Rock Island Independents Part 1

The Rock Island Independents football franchise has come up quite a bit in our studies of early professional football. It seems like many of the big games and the better teams of the 1920s were contending against this group. So who were the Rock Island Independents? We hope to find out in this edition of the series on early pro football teams.

Gridiron squads back in the early twentieth century were basically neighborhood sandlot teams blowing off a little bit of steam by men that loved to play the game. Generally, the members all were associated together through a club or worked together and they congealed as a group to play ball. Since the Rock Island team was not affiliated with any organizations, clubs, or businesses like most other teams of the era they called themselves the Independents.

The Rock Island Argus newspaper in the clip seen down below first calls the Independents out by name on October 13, 1902. The article reports the victory the RI team had over their opponent the Davenport Standards by a score of 6-0. The Argus piece also gives us a brief look at some of the early roster members of the Independents team. M. Ohlweiler played center, the left guard was J. Wright, left tackle M. Harder, E. Colligan wrapped up the end of the left side, while E. Bloomquist, L. Swanson, and W. Fowler played the right side of the line of the guard, tackle, and end respectfully. The backfield makeup had W. Stremmel at quarterback, W. Carse as left halfback, O. Oberg at right halfback, and manning the fullback position was H. Battles.
 

13 Oct 1902, Mon The Rock Island Argus (Rock Island, Illinois) Newspapers.com

The website RockIslandIndependents.com shares quite a bit about the club and its origins. The site says the information was spotty but iterations of the Independents were in the records for 1902-1903, 1907-1909, and 1912 at least early on. The Independents were a competitive team in some seasons, such as in 1907 they finished with 2 wins, 1 loss, and 3 ties and outscored their opponents 82 to 12. 1908 they were undefeated in four games. 1909 the team only organized for 3 games, however, they were smothered by their opponents in all three.

In 1912 the Independents seemed to have a more formal organizational structure when Jack Roche took over control as team manager. They went undefeated that year with an 8-0 record and were crowned the Champions of the state of Illinois. The following year Roche added Walter Flannigan as not only the starting left end but as his Assistant Manager as well and the record of the Independents was still stellar at 6-0-1. This managing duo stuck together for 1914 and finished the season with a 5-2 mark. Games with the rival Moline Indians and the Davenport Athletic Club were their toughest competition in this time frame. In 1915 Roche apparently stepped down as Flannigan took over full control and a 5-1-1 record proceeded. Perhaps there was a bit of a falling out between the two?

It gets a bit confusing in 1916 as Jack Roche started a Rock Island squad in addition to the one that Walter Flannigan was in control of. With two teams starting the season there were confusion and scheduling issues. Eventually several of Roche’s men deserted after he failed to secure a second game. Roche and Flanigan struck a deal and the Flanigan eleven were able to pick up the Independent's name and the rights to the field which Roche had secured for his home games. All indications though are that Flannigan owned the team from 1916 through the 1925 seasons. 

The team started out 6-0 in 1917 and game requests from other squads around the land were pouring in, many of which Flanigan denied. The gate draw attendance for home games was virtually always in the thousands of paid onlookers. Flanigan wanted to schedule a game with a team that everyone knew. He tried to schedule the famous Fort Wayne Friars, but the game fell through. Across the river though was a nationally recognized team that had beaten the rival Davenport Athletic Club 40-0. Flanigan invited the same team back for a game in Rock Island.
The American Football Fandom website says that things started to get interesting when Flannigan penciled in two games against the Minneapolis Marines, who many considered one of the toughest teams in the midwest really put Rock Island on the map in the football world and even garnered them national attention. Rock Island lost to the Marines by a narrow margin of 7-3 on game one. However, they were soundly defeated by a wider margin, 33-7, at the second game in Minneapolis.

With these games and the taste of being competitive, Flannigan started recruiting players from outside the Illinois area. The first great War interrupted this progress of growth as it did most things in life, but in the post-war and disease, 1919 season the Independent’s plans were back on track.

In 1919, Walter hired a guy by the name of Rube Ursella, formerly of the Minnesota Marines team to serve as a player/coach. Though the team carried little or no nationally recognized players prior to the season. Flanigan's passion to win, organizational skills, and the overall reputation of being a good football manager may have been a big factor in the decision of Ursella to come to Rock Island. In the process, Rube brought several other Minneapolis players with him to Rock Island. That season the Independents came out of the gate fast with two easy victories. Their next opponent was an all-star team from Hammond, Indiana. The Hammond Pros were dubbed the “$20,000 Team” sporting so many stars on their roster that they couldn’t have them all on the field.  This team featured a couple of stars including a guy named George Halas that had recently had a big game in the Rose Bowl on a military team that he had played for. The contest was closely played by the two evenly matched squads in front of 7,000 fans at Douglas Park. However, the Independents gave up a score late in the 4th quarter and lost the game 12 to 7. The Independents' perfect season was over and so were their chances at the Professional Football Championship, or so many people thought.

The team went on to win 6 of their remaining 7 games and played the famous Pine Village AC to a 0-0 tie to finish the season 9-1-1 while outscoring their opponents 309 to 12. The season was a huge success and by beating teams from Cincinnati, Columbus, and Akron the Independents did achieve their goal of gaining national recognition. The big wins over the Columbus Panhandles 49-0 and the Akron Indians, 17-0 were extremely impressive.

Flanigan decided to try and capitalize on the popularity his team was riding and then challenged the Canton Bulldogs to a "championship" game. Apparently, the Canton eleven seemed intrigued at first. A day later, however, Jim Thorpe expressed that his players had already left town since they figured their season had ended. Flannigan retorted by even offering a $5,000 guarantee if the Bulldogs would come to Rock Island for the contest. Pretty big money for that time in the game of football. But Canton, which had already won the "Ohio League" championship by defeating their arch-rivals, the Massillon Tigers, had nothing to gain so they turned down the offer. American Fandom speculates that Canton's Jim Thorpe and Ralph Hay learned that Rock Island's game against the Akron Indians had drawn only 1,700 spectators and felt that Flanigan could not deliver on his $5,000 guarantee, that was money that would come primarily from the gate receipts. Historian Bob Carrol thinks that possibly the Canton team figured they had nothing to prove in the contest as they just proved to be the best team in the mythical Ohio League, which is thought to be the standard of professional football in that era. Despite the decline of the Bulldogs, Flannigan ever being the great promoter of his team, claimed the Independents to be "Champions of the USA," per a PFRA Coffin Corner article by Bob Carrol and Bob Braunwart.

This contact with the Bulldogs and even with George Halas did pay dividends in the coming years though. It gave them an invitation to join a group of franchises that would make professional football history when they would organize into the precursor of the NFL, the American Professional Football Association. We will talk about that next week in part 2 of this story on Rock Island.

The banner photo is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons of the RI Independents Championship Football Team of 1919.

A Very Special thanks to information obtained from the following brilliant internet sites mentioned above including the the PFRA.org, American Football Fandom, and the RockIslandIndependents.com websites. Look to them at the links above for even more info on this franchise of yesteryear.