AFL Spring Meetings 1958

LEAGUE MOVES EXPANSION TO 1960 & 1961
The AFL’s expansion over the past two years can be considered a rousing success. Out of the 4 teams introduced, all but one have made the playoffs (with the Rattlesnakes only missing out by half a game) and all of them have won at least one game in the playoffs. Boston and St Louis look like they will be up there with the “Big Three” teams of Chicago, Cincinnati, and Washington. New York made a miracle run for the title this past year. Philadelphia has some of the largest attendance numbers the league has seen so far. With the sport of football on the up and up in recent years, the league announced that it will move up the second half of the “Manhattan Plan” by one year. Los Angeles and San Francisco are now slated to join for the 1960 season, with two other teams to join a year later in 1961. The two bids from San Francisco, the group that attempted to buy the Knights (Allen Penoyer & Ernest Barlowe) and the other headed by former Kansas City Cowboys minority owner Victor Culpeper, were merged into one when Culpeper provided the necessary funds to complete the construction of their new stadium in exchange for majority control of the future team. The new stadium, temporarily named “Bay View Stadium”, is expected to host games for this new football team and for the newly-promoted San Francisco Zephyrs baseball club, promising to be a truly modern park for both sports. Culpeper launched shortly thereafter both a name-the-team contest and a name-the-stadium contest in the San Francisco Chronicle, to christen both the new football team and the stadium before the 1960 season. Los Angeles owner Barron Forbes had already said he has a name for the team, which he would present at one of his hotels within a year’s time. They will play in the prestigious Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which will host professional sports for the first time in its history. 

The league also granted its 15th franchise during this time, going to oil heir J.B. Gilchrist in his hometown of Dallas. Gilchrist had originally been approached by PAFC president Virgil Bradshaw to inject more funds into the slowly-decaying league, but Yeats stormed out of his negotiations over a heated argument he had gotten into with Bradshaw over terms. Gilchrist allegedly spoke with Rudy Branthwaite, son of the New Orleans Pirates’ owner, before meeting with Bradshaw, and the younger Branthwaite persuaded him to not join the league over its instability. He instead pursued joining the AFL, and beat out a joint Dallas-Fort Worth bid in his persistence to grow the league in the south. His original name for the team was the Spurs, but decided against the name over confusion with the city’s minor league baseball team of the same name. Yeats instead announced a name-the-team contest in the Dallas Times Herald, offering the city a chance to properly represent the city. Rumors did circulate that Gilchrist had a few names in mind and would just give the grand prize to the name he had already liked the best, but was open to any and all kinds of submissions. The new franchise will play out of Fair Park Stadium, home of the yearly Oklahoma-Texas college football rivalry game and one of the largest stadiums in the state of Texas.

DENVER EXPANSION FACES SETBACK
With the amount of buzz it has been getting around the AFL, Denver seemed all but guaranteed to be entering the league along with Dallas in 1962 as plans originally were. Minor league owner Edwin Phillips had blown the AFL owners away with his proposal for a new stadium in Denver to suit both pro baseball and football, wanting to take his Denver Rams club to the majors once the stadium had been built. Construction on the new stadium had only just begun a few weeks before the AFL decided that they were going to move the expansion dates up by a year, catching the Denver ownership group completely off guard. The stadium wasn’t expected to be complete until just before the 1962 season would begin, and the Rams’s current stadium is nowhere near able to host football games. With its current situation, the AFL has promised Phillips that Denver would be guaranteed a spot in the league in the meantime, and would join by no later than 1965. Denver pulling out of this round of expansion will make the AFL work quickly to find their replacement, forcing the owners to go back through the prior bids and find one to start along with Dallas. Proposals for teams in Minneapolis/St Paul and Miami were two bids that the owners had in their final considerations, though neither seem like they will be as a certainty like the Dallas and Denver bids were together. Some in the media even speculated that commissioner Hasenkamp would try to target a PAFC team trying to leave the chaos and join a more stable league. The source that broke that story didn’t have a conclusive source, so at this point it’s more of a rumor that could happen if none of the current bids impress the owners. Hasenkamp and the other owners have a little over a year to reach another final decision, though they seem in much better shape than the PAFC to decide on something this hastily. 

ASPFL UNCERTAIN ON EXPANSION
The ASPFL has been relatively stable since its restructuring to a semi-professional feeder league into the AFL. The AFL is on its way to move up to 16 teams, and the AFL owners want to expand the ASPFL to 16 teams to match the 1-to-1 affiliate model they set up after the merger. Commissioner Robert McNamara brought up a vote to the other ASPFL owners to expand up to 16 where he thought it would be passed with ease. It was rejected overwhelmingly 9-3, with McNamara only able to gain two other “yes” votes to expand. McNamara had thought that the ASPFL would be more open to expansion, but the ASPFL is hesitant to add any teams outside of their footprint of the northeast. With it still being a semi-professional league, the owners fear that adding or moving teams around could upset the balance and force the league out of existence if not done right. Expansion is off the table at the moment for the ASPFL, but some teams might not make it very long in their current position. The Springfield Knights have been improving on the field since their title in 1945, but they have been having trouble attracting fans to games. Detroit owner Florian Riddle is trying to outright purchase the team instead of having an affiliate agreement and move them somewhere in Michigan, but the other owners in the ASPFL have been cautious on allowing the move, as it would allow for teams to be purchased by AFL teams and violate any agreements made when the affiliation system started up a few years ago. Some of the Midwestern AFL teams, namely Detroit and St Louis, are attempting to influence their way into moving either their affiliate or another team closer to them. The AFL’s push westward will likely bring in more teams to the ASPFL sooner rather than later, but the ASPFL is standing firm in preventing westward expansion of its own.