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Last Updated: May 9th, 2011 - 08:37:04 |
Even in its quaint era, NFL had hype
By ROBERT RUBINO
Feb 6, 2005, 16:30
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Sunday, February 6, 2005
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
It's hard to believe, especially with today's Super Bowl culminating two weeks of wretched excess, but the NFL did have a simpler time.
Not simpler like the 1980s were simpler in the days before the salary cap. I'm talking much simpler than that.
Not simpler like the 1960s, when the NFL competed with the upstart American Football League and then merged. I'm talking much simpler than that.
Not even simpler like the 1950s, when TV made its first major impact on the sport with the broadcasting of the 1958 title game between the New York Giants and Baltimore Colts, with the Colts winning in overtime.
It can get even simpler than that.
I know just how utterly simpler the NFL was because of a book I've been reading these past two weeks, courtesy of a colleague who loaned it to me. OK, it's not really a book. It's the 1946 NFL media guide.
Of course in 1946, still two years before the arrival of commercial TV, the word "media" didn't have much meaning and so it wasn't called a media guide. It was called the National Football League Roster Manual, but it was clearly a forerunner of today's media guides, those bloated volumes of statistics, public relations and pretentiousness.
The 1946 NFL Roster Manual proved to be not only a delight but the perfect antidote to the cacophony of hype that surrounds today's game.
For example, we're accustomed to being told how today's head coaches rely on a virtual army of assistants, from offensive and defensive coordinators to position coaches and various other functionaries involved with scouting, conditioning, and even coordinating the miles of game film that is analyzed endlessly.
In 1946, the Boston Yanks, for example, had a head coach and a line coach. That was it. The Philadelphia Eagles' coaching staff also consisted of the head man and one assistant. Ditto the Washington Redskins and just about all the rest of the 10 teams in the league.
The Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers were big thinkers, each with a head coach and two assistants.
The Philadelphia Eagles did lead the NFL in team doctors with two, which indicates either the franchise's progressive thinking regarding medical care for its players or else those players were in constant need of getting patched up. After all, in 1946, they were still playing in leather helmets and without face guards.
The Chicago Bears in 1946 were an exception, on the extravagant cutting edge, with owner/head coach George Halas commanding a staff of not one, not two, but three assistant coaches. The team even had the luxury of an assistant trainer.
The Los Angeles Rams of 1946 list the usual positions under the category of staff personnel, with one noted addition: "musical director."
It's tempting to think that all this simplicity in the NFL of 1946 was so different from today's NFL as to be unrecognizable, if not outright alien. But that's not entirely true. Despite the quaintness of the small coaching staffs, there was hype, even in 1946.
Try this piece of hyperbole on for size, from the 1946 media guide, about the aforementioned Chicago Bears:
"From the Texas prairies, Kansas, the effete east they come. Theirs is a legacy of zest for competition, of a dauntless fighting spirit, steeped in a tradition that Bears are Champions.
"Few teams in the history of sportsdom have attained greater prominence than the Chicago Bears. ... The Bears have become as well known as Notre Dame and the New York Yankees. Today, they are truly 'Champions of the Gridiron.' "
Say what you want about the balderdash leading up to today's game, but it's doubtful you heard anything quite so ... pompously bombastic. It's also doubtful you heard the word "sportsdom."
But if you've ever read some of the self-congratulatory exaggerations in the Oakland Raiders' media guides over the years, you now have a strong clue as to where Al Davis got his inspiration.
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