The Red Shirted Players of the AFL

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In the fledgling days of professional football, long before the million-dollar contracts and Sunday night spotlights, there was the American Football League, a league that dared to challenge the dominance of the NFL. But within the AFL, there existed another layer of hopefuls – the redshirt freshmen, or in this case, the redshirt sophomores. These weren't the star players drafted with fanfare, but the grinders, the backups, the players fighting for a shot at gridiron glory. Today on the podcast, we dive into the archives to hear from the red-shirted renegades of the AFL, the men who toiled in the shadows, and the stories they have to tell about a league that dared to be different. So, buckle up and get ready for a journey into the forgotten trenches of the AFL, where dreams were chased one grueling practice session at a time.

Timothy Brown of Football Archaeology joins us again this week to educate us on another aspect of football. This week we chat about the a n event called the 1965 AFL Redshirt Draft, a group called LESTO and how they both may have been the stepping stones towards the modern NFL Combine.

-Transcription of the Red Shirted Players of the AFL with Timothy Brown

This is Darin Hayes of pigskindispatch.com. Welcome once again to the pig pen, your portal to positive football history. And it is Tuesday. And once again, we have a friendly visit from our friend Timothy Brown of football archaeology.

Tim, welcome back to the pig pen. What's your name again? Darren. Did you play a couple of games without the helmet on, Tim? You know, more than a few, more than a few.

Okay. All right. Hey, good.

It's good to be back, as always. All right. Well, let's get to the topic at hand.

And one of your tidbits really caught my eye from mid-October and it was on the American football league from the 1960s. And as a matter of fact, the 1965 AFL red shirt draft. And you talk about a couple things.

And one of them was the Lesto organization as well. And I'd like to see if maybe you could have some discussion on that tonight. Yeah.

So, you know, this is one of those where I think in order to kind of set up the 65 red shirt draft in the AFL, there's just a whole lot of history behind that. So I'm going to double back, you know, decades or so. And so, you know, so part of this is just like, I'm always scouring eBay and some other places for scores, postcards, images, books related to football history.

And, but I'm mostly, I'm not necessarily looking for like this great item. I'm mostly looking for some kind of item that provides some context, some information or an image that tells me something about football at a different time. And so one of the great sources is the Spalding's football guides, right? And so I've got like boatloads of those, both PDF versions that are out of copyright.

So you can get them for free. Then, the NCAA offers free ones from 2000 onwards. So I've got those and then I buy the books, you know, in between.

And so I never spent much money. I buy them. And so recently I was able to buy this 1965 AFL guide, similar to the old Spalding kind of guides.

So I bought it really not knowing what's going to be inside that thing. And so when I received it, I said 1965, but it was a 1967 guide, but it had information about the 65 draft. And anyway, so I'm, you know, leafing through the thing and here it says 1965 redshirt draft, which at that point I had never heard of before.

I am now familiar with the NFL, which has a future draft. And I understood what that was all about, but I hadn't heard the redshirt version. So, you know, what the AFL did was, and even, you know, going back into the NFL, back in 1925, the Bears signed Red Grange right after his season.

So the day after he completed his last game at Illinois, he was playing for the Bears and that violated the norms of the time. And so, you know, created all kinds of turmoil. So the NFL agreed, we're not going to draft any, or we're not going to sign anybody until their graduate, until their class has graduated.

Right. So you get to sign them for their senior season. And so everything was fine until about six when all of a sudden, what we now think of as the redshirt process came into being.

So a redshirt, and, you know, get four, you know, basically be in college for five years, but played in four, which then changed the dynamic of your signing, you know, your original class versus your graduating class. Right. So, so everything, nobody paid attention to it until like in the early sixties, I think it was, maybe it was late fifties.

NFL team started signing what they call the futures contract. So, a guy who redshirted would draft him in a normal draft order, just the normal draft. They'd sign them, or they draft him and basically stake a claim to a guy like Donnie Anderson or some top-notch junior who they knew they wouldn't be able to sign for another year because he was going to keep playing.

You know, he had another year of eligibility. The AFL, on the other hand, ended up doing what it said: instead of just having integrated with the normal draft, we're going to have a separate redshirt draft. So they drafted their normal guys, and then they drafted, then they had a separate draft of redshirts, right?

They could basically stake their claim to these players. But the other, you know, I mean, two other cool things about it was just one was that they, at the time in 65, the draft occurred on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. You know, now it's like April 23rd or some crazy date.

And, but it gets later every year, I think too. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's going to be in December pretty soon.

But back then, it was like, neither the NFL nor the AFL, because they were still rival leagues, wanted the other one to get ahead of each other. So they held it on the same day, right after the college season ended, so that, you know, if they had the chance to sign somebody the next day, they did it. So anyway, it's just one of those things we just it's not even part of our thinking anymore.

But with two rival leagues at a time who both had money, you know, it was a big deal. Yeah, so anyways, I mean, it's in this list just, you know, had a bunch of guys, most of them, I have no idea who they were. You know, maybe in 1966, I would have recognized their names, but not anymore.

But there were still, you know, there were a handful of really pretty top-notch guys, which I guess brings me to this whole Lescoe issue, right? So, you know, until about that time, each team scouted independently. So they'd each send their guys out, and some of them didn't do much scouting at all, and they were terrible at it. And others, you know, they were pretty proficient at it.

So send their guys out to the colleges, measure them, weigh them, time them, all that kind of stuff. And a couple of teams, the Lions, Eagles, and Bears, so Lescoe, or Lions, Eagles, and Steelers. So, you know, they combined their scouting resources or part of their scouting resources.

So that's where we get the word combine. They combined their early scouting resources, and it became more like those were the guys who went out and did all the preliminary work to evaluate who should even be considered. And then the serious examination of who's who, that, you know, came more, you know, that was left to more higher-end scouts within each individual team.

And then, you know, there were other combines that came together, and eventually, they all joined into the one combine, which we now know today, right? So yeah, that's kind of the origins of this future draft, which kind of existed around the same time as the combine got started. So all that, and it turned into the Underwear Olympics. That's commonly what they call it.

Yeah, I mean, it's really amazing. You know, I've written about this elsewhere, but there was, you know, there's been times like the Redskins, I think it was, they drafted the same guy two years in a row. He was a USC or Cal, you know, named Russo.

But, you know, a lot of these teams, they would just draft guys based off of what they read in the newspaper, or like, not the Street and Smith's, but you know, some version of that of their time. And they drafted this guy, and he was a junior. So he wasn't eligible for the draft, but they used a first-round draft on the guy.

So then they draft him the second, the next year. He says I don't want to play NFL. I'm joining the Navy.

I mean, it's just the level of scouting and insight. I mean, so much of it was just based on, hey, I've got this buddy who's a coach out at Pacific Lutheran or Texas A&M, whatever school, and he says this kid's a player. So you trusted that, rather than like on-site physical evaluations.

And, you know, then you had Paul Brown bringing the 40-yard dash and, you know, to really more technical evaluations and cone drills and all that kind of stuff. So, I mean, it's just, it's a different world. Yeah.

It's, it's interesting when you, when they publish some of them, like the radial charts that they have on these guys where they have, you know, radial charts, sort of a round chart and the points go out in different directions, almost like a clock. And you see where these guys are rating on it. And it's, I mean, really kind of a unique monitoring and calibrating system to try to judge a player's proficiency.

It's kind of a cool thing. So, yeah. Well, you know, one thing I commented out in the little article about the redshirt draft is that the heaviest player in the redshirt draft was 270 pounds, you know, and, you know, that's just kind of unimaginable today, you know, because, you know, that 270 isn't going to get you very far on a defensive line or especially an offensive line.

But back then that, you know, that was a huge man because very few teams did any lifting at all. Right. Yeah.

So it's amazing. We were just talking to Os Davis, who's a fellow podcaster. We were doing a program on the 1924 game with the University of Chicago and with Illinois, including when and how Chicago was going to defend Red Grange.

And he was Alonzo Stagg, and he was going to put two of his biggest guys at him. And one guy was 199 pounds, and the other guy was like 204 pounds. And that was how they were going to stop range.

That's just amazing how, you know, mankind is sort of grown, and through nutrition and exercise and genetics and the size of people we have playing football today, It's amazing. Yeah.

And I mean, a lot of it is also just, you know, kind of a selection process and the different techniques, you know, if, if you, you know, when teams played when you play single platoon, there's a way you could have 300-pound people, you know, I mean, half the guys in the NFL could not survive in that game because they just, they're too big. They're too heavy. They're not; they're not in shape.

And so, I mean, even like you look at rugby, international rugby players, top-end athletes, and the biggest guys by, you know, huge guys in that sport are 270, you know, and they're kept, but they look more like a tight end, the end, you know, sort of guys, not like offensive tackles, right. Because they got to run the whole game. Right.

So, you know, but anyways, I mean, it's, I mean, take nothing away from the athleticism of, of an NFL offensive tackle, you know, but it's just, it's a selection process. It is not; it's enabled by the rules that are in place today, not the rules that were in place in the 1940s or twenties or whatever. Well, definitely some fascinating stuff.

And we really appreciate you digging into that. It's a little bit more modern than what we've, we've talked to you about before being in the sixties, but back and think about how long ago the sixties was. It's a kind of shocking time period that I was alive in, but don't remember much, but I was alive.

Tim, why don't you, while we're talking about your tidbits, why don't you give us, the listeners, an idea of how they can enjoy your tidbits on a daily basis? Yeah. So, I mean, if you're interested in listening, then subscribe to this podcast. If you're interested in reading, then, you know, I'm at footballarchaeology.com. You can find me there.

It's, it's a Substack, you know, application and you can, at least for now, find me on Twitter. We'll see what happens in the long-term with her. But anyways, for now, I'm on Twitter, but I don't know the same name, footballarchaeology.com. And so however you prefer to consume, have at it.

All right, Tim Brown, footballarchaeology.com. Folks, we have that information on the show notes of this podcast. So you, if you can't get to a pencil and write it down right now, it's not convenient. Don't worry.

Come back and check out the show notes or go to pigskindispatch.com or footballarchaeology.com and you'll find out how to join that. Tim Brown, thank you very much. And we'll talk to you again next week.

Hey, thank you again, Darin. Thank you.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.