AAFC Baltimore Colts

We continue our weekly series on the teams of the All-American Football Conference and this week the spotlight is on the original Baltimore Colts of the AAFC.

We discussed this before but please allow us to present the facts of the origiginal Baltimore Colts so that the facts of this original franchise is preserved intact.

In the mid-1940s as Arch Ward was gathering together a group of potential owners for his newest football venture of the All-American Football Conference. We discussed this in our last episode that was focused on the start of the AAFC. One of the original franchises was supposed to be in the city of Baltimore as owner candidate George Tunney, the former boxing great, was organizing and heading a group of investors that wanted to have a pro football franchise centered there. They did the financial work to be able to have the franchise but when they could not secure a stadium deal Tunney had to ring the bell and get out of the ring, so to speak in this fight. So as we learned a few weeks ago the Miami Seahawks franchise was formed as sort of a last ditch effort to have a eigth team in the fledgling league. 

The Miami Seahawks were in financial distress after thier inaugural 1946 season in the AAFC and thus the franchise was stripped from owner Harvey Hester and the league sold it to a new investor group from Baltimore that had a stadium deal in hand as well as deep pockets. A Washington D.C. attorney, Robert D. Rodenburg and four other businessmen were awarded the club and reformed the team in Baltimore and renamed it, and the original incarnation of the Baltimore Colts was born.  This is the first time that the Baltimore Colts name was used for a major professional football team. The origin of the Colts moniker apparently came from the city's long history of horse racing and breeding.

This team was not a transplant of the Miami franchise talent to Maryland. Not at all, as the squad had to be built from scratch except for four players.  Guard George Zorich, Tackle George Hekkers, and a pair of ends Lamar Davis and Lamar Blount were the only Seahawk holdovers to make the '47 Colts roster. There was also the draft, that took place on December 21 and 22, 1946 but the thing is that the Colts were not awarded a franchise until December 28. The 1947 AAFC Draft was the first collegiate draft of the All-America Football Conference. It used an inverse order to the teams' final standings in the 1946 season. The AAFC brass knew that they would have an eight franchise, but the negotiations and contract with the Baltimore group were far from being finalized. Since the new franchise could not formally participate in the already scheduled draft, their selections were exercised by the former Miami Head Coach Hampton Poole, and were listed under the name "Florida Seahawks" for the purposes of identification.

This was truly an awkward situation especially since the Florida Seahawks had the first two picks in a special selections draft that really wasn't part of the normal 1947 AAFC Draft. Poole chose Ernie Case a back from UCLA and Arnold Tucker, the former Army Cadets QB. Tucker was not on the 1947 Colts roster but interestingly enough Case did play for the Colts as a quarterback eventhough he was also the first round pick of the Green Bay Packer of the NFL as the 6th overall pick in that draft. In the regular AAFC Draft of 1947, Poole took Elmer Madar an end from the University of Michigan.

Like we said earlier, about a week after the draft the Maryland group officially were awarded the new Baltimore Colts franchise. To further try and improve the depleted roster the Colts were permitted to recruit a single player from each of the AAFC's four strongest teams. The new ownership group did not keep Poole as its coach nor much of the front office of the Florida franchise. They hired on Cecil Isbel as their Head Coach. Even with all of the changes the product onthe field really did not improve much from the Miami dibacle. The 1947 Colts went on to win only two games, but they did have a strong fanbase forming.

Sensing a brewing crisis, the AAFC supplied its three weakest teams with some better players. The three bottom feeders; the Colts, the Chicago Rockets and the Brooklyn Dodgers all received some higher quality personnell compliments of the league for the 1948 season. The Baltimore Colts also gained new ownership, but they were still in financial struggles. Even with stronger players, the Colts were only marginally more competitive on the field in 1948. The thing is that, fortunately for the Colts, the Eastern Division was rather sorry in comparison to the West as none of its four teams tallied a winning record. The Colts tied for first with the Buffalo Bills with a 7–7 record, and lost the division championship playoff to the Bills. In 1949 they regressed again and finsied with an AAFC 7th place finish at 1-11.

In 1948, both the AAFC and the NFL were struggling, and it was determined that in order to allow professional football to survive a merger between the leagues of some sort would need to occur. The leagues began negotiating a deal in which three AAFC teams would be brought into the NFL, and the owners of the others would be compensated for their interest. The Cleveland Browns and San Francisco 49ers, clearly the AAFC's strongest teams, were "no brainers" but the the third franchise to survive was not so cut and dry..

It initially appeared that the Bills would be the third team in the merger. However, the Baltimore contingent were crying loud for a place at the NFL table, even though they were one of the weakest teams in the league but their support from a city and a fanbase was not going unnoticed in by the NFL. The League needed viable and intrested fanbases to support its teams to help the NFL stay affloat.  George Preston Marshall, owner of the Washington Redskins, initially refused to vote for a Maryland team. It was too close to his home stadium in D.C. and Marshall considered Baltimore to be part of Washington's territory, and believed the Colts would infringe on his teams rights.

The Redskins owner was finally was convinced when the Colts laced his pockets with $150,000 for the infringement. With this obstacle overcome, the merger was finalized, and the Colts were brought into the NFL eventhough as historian Ken Crippen point out last week in our look at Buffalo that the Bills were arguably a better choice for entry into the NFL.  To add insult to injury some of the former Bills players were given to the Colts franchise. It still did not help Baltimore to be a very competitive team in the 1950 NFL as they again finished 1-11. 

It was more than ownership could face. The fanbase was losing interest and the Colts were facing a financial crisis. Colts owner Abraham Watner tried to recoup anything he could and sold the team and its player contracts back to the NFL for $50,000, and the team officially folded. As our friend Larry Schmitt pointed out a few weeks ago, this was the end of that Baltimore Colts franchise.

Fan support continued in Baltimore though.  Heck even the team's marching band and fan club remained intact. This support did not go unnoticed by the League and investors and three years later, another franchise, also named the Colts, came to Baltimore to start play in the 1953 season of the NFL. And they had a bit more success that the previous one.

The banner photo is compliments of Wikimedia Commons, and is a cropped pic from an old  magazine called; The practical horseshoer : being a collection of articles on horseshoeing in all its branches which have appeared from time to time in the columns of "The Blacksmith and wheelwright" including a chapter on horse physiognomy and another on ox shoeing, Blacksmith & wheelwright.; Richardson, M. T.