Denver Broncos Origin

Have you ever wondered the backstory of Professional football in the Mile High City of Denver? Well pull up a chair and adjust your headsets because we are going to higher altitudes with the origin of the Denver Broncos. 

The Denver Broncos NFL franchise is quite popular and storied over the last half of a century or more. The legendary John Elway leading the team to 5 Super Bowl appearances, and leaving for retirement as he hoisted the Lombardi a second consecutive time was quite the story book ending of a great career. Another brilliant era of Bronco football was the late 1970s and the gritty Orange Crush defense, or more recently the Peyton Manning years where they again captured Super Bowl glory. These are fascinating stories in themselves but in this segment I want to place those for another day and learn the origin of the Denver Broncos franchise.

One source that we will use in this endeavor is the fantastic book titled, Tales From the Denver Broncos Sideline: A Collection of the Greatest Broncos Stories Ever Told compiled by author Andrew Mason.

Mason points to a movement in the late 1950s of American cities on the rise trying to obtain sport teams to help quench their citizens' thirst for representation in professional athletics. The rise of the Continental League in baseball, started by New York tycoon William Shea in an effort to start a replacement for the MLB National league teams of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants who departed the Big Apple for greener pastures in California. Shea, the man  who Shea Stadium was named for, forced the hand of the MLB to expand and add franchises in areas like Houston, and move the Washington Senators squad to Minnesota to become the Twins. They also allowed Shea to have a team, the Mets, to help quench any competition from an upstart league, and it worked. However there were many more cities like for instance Denver that had a populated center but did not have a team that played on their confines to root for.

Denver was having some success at the triple A level of baseball and the city started gearing for a possible Continental League team by making plans to expand their multi-use stadium. They figured if they could get a chance at a football franchise in the Mile High City they could make it even bigger than the 8000 seats they were planning. Bob Howsam, the owner of this hardball team called the Denver Bears, was soon approached by Lamar Hunt who was forming a new football league that would fill the same gaps that the Continental League was filling in neglected fanbase cities. Hunt’s league was the AFL. You can learn more about Lamar Hunt’s story and start of the AFL in our post and interview with author John Eisenberg and hisTen Gallon War.

Howsman despite the uphill battle of possibly making money on a such a venture did invest and in August of 1959 the founding owners of the AFL met to form the American Football League, well at least the third such football organization of that name. 

They decided to choose the moniker of the Broncos reviving a minor-league baseball team name from nearly forty-years earlier. The DenverBroncos.com website sheds further light on the subject, stating;

"Broncos was the nickname selected out of a statewide contest by Bob Howsam, the original owner of the American Football League franchise, with the help of a group of prominent citizens as judges," Joseph Sanchez wrote in The Denver Post in 1995. "Eight entrants submitted the name, but Ward M. Vining of Lakewood was declared the official winner of the contest, based on his 25-word essay explaining why it would best fit a football team based in Denver."

The name was fitting for the Wild West heritage of the city of Denver as a bronco was a tough, always fighting horse, befitting of the city and its people living high in the Rockies.

They got right to work signing 34 players before they even hired the first General Manager of the franchise, Dean Griffing. Griffing was a former CFL executive and he called up people named Frank that he worked with nNorth of the border to help make the Broncos competitive. Frank Tripucka was the former Saskatchewan Roughriders QB that had appeared to have retired but with a chance to play pro ball in the States, he had the desire to play once more. The Roughriders former Coach Frank Filchock was hired as the Broncos first sideline boss.

One of the first players inked was 1959 Heisman winner Billy Cannon, offering $60,000 more than the LA Rams of the NFL’s offer of $50,000. After that everything was on a tight budget. The uniforms were the least expensive Howsam could find being brown and mustard yellow. Quarterback Frank Tripucka once said that they were the “ugliest-looking things” he ever saw. Those colors are horrid together but just imagine when you combine them with vertically striped socks for every player? Nearly 120 players were brought into camp and they sifted through the bunch and found their roster. A lot of the credit of budgeting players pay to fit the financial constraints goes to Howsam, who about a decade later would use these same skill to forge together the “Big Red Machine” of the Cincinnati Reds MLB team. Howsam sold the Broncos after the first season.

The Broncos never had a winning record in the AFL, with their final season of 1969 being the best of the bunch at 5-8. They did have some success though with some milestones in the upstart league. The Broncos won the first-ever AFL game over the Boston Patriots 13–10, on September 9, 1960. Almost seven years later on August 5, 1967, they became the first-ever AFL team to defeat an NFL team, with a 13–7 win over the Detroit Lions in a preseason exhibition game.

More than 6 decades after the AFL formed, the AFC West is the only division in football that has the same four franchises that it began with back in 1960. Along with the Broncos, Raiders, Chargers and Chiefs (who started as the Dallas Texans) these four franchises have rivaled each other all that time. And out of them only the Broncos are in the same town without ever leaving.

The banner photo is of former Denver Broncos quarterback, Jay Cutler, taken by Denverjeffrey. In the public Domain Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

A Very Special thanks to information obtained from the following brilliant internet sites: DenverBroncos.com, Tales From the Denver Broncos Sideline: A Collection of the Greatest Broncos Stories Ever Told compiled by author Andrew Mason, the Sports Reference's family of website databases & Stathead.com