followed at 7–7, and Chicago again finished last at 1–13. The quarterbacks of the two outstanding teams, Cleveland's Otto Graham and San Francisco's Frankie Albert, shared the MVP. In the East, Buffalo and Baltimore tied at a mediocre 7–7, just ahead of 6–8 New York. Brooklyn was last at 2–12. Buffalo won a playoff and the dubious privilege of meeting Cleveland for the title. Cleveland won the title in a predictable rout, 49–7. With pro football's second perfect season (after the 1937 Los Angeles Bulldogs of the second American Football League) and an 18 game winning streak and a 29 game unbeaten streak in progress, the Browns were making history. Since then, only the 1972 Miami Dolphins team managed to win its league championship with an unblemished record. The Pro Football Hall of Fame recognizes the Browns' latter streak as the longest in the history of professional football. The NFL also had a problem with imbalance. Nearly every title game from 1933 to 1946 featured either the Giants or Redskins from the East against either the Bears or Packers from the West. But in the late 1940s new powers rose in the NFL, as the Cardinals, Eagles, and Rams all won titles, and the Steelers reached a playoff. All these teams had long histories of futility and had merged or suspended operations during the war. (In fact, the Cardinals were winless from mid 1942 to mid 1945, including a 0–10 merged season with the Steelers.) Adding to the drama, the division races were often tight. Decades before Pete Rozelle, Bert Bell promoted parity by purposely matching strong teams early in the season, keeping them from getting far ahead in the standings. All this contrasted sharply with the AAFC. The war was getting increasingly costly thanks to rising salaries and dropping attendance. Nearly every team in both leagues lost money – enough that in December, the NFL officially acknowledged the AAFC as peace talks almost succeeded in ending the war. However, the AAFC wanted four of its teams to be admitted into the NFL, while the NFL was willing to admit only the Browns and 49ers. Although the survival of its Brooklyn and Chicago teams was now in doubt, the AAFC decided to continue the fight.

After winning each of their titles, the Browns challenged the NFL champion to an interleague championship. Each year the NFL refused. (Of course, by playing such a game the NFL would legitimize the AAFC and risk more prestige.) In December 1949, with both leagues financially exhausted but now at peace, a profitable interleague playoff was now both possible and desirable. Although Pittsburgh's Art Rooney, whose Steelers were among the shakiest NFL franchises, publicly advocated such a game, most of the NFL was unwilling to risk defeat at the hands of their vanquished, supposedly inferior rival. Officially, however, commissioner Bert Bell maintained that the NFL constitution barred such a game. Although the game was played in Philadelphia, it was not played on the Eagles usual home field: because of the huge crowd expected, the game was moved from Shibe Park to Philadelphia Municipal Stadium, site of the Army–Navy Game. Attendance was a whopping 71,237, the third largest pro football crowd to that date (next to two crowds for Rams games at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum the year before), and the largest ever on the east coast. (This figure also surpassed every previous NFL or AAFC title game, as well as Super Bowl I.) There was even a most valuable player award, unheard of for a regular season game. The Eagles were widely considered one of the NFL's strongest ever champions, while many discounted the Browns’ success in their "inferior" league. The result was therefore shocking: the Eagles underestimated the highly motivated Browns (coach Greasy Neale did not even scout the Browns’ preseason games), while Paul Brown found some previously unknown weaknesses in the widely imitated "Eagle Defense" that allowed the Browns to run up 487 yards of total offense. The Browns led 14–3 at halftime and dominated the rest of the game to win decisively, 35–10. Quarterback Otto Graham was named the game's MVP.

The Browns went 10–2 to finish in a first place tie with the New York Giants, then won a playoff 8–3 to qualify for the 1950 NFL championship game. Their opponent was a formidable Los Angeles Rams team that averaged nearly 39 points per game, a record that still stands. (Ironically, this was the Rams’ first game in Cleveland since winning the 1945 title as the Cleveland Rams.) In a classic seesaw game, the Browns prevailed on a last minute field goal, 30–28, to win their fifth consecutive league title. The Browns’ 1950 season confirmed the quality of their AAFC achievements as nothing else could. After the title game, Commissioner Bell called the Browns "the greatest team to ever play football." Cleveland remained near the top of the NFL for years, although in 1951 they were finally denied a league title (by the Rams). The Browns played in every NFL title game from 1950 to 1955, winning three of them, for a grand total of seven league titles in ten years. The other ex AAFC teams did not fare nearly as well. The 49ers, the AAFC's second best team, struggled in 1950 and finished 3–9. However, starting the next year they emerged as one of the better teams in the NFL's Western Conference, reaching the postseason in 1957 after some near misses. The Colts' prospects were not promising: they had finished 1–11 and last in the AAFC in 1949 and also faced the handicap of playing near the Washington Redskins. In 1950, the Colts went 1–11 again and disbanded. Their legacy lived on, however: three years later, a new Baltimore Colts franchise team was established after the Dallas Texans folded and the Colts became one of the NFL's storied teams. Although the Colts would controversially move to Indianapolis, on March 29, 1984, the NFL would return to Baltimore for the 1996 NFL season in the form of the Baltimore Ravens. From an organizational perspective, the Ravens are a continuation of the pre 1996 Browns, who played in Cleveland until they controversially agreed to move to Baltimore during the 1995 NFL season. Officially, the NFL considers the "expansion" Browns (1999 on) to be one continuous franchise from the original 1946 AAFC team, with it having suspended operations from 1996 to 1998, while the Ravens are considered to have been established in 1996. While the pre 1984 history of the Colts officially remains with the Indianapolis franchise, the Ravens have also recognized it in a number of ways. See Cleveland Browns, San Francisco 49ers, Baltimore Colts (1947–50), and Indianapolis Colts for further details of these teams' subsequent histories.

One notable difference between the All America Football Conference and the American Football League (AFL), which merged with the NFL two decades later, is that the records and statistics of AAFC players and teams are not included in the NFL record book, while those of their AFL counterparts are. However, in the case of the NFL AFL merger, which was completed in 1970, the AFL gave all of its official scoresheets to the NFL making it possible for the NFL to accept the AFL's statistics and records. Another explanation is that unlike the NFL AFL agreement, the NFL AAFC agreement was not a merger between equals. Only three of the seven AAFC teams were admitted to the NFL. There was no interleague playoff in December 1949. "American" swiftly disappeared from the enlarged league's name. The AFL, on the other hand, was able to force the NFL to admit all of its teams, to play an interleague championship game on a neutral field, and to maintain the "American" name in the form of the American Football Conference. The Pro Football Hall of Fame does recognize AAFC statistics.

Although the AAFC played only four years, it had a major, lasting impact on pro football. Of all the leagues that challenged the NFL, only the American Football League of the 1960s influenced the NFL more than the AAFC. The AAFC put the first pro football teams in Baltimore, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Miami. Indeed, the AAFC was a coast to coast league more than a decade before Major League Baseball. This brought about another innovation: AAFC teams traveled by air while NFL teams still traveled by train. The Cleveland Browns, San Francisco 49ers, and original Baltimore Colts began in the AAFC, while sixteen AAFC alumni are enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The AAFC played a 14 game schedule more than a decade before the NFL, and played a major role in popularizing zone defenses in pro football. The AAFC's Paul Brown produced numerous innovations to the game on and off the field. Among them were year round coaching staffs, precision pass patterns, the face mask, and the practice of coaches’ calling plays via "messenger guards". He also was the first coach to have his staff film the opposition and have his team break down those game films in a classroom setting. In fact, the classroom setting and chalkboard analysis can also be attributed to him. His success with the Browns forced the rest of both leagues to adopt his methods. Many of his players and assistants eventually coached champions. Brown declined efforts to draft him to succeed Bert Bell as NFL commissioner, later founded the American Football League's Cincinnati Bengals, and later served on the NFL's key Competition Committee until his death in 1991. These and other AAFC innovations and personalities helped lay the groundwork for Professional Football's great success. The merger would also benefit the Pittsburgh Steelers. One of the NFL's shakiest franchises financially prior to the merger, the addition of the Browns would help form a rivalry due to the close proximity of Cleveland and Pittsburgh that would be cut to two hours driving time by the time the Ohio Turnpike and the western extension of the Pennsylvania Turnpike were completed by the mid 1950s, allowing fans of both teams to attend each other's away games. While the Steelers would largely remain non competitive until that team's 1970s dominance, the rivalry with the Browns along with their existing rivalry with the Eagles would help stabilize the team's finances. Finally, the Browns' NFL Championship in their first year in the NFL and their domination of that league for the next decade, in retrospect, seem to have been harbingers of another upstart league that like the AAFC was ridiculed and reviled by the NFL and its supporters, but would eventually be recognized as the genesis of modern Professional Football: the American Football League of 1960–1969.