1971: The Birth of Spring Football
As the USFL season comes to a close, football fans will have witnessed yet another attempt at spring football. Be it both versions of the USFL, both versions of the XFL, the Alliance of American Football, or NFL Europe, sports entrepreneurs have tried to capitalize on the six month absence of NFL and college football games. Some of the leagues have achieved modest success and sustained some longevity, and it remains to be seen how the new incarnation of the USFL will fare. Historically, however, the interest in these leagues decline rapidly as the season goes along before they eventually disappear. But even if cracking the spring football code is no easy task, that hasn’t stopped visionaries from trying, and though the original USFL is often regarded as the first football league to tackle this challenge, the experimentation was tried over a decade earlier in 1971 by an obscure minor league football circuit known as the Trans American Football League.
The TAFL may not sound familiar even to the most adamant of football history buffs, and for good reason. The TAFL never gained a reputation for being more than minor league football, though some players went on to sign contracts with NFL teams. Despite the name Trans American, the league’s presence hardly extended beyond Texas, as it was home to only four lone star state ball clubs in 1971: the Fort Worth Braves, the San Antonio Toros, the Dallas Rockets, and the Texarkana Titans, each of whom only played 5-games that season. The TAFL also never saw a second spring season, for after the 1971 experiment, the Fort Worth Braves and the Texarkana Titans folded, leaving the remaining two franchises to temporarily join another doomed to fail minor league known as the Southwestern Football League.
Despite a brief existence, however, the league’s decision to play football in the spring of 1971 after playing football in the conventional fall time of 1970 was years ahead of its time, playing their games between April and June to avoid conflicts with NFL, college, and high school football games. And although the history books only show a one season stat sheet for Trans American Football League, the four teams in the TAFL took a long road to pioneer this experiment in the spring of ’71 – a journey that encapsulated the struggle, unpredictability and spirit of minor league football in mid-century America.
This journey began right in the middle of the last great decade for minor league football in America; the 1960s, a time when regional semi-pro football teams garnered support from both small towns and metropolitan areas that didn’t have an NFL or an AFL franchise. Leagues such as Atlantic Coast Football League and United Football League ignited modest but passionate fanbases amongst the hometown crowds against the backdrop of a national competition between the AFL and the NFL.
As the AFL and the NFL rivalry resulted in a merger to end the expensive talent war, many regional leagues also merged to grow bigger to ultimately become an alternative to the new NFL. Other football obsessed entrepreneurs, however, decided to form new leagues with the hopes of serving as a farm league for the NFL. One such league was born in 1966; The Texas Football League.
Headed by Commissioner George Schepps, a longtime sports promoter who made a career for himself in the minor league baseball circuit, the TFL had grown a reputation in its first year as being one of the most stable minor league outfits in pro football. Having six franchises that stretched from Texas to Oklahoma in the inaugural 10 game season, the league expanded to eight franchises in 1967 for a full 14 game season.
After 1967, however, the Texas Football League did not grow quite as Schepps had hoped. With visions of a 12 team league and reportedly having arrangements to speak with NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle and Dallas Cowboy’s coach Tom Landry about the TFL becoming an official farm team for the NFL, Schepps and the Texas League owners were never able to expand beyond 8 franchises at a time.
Though Schepps had awarded bids to various Southwestern cities, such as Austin and Corpus Christi, he was adamant that all of his owners have strong financial backing before entering into the league. Only the San Antonio Toros franchise turned a profit since the league’s inception, however, thereby discouraging people with deep pockets to take ownership of a franchise, which lead to a state of stagnation for the TFL.
Meanwhile, the Continental Football League had become the third largest professional football organization in America, though it hadn’t quite achieved a professional image. The Continental League offered to merge with the TFL following the 1967 season, an offer which Commissioner Schepps declined, feeling that his league was superior, and even went so far as to propose a minor league championship between the two leagues. But following the 1968 season, Schepps agreed to the merger, and the Texas Football League became the new Texas Division of the Continental Football League.
The Texas division stood out in the Continental League for two reasons: for having the first professional football team based outside the U.S. with the Mexico Golden Aztecs, who shut down operations after five games, and for the success of the San Antonio Toros, who made it to the championship game that year and lost to the Indianapolis Capitols in a 44-38 overtime thriller.
Following the 1969 season, the Continental League was in dire straits. Most of the teams in the league were financially unstable and folded in the spring of 1970, while the competitive and financially successful teams defected to the Atlantic Coast Football League, including the Orlando Panthers, Norfolk Neptunes and the defending champions Indianapolis Capitols. Shortly thereafter, Continental League commissioner James Dunn resigned from his post, and in an ironic twist of fate, George Schepps was named the new commissioner of the Continental League.
With the Continental League’s fate already hanging on by a thread, the death nail in the coffin arguably came when the owners of the original Texas Football League franchises agreed to secede from the Continental Football League and revive the TFL. Oilmen Nash Dowle and Dan Shaughnessy, owners of the West Texas Rufnecks, said that the TFL would be revived for the 1970 season, and that by 1971, a new league would come about that would stretch across the United States from Los Angeles to Hershey, Pennsylvania. It would also secure a television contract and allegedly would be led by former AFL commissioner Joe Foss.
It would be known as the Trans American Football League.
The optimism for the new league, however, wouldn’t quite trickle down to the fanbases. Following the decline of the Continental Football League, Schepps returned to his previous post as the Commissioner of the TFL, and immediately resumed his plans of expansion. Though the league had six franchises in 1970 and had some football fanatics in Texas who continued to follow the TFL, support for the teams had never been more apathetic, as attendance was the lowest it had been since the league’s creation, resulting in two franchises folding.
The attention for football could only be split so many ways, as the AFL-NFL had officially merged and college football in the South was as powerful as it had ever been. With their eyes wide open about the likelihood of a minor league football syndicate drawing interest away from the NFL and powerhouse college football programs, or even interrupting the tradition of high school football on Friday nights, the leadership of the Trans-American Football League decided to expedite their inaugural season and take the field in April of 1971.
Dubbed as the “Great Experiment,” the intrigue surrounding the TAFL’s spring season initially spread to other corners of the country, despite being comprised of four teams playing a nine game schedule.. The San Antonio Express in 1971 claimed that NFL scouts would keep an eye on the development of the TAFL spring season. The decision to play the spring also caught the eye of Tex Maule, the acclaimed Sports Illustrated writer who wrote an article about the Trans American Football League in May of 1971. Maule wrote that the TAFL wasn’t quite Trans American as it was Trans Texas, but also wrote that “the football was crisp, quick and exciting and the fans showed their appreciation…”
Interestingly enough, the high praise for the TAFL’s out-the-box approach was modest compared to the high hopes that the owners had for this new league. San Antonio Toros owner and general manager Henry Hight, who a couple years earlier offered Heisman trophy winner O.J. Simpson $15,000 a game to play for the Toros, believed that the TAFL would become the third major league, and could even compete with the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys and the AFL’s Houston Oilers, even proposing a “Texas Pro Championship” between the TAFL champion and the winner of a 1971 pre-season exhibition match between Dallas and Houston.
But despite an endorsement from one of the nation’s premiere sports writers and an exuberant confidence from league owners, reality on the ground was much different than what was being read in Sports Illustrated.
The indifference amongst the Texas football fans proved to be too large, for the interest in the league dwindled after the first couple weeks. Originally slated for a nine game season, the teams up ended up playing five games each, with the San Antonio Toros defeating the Texarkana Titans 20-19 in the championship game. The shortened season and ultimate demise of the league was due to having the worst attendance for all the teams since their original incarnation with the TFL, as the Toros were the only franchise to net a small profit. The Del Rio News Herald reported in May of 1971 that the league “was slightly successful at first, but team owners were said to be unanimous in deciding at a meeting Sunday to return to Fall play.” The San Antonio Express echoed these sentiments in June of 1971, right before the championship game, writing, “Owners have decided that the ‘Great Experiment’ wasn’t great enough to try again next year…”
Though the owners strived to move back the “ordinary” fall for the 1972 season, the TAFL never resumed operations. Various newspaper men provided self evident postmortems, citing the originality of the idea, but that it was a “dismal failure” and that many times, “the spectators at these games barley outnumbered the players.” Some of the players did receive attention from the National Football League, most notably the Texarkana Titans quarterback Tommy Boutwell, who’s three touchdown performance in the championship game landed him with a five figure contract with the Atlanta Falcons. Regarding his experience with in the TAFL, Bouwell said that “the people I’ve been associated with in the Titans organization has been great, but I am really disappointed in the town people for not supporting an undefeated (5-0) regular season team.”
With the Titans and the Braves now defunct, the Toros and the Rockets joined the Southwestern Football League, headed by retired NFL great Ollie Matson as its commissioner. The Toros won the championship of the 6 team league in 1972. In 1973, when the League was trying to sell itself as a potential “American branch” of the Canadian Football League, the Toros finished as the runner ups of the 8 team league.
The league folded after two years. The Rockets shut down operations, and the San Antonio Toros played their final game on July 16th, 1974 when they played a preseason game against the Houston Oilers that was full of rookies due to the NFL players strike that offseason. The Toros lost, 13-7 at the Alamo Bowl, and would be the last minor league football team to play against an NFL team.
51 years after the TAFL’s “Great Experiment” numerous leagues since then have asked “what do we have to do attract eye balls when there is no NFL, college or high school football being played.” Some have secured talent that’s on par with the NFL, while some have tried to implement unique brand of football via rule changes. But as the Trans American Football League story shows us, these challenges have always existed for alternative football leagues. And though football fans are still left awaiting a successful spring football story, time only will tell if the new USFL or the 2023 incarnation of the XFL will succeed where the Trans American Football League, and so many others, have failed.
References
https://www.newspapers.com/image/297919961/?terms=pete%20rozelle%20george%20schepps&match=1
https://www.newspapers.com/image/386474776/?terms=schepps%20texas%20football%20league&match=1
https://www.newspapers.com/image/301715055/?terms=george%20schepps%20trans%20american&match=1
https://vault.si.com/vault/1971/05/10/43076#&gid=ci0258bfb6c00d278a&pid=43076---071---image
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