Frankford Yellow Jackets
The Frankford Yellow Jackets were an American football team from the Frankford neighborhood of Philadelphia in the early 20th century . The team, which was founded around the turn of the century, took part in the NFL's game operations from 1924 to 1931 and became league champions in 1926.
Team history
The team's roots can be traced back to a team from the Frankford Athletic Association founded in 1899 . After the end of the club, members of the team founded a team called Loyola Athletic Club in 1909, which was renamed the Frankfurt Athletic Association in 1912. In the early 1920s the team developed into one of the best independent teams. After the final game for the city championship of Philadelphia was still lost in 1920 and 1921, they became city champions in 1922. In friendly games against NFL teams in 1922 and 1923, they only lost two games in six wins and one draw.
Therefore, the team was accepted into the NFL for the 1924 season. They were the first NFL team that was based outside of the Midwest and thus represented the first step in the expansion of the NFL to the east coast of the USA. In their first season, the Yellow Jackets could play the most games of all NFL teams with eleven win, but they only achieved the third-best win rate after the Cleveland Bulldogs and the Chicago Bears , which decided on the championship, because of the much less completed games of their competition .
For the 1925 season, the team management hired multiple NFL champion Guy Chamberlin as a player -coach . In the first ten games, nine wins were achieved, but after many injury-related failures in the second half of the season - which were among other things responsible for a 0:49 defeat against the Pottsville Maroons - the championship could not be won despite again most wins.
In 1926 the championship finally succeeded after losing only one game out of 14 wins. After the championship Chamberlin left the team and with him went numerous top performers, so that the club placed in the lower midfield in the following season. A rather inconspicuous player this season was Ignacio Molinet , but he was the first player in the NFL with Latin American - more precisely Cuban - descent.
In 1928, the young team, led by Bull Behman, had become so well established that they could play for the title again. Again the team with the most wins, because of the more completed and also lost games, they did not become champions, but second behind the Providence Steam Roller .
In the following years, the number of spectators continued to decline - probably also because of the onset of the global economic crisis , and the team, led by the new player-coach Bull Behmann, could no longer build on its old successes; In 1930 the club management tried to consolidate the situation by taking over numerous players from the bankrupt Minneapolis Red Jackets and their coach George Gibson , but when their home stadium, Yellow Jacket Field, burned down in 1931, the franchise could no longer hold and went in in autumn 1931 Bankruptcy .
Two years later, Bert Bell and Lud Wray bought the idle license and founded the Philadelphia Eagles , which is sometimes mistaken for the continuation of the Yellow Jackets.
Players in the Pro Football Hall of Fame
- Guy Chamberlin (1925-1926)
- William R. Lyman (1925)
Other well-known players
- Tex Hamer (1924-1927)
- Bill Hoffman (1924-1926)
- Herb Stein (1924)
- Russ Stein (1924)
- Bill Springsteen (1925, 1926)
Web links
- Statistics Frankford Yellow Jackets in the NFL ( English )
Individual evidence
- ↑ Richard Pagano and CC Staph: "Frankford Yellow Jackets, Part 1: Pre-NFL", The Coffin Corner, Vol. 9 (1987), No. 2, p. 1 ff. ( Http://home.comcast.net/~ghostsofthegridiron/articles/09-02-294.pdf ( Memento from December 22, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) , pdf , English).
- ^ " The Story of the Frankford Yellow Jackets, " article on Ghosts of the Gridiron ( Visited August 1, 2008 ).
- ^ A b Al Myers: "Bull Behman and the Jackets", The Coffin Corner, Vol. 5 (1983), No. 8, p. 1 ff. ( Http://home.comcast.net/~ghostsofthegridiron/articles/05-08-149.pdf ( Memento from December 22, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) , pdf , English).
- ↑ Brad Herzog: " Pigskin Pioneer Remembered ( Memento from October 1, 2003 in the Internet Archive )", archived article from September 15, 2003 ( English, visited August 15, 2013 ).