The Phil-Pitt Steagles and The Cleveland Rams
“I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going… Here is another way of looking at it — if 300 teams use 5,000 or 6,000 players, these players are a definite recreational asset to at least 20,000,000 of their fellow citizens — and that in my judgement is thoroughly worthwhile.”
On January 15, 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote a letter (commonly refereed to as the “Green Light Letter”) to the commissioner of baseball asking for the sport to be continued during the war, which may have came as a surprise to some, as a little over 20 years earlier during WWI, sports were considered to be “ non-essential occupations,” forcing baseball to close the season early. However, this letter changed the sentiment surrounding the essentiality of sports, illustrating that sports were an important morale booster to American communities during wartime.
While professional football did not receive a similar letter from FDR, maybe because the season was much later in the year, it also took part in being a “definite recreational asset” during World War II. While both sports continued, they each took large hits in participating players volunteering to be soldiers. Because of this, the 1943 season had reduced set of teams competing, moving from 10 teams to 8 teams.
At the time, there were two balanced divisions: Eastern and Western. In the East, the Philadelphia Eagles and The Pittsburgh Steelers were temporary merged, creating the Phil-Pitt “Steagles.” While the Steagles was not an officially given name, it was one that fans coined and it stuck (officially, they were just called Phil-Pitt Combine). The Steagles would play four home games in Philly and two in Pittsburgh. In the West, rather than merging a team, the Cleveland Rams would suspend operations for the season. And yes, I said “Cleveland” Rams, who would move to LA in 1946 after winning an NFL Championship in Cleveland, making them the only team to win a championship and play in a new city the next season. Long story short, the Cleveland Rams are the Sean McVay lead LA Rams we know today.
The slimmed down 1943 season would end with the Washington Redskins winning the East and the Chicago Bears winning the West. The Sid Luckman lead Bears would go on to win the championship. The Steagles ended the season with a winning record, and not far out of winning the division, pretty good for a two home team.
The Phil-Pitt combined team had more issues than just two home cities that made this winning record surprising. They had two head coaches: Greasy Neale (Phil) and Walt Kiesling (Pitt). According to a book by Matthew Algeo in 2006, both refused to be demoted during the merged season and, in fact, they hated each other. Apparently, Kiesling’s players did not like him much either. Kiesling was a fan of an pre-forward pass offense called the single-wing formation, which is a formation with an unbalanced oline and the QB in as a blocking back (Hopefully the QBs at the time blocked better than Tom Brady). Neale on the other hand was a fan of the much newer T-formation, which is much closer to the offenses you see today. Neale began teaching the team the T-Formation, while Kiesling was running late to camp, which probably made their hatred of each other even worse. Despite this hatred, the conflict over offensive scheme forced Neale to act as the offensive coordinator and Keisling as the defensive coordinator. Turns out this combination was fairly successful.
To make the odds against the Steagles winning even worse, the team was the only professional team that had all players working full-time jobs out side of football, as it was a requirement by the team. Despite the sentiment of FDR about sports as a recreational asset, many still viewed sports as extracurricular, hence the job requirement. Interestingly, these jobs were not just any old jobs, but all players worked at defense-related factories, making this temporary war-time team truly a war-time team.
The Phil-Pitt merger would give the city of Philadelphia their first ever winning season, and the Pittsburgh Steelers franchise their second. This uniting of Pennsylvania left a legacy on sports, as the team was both a recreational asset and it’s members were direct contributors of war-time products. And in the end, many would say this merger experiment was “thoroughly worthwhile.”
Bonus fact: The Steagles still hold the record for fumbles in a game, with 10. Crazy enough, the Steagles still won that game.
