June 1

In this episode we try to figure out the significance of the NFL's June 1 cuts, the NFL's relationship with the Arena League and celebrate a legendary Notre Dame & a TCU linemen on their birthdays!  We will provide you with a little bit of football nostalgia. This daily football history segment features the Great events, Franchise formation anniversaries as well as the birthdays of notable Hall of Fame players, coaches or anyone else in our great game and many more  Legendary stories of the Gridiron.

June 1st Cuts NFL Rule

Part of the NFL and NFLPA Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA), the league uses June 1st of every year as the trigger point for player bonuses and how these bonus payments affect the team's salary cap for that league year. The NFL allows for some salary cap relief if a team releases a player from his contract after June 1. In fact, the league allows teams to designate two players as "post June 1" cuts even before free agency opens.
 
Basically if a player is removed from the roster prior to June 1st, the team must push any remaining unpaid bonus money to this player to count against the next year's salary cap as dead money. So in the past week or so you may have heard the term "June 1 Cut" or something to the effect and now you know what they mean!

NFL May get New Arena 

This was the headline in the Tennessean paper from Nashville, Tennessee on June 1, 1991 and it is our Football History Headline of the Day. The article tells how on June 1, 1991 the clock was ready to start ticking on an option that the National Football League had bought two years earlier on the Arena Football League. If they exercised the option within 10 months of the writing the NFL would own 49.9% of the Arena League. Then NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue announced that March 31, 1992 would be the deadline for such a decision. The Commish commented; “We think the Arena League is complementary to what we do. It’s a different time of year and it’s a different form of the game.” If the NFL would approve the purchase they would have control of the 19 team Arena Football League and the 28 team t\second tier league Arena Football 2. The opinion of one Arena League team, Mark Bloom of the Nashville Kats was that, “It’s hard to get inside their thinking process, but I think the NFL is interested in the grassroots support the Arena League has.” Well what was the outcome you may ask? It appears that the NFL never did exercise the option and the Arena Football League has been on a roller coaster ever since. The 2009 season was cancelled and there has been a couple of restructures of the league. However on November 28, 2019 the league filed for Chapter 7 Bankruptcy as it had ceased operations a month earlier according to a report in the November 28, 2019 Boston Globe. The Arena Football League was second only to the NFL as the longest running U.S. professional football league after nearly three decades of operations.  

If you want to be able to be able to read through some old articles like The Tennessean, you need to check out Newspapers.com. At Newspapers.com, you can get access to over 640 million pages’ worth of news from the US, Canada, England, Scotland, Ireland and more dating back from 1798 to yesterday.  Get a free one week subscription to Newspapers.com by visiting SportsHistoryNetwork.com/newspapers. And with a paid subscription, you’ll also be helping to support the production of this and other Sports History Network shows. 

June 1, 1901 - Canton, Ohio - Edgar “Rip” Miller the fantastic tackle for Notre Dame from 1922 to 1924 was born. The National Football Foundation has a great story for Miller. When the famous 1924 season had ended for Notre Dame, which was tremendously effective with an unscathed record and they accepted the National Title with the Rose Bowl victory over Stanford. Back home, the team gathered to determine who was responsible for the smashing success - the Four Horsemen or the Seven Mules on the line. A vote was taken: the Mules 7, Horsemen 4. Rip Miller's vote went with the Mules, of course, because he was their anchor. Rip had attended high school at Canton McKinley High School and aided them to three straight unbeaten seasons. "There were two kinds of people in Canton then," he would chuckle, "the quick and the dead. The quick played football." Miller was as quick with his brains as he was with his feet. He was presented Notre Dame's top scholar-athlete award. Edgar Miller received the great honor of being selected for inclusion into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1966. Later, Miller served as line coach at Indiana and Navy. In 1931, Miller was named head coach at Navy and guided the Midshipmen in their first victory ever over the Irish - a 7-0 triumph in 1933. The following season however, Miller passed on the head coaching duties to Tom Hamilton, as he preferred to stay on as Navy's line coach. In 1948, Miller was named assistant director of athletics, a position he held until he retired July 1, 1974, ending 48 years' service at the Naval Academy.

June 1, 1916 - Rogers, Texas - Ki Aldrich the 1936 through 1938 Texas Christian University center arrived into the world. The FootballFoundation.org shares that TCU was voted national champion in the Associated Press poll and beat Carnegie Tech 15-7 in the Sugar Bowl. Aldrich, 5'-11" and 198 pounds, was a great blocker as a center on offense and a terrific linebacker on defense. His coach, Dutch Meyer, said, "That boy wanted to play football more than anyone I ever knew. He liked in rough." His teammate, Sammy Baugh, called him "the toughest player I ever knew."    Life Magazine in 1938 called him "probably the greatest linebacker in history." Aldrich blocked for Baugh in 1936 and for Davey O'Brien in 1937-38. Ki Aldrich’s collegiate football records are celebrated in the College Football Hall of Fame after his induction in 1960. He played pro with the Chicago Cardinals and Washington Redskins but had his pro career interrupted as he served his country in the U.S. Navy during World War II.

June 1, 1933 - Kenosha, Wisconsin - Wisconsin’s brilliant fullback from 1951 to 1954, Alan Ameche was born. The Heisman.com website shares with us that Ameche won the 1954 Heisman Award with a tough, physical style that earned him the nickname “The Iron Horse.” He’s one of only two fullbacks to have won the Heisman. They also share a story that during his college recruitment, Alan was being heavily pressured to attend Notre Dame by Fred Miller, the philanthropic owner of Milwaukee’s Miller Brewing Co. Wisconsin partisans, however, threatened a boycott against the buying and consumption of Miller beer if Ameche attended Notre Dame. Under threat of boycott, Miller backed off and Ameche signed with Wisconsin. The NFF states that Ameche held the NCAA record for career rushing yards at the time of his graduation. In the 1951 season he became the first freshman to lead the Big Ten in rushing as Frosh were allowed to play due to the Korean War. That season he broke the Wisconsin single-season rushing record with 774 yards and was named to the All-Big-Ten team. Ameche duplicated his rushing feat the following year as the Badgers were Big Ten co-champions as he broke his own mark, rushing for 946 yards as the Badgers made it to the Rose Bowl. Despite a 113 yard performance by "The Horse," Wisconsin was defeated 7-0 by Southern California. In 1953 Ameche won his first All-America award and the Wisconsin Most Valuable Player Award.  The College Football Hall of Fame proudly placed a display in honor of Alan Ameche  into their legendary museum in 1975.
Ameche was picked by Baltimore in the 1955 NFL Draft, and Alan eventually turned down a lucrative offer to join the pro wrestling tour and signed with the Colts. He led the NFL in rushing his first season and was named Rookie of the Year. He played as a fullback with the Colts for six seasons.

June 1, 1966- Greg Schiano, American football player and coach. Schiano was a 3 year letterman at Bucknell University and then became an assistant coach at Penn State University, the University of Miami and the NFL's Chicago Bears. He eventually became the head coach at Rutgers University and turned the program around in his tenure there and was awarded multiple Coach of the Year honors for his guiding the 2006 Rutgers "Cinderella Season." Schiano later went on to serve as the Tampa Bay Bucaneers Head Coach in the NFL.

June 1, 1979 – Santana Moss had a 14 year career in the NFL as a wideout. Moss played for the University of Miami in college and is regarded one of the programs most successful  players at the position from the school as he held the team's records of most receiving yards and most punt return and all purpose yards when he graduated. In th NFL Santana Moss played for the Jets and the Redskins where he made teh Pro Bowl and was also awarded 1st team All Pro honores during his career.

For more stats on football people born on June 1  check out Pro Football Reference.

See something that happened on this date that we missed? Please let us know via email at PigskinDispatch@gmail.com. 

The picture in the banner above is from the US Library of Congress' collection and was contributed by photographer Kenneth Spencer circa 1914 and is titled " Notre Dame Foot-ball Squad 1914 ."