Bill Nunn

In this episode of the Western Pennsylvania Football History weekly segment here on the Dispatch we want to learn more about Pro Football Hall of Fame enshrined executive Bill Nunn who was born and raised in Pittsburgh and worked for over four decades for the Steelers.

Bill Nunn was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame posthumously in the summer of 2021. Bill was not an NFL player, and many had never even heard of this man when I walked around Canton, Ohio that warm July weekend. What they didn't realize is that Bill was about as interesting of a football person as they come, he was savvy, knowledgeable, and clever as a fox.

He took NFL scouting to places it had never been before and helped assemble one of the most legendary teams of all time.Nunn was a pretty good athlete in his younger days. He was a star basketball player at West Virginia State and was so good that the Harlem Globetrotters wanted to ink him to a contract. Amazingly he took a hard pass on that offer and followed his father's footsteps to work as a writer and editor with the Pittsburgh Courier, a weekly newspaper that was a leader in covering stories of African-American news especially sports and the young athletes.

Much of what we know about early HBCU teams and the Negro Leagues of baseball was covered in the Courier from 1907 through 1966.In the 1960s Nunn traveled each week to the best games featuring Black colleges. And he continued the Courier’s tradition of compiling an annual HBCU All-America team from 1950 to 1974 and even hosted an end of the season banquet in Pittsburgh each January for the top HBCU players. This gave him great connections and loyalties from the coaches and administrators of these mostly small southern schools that were brimming with untapped talent. It is interesting to know that Bill Nunn nominated Mike Tomlin's father, Ed Tomlin to the 1967 HBCU All-America team.

As a matter of fact, Coach Tomlin has regaled in interviews that Nunn approached him on his first day as the Steelers headman, to broach the story with the proud son.By the time the late 1960s had rolled around Steelers founder Art Rooney did a lot of coercing to get Bill to join the Steelers in their struggling scouting department. The team was horrid and needed all the help with the talent they could get. What Mr. Rooney ended up getting was a dedicated man that had a direct pipeline into the pool of many great players.

Join us in the podcast above to hear a few great Steelers Draft Stories that wher Bill Nunn really pulled out all the stops to get talent on Pittsburgh's team.

The picture in the banner above is from the Wikipedia Commons photo collection of the Public Domain of an 1894 Map of Pennsylvania

Special thanks to Pro-Football-Reference.com, Stathead.com, Newspapers.com, The Athletic, and the Pro Football Hall of Fame