American Football League - Fictional History

Retirements QB Gilbert Clay College: Kansas Teams: Tri-Cities Black Hawks/Hawks (1946-1956) AFL Championships: 1 (1950) Awards: Most Valuable Player (1950) In college, Clay was a pretty good but not amazing player. He only got a single contract once he graduated college, and not even for the team that was closest to him. He would have to travel to Iowa, joining the Hawks just a year after they won their second title in the MWFC. He was brought in as an extra player in case of injury, not taking a single step on the field due to the regular starter going down with injury. He lit a fire under a Hawks team that was starting to be past its prime, taking the Hawks to finish runner-up in his second year as a starter. His play transferred well into the AFL, winning the first Most Valuable Player award and taking the Hawks to win the first championship in the AFL. For a future that would look so bright, that 1950 season would be his peak. He was never able to re...

After paying tribute to his father for one more season by wearing the uniforms most associated with the team, Detroit Knights owner Florian Riddle decided that a new era was needed for Detroit football.  Their main logo got rid of the interlocking swords in favor of the shield alone. Riddle had wanted the logo to be representative of Detroit as a whole, integrating the design of the city’s flag into the four quarters of the shield with a D in the center. There were a few alterations from flag to logo, mainly reducing the number of Normal lions and fleurs-de-lis to better fit within the shield. However, they did increase the number of stars by 1 to 14 to represent the total number of championships they had won across all the leagues they played in. Their shades of red and blue were altered slightly, though that could be attributed to the new supplier for their uniforms.    Controversially, the team deviated from their shoulder yoke for the first time in their history. “[Th...

LEAGUE NARROWS DOWN EXPANSION CITIES The first two teams that will be joining for the 1961 season seem to be all but guaranteed to be Los Angeles and San Francisco. The owners met with a handful of prospective ownership groups over the past year, and managed to narrow down the groups to a single owner from Los Angeles and two potential owners from San Francisco. The Los Angeles owner impressed the AFL owners, as hotel chain heir Barron Forbes made his case for ownership and won over all of the AFL owners. On the other hand, the AFL owners had to choose between two prospective bids for San Francisco. The first group was expected, as the duo that tried to buy the Knights this past offseason, former ACAA councilman and lawyer Allen Penoyer and lumber magnate Ernest Barlowe, got another, slightly more favorable chance to prove why they deserved a team. The other bid was a complete surprise: Victor Culpeper, a minority owner of the PAFC’s Kansas City Cowboys. Culpeper had wanted to bring a ...

MATCH FIXING SCANDAL ROCKS PAFC As the rift between the AFL and PAFC continues to grow, one of the most glaring differences that have emerged has been player pay. If you were riding the bench from team to team, then the pay was almost as much as a semi-pro player. But if you played for a team like Chicago or Indianapolis that had the money and competed for titles year in and year out, then you’d be paid comparably to a player in the AFL. This massive disparity in pay left a majority of PAFC players to either test their luck elsewhere or protest the league to increase their wages. President Bradshaw was not keen on increasing the minimum pay for players, as the league’s finances at this point were cutting it close to bankruptcy. Unbeknownst to Bradshaw, a few players reached out to their fellow players in the AFL to unionize, forming a football player’s union to advocate for fair wages. The league looked like it was on even more uneven ground and ready to fold at any point at its curren...