Pottsville 1925

In this edition of our Scandals and Scoundrels Series we need to take a closer look at the controversy of the 1925 Pottsville Maroons and their claim to the NFL title and why it was denied. join us for the story of the 1925 Pottsville Controversy.

The Frankford Yellow Jackets played their inaugural game as an official member of the NFL in the fall of 1924 by knocking off a tough Rochester Jeffersons team 24-0. That first year was indeed a successful campaign for the Jackets as they played to a 17-3-1 overall record and an official NFL mark of 11-2-1, with both of those losses coming at the hands of George Halas and his powerful Chicago Bears team.

The 1925 season saw another local Pennsylvania franchise join the NFL fray, the Pottsville Maroons. These teams had tangled before as independent squads, but things would be differentas the two competed in the prestigious NFL. The leaders of these two PA squads placed sort of a side bet ahead of the season, as a local promoter staged an event that whichever of them should have the better record in the NFL then that team would gain the very lucrative meeting with the Notre Dame All-Star team. This was a large incentive for both squads as the Irish would be a big draw at the box office and place much needed funds into the pockets of the players. Let's get back to this Nortre Dame side game in a moment.

Before we do let us talk about the December 6,  matchup of the NFL big boys. The Maroons and the Cardinals. In the meeting Pottsville defeated Chicago, 21-7, to establish the best record in the league and seemed to all but officially clinch the NFL championship. The Maroons famously had the best record in the NFL but the game they played with the Notre Dame stars in Philadelphia violated the territorial rights of the Yellow Jackets, who were holding a home game that same day in the City of Brotherly Love.

This complication went to the NFL head at the time Commissioner Joe Carr who ruled in favor of the Frankford team. Pottsville would have had the official best record if not for a disputed, controversial ruling by Carr to suspend the club after it played the unauthorized exhibition game in Philadelphia. This decision by the Leage President subsequently stripped the NFL title from Pottsville giving it to the Chicago Cardinals. Apparently the Cardinals scheduled two extra games at the end of the 1925 season in an effort to have a better win loss record that the Pottsville Maroons so that the NFL title could be claimed. We talked about the scandal that resulted with those two Cardinal victories in our last episode titled Caridnals 1925 ( see below.)

Banner photo is a cropped image of the beautiful 1915 college game of  Penn versus Pitt football program cover, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons drawn by an unknown.