As the NFL’s Buffalo Bills limped to the end of their 50th anniversary season earlier this month, forlorn local football fans had little choice but to flash back to fonder days of yore to receive any sort of gridiron satisfaction.
As it turns out, those flashes should go back farther than the half-century of the NFL team’s existence.
Kenneth R. Crippen, head of the Professional Football Researchers Association, has written a comprehensive if heady look back at professional football’s earlier days in Western New York. “The Original Buffalo Bills” examines the team’s four-year run in the All-American Football Conference and inability to warrant inclusion in the NFL once the AAFC was disbanded.
The original Bills weren’t even the Bills. Borrowing a moniker from locally based baseball and hockey teams, Buffalo’s AAFC entry was known as the Bisons as the team entered 1946. Previous Buffalo entries in the NFL in the 1920s, along with a handful attempts by competing leagues to place franchises in the area, nonetheless indicated a hint of interest in pro football in this region, warranting the granting of a franchise.
Numerous local men were on the original training camp roster, including players from Niagara Falls, North Tonawanda and Lockport (many of whom played for two colleges, Canisius and Niagara University, that no longer field football teams).
Any fan interest generated by this local touch was hard to maintain as 1946 lingered, as the Bisons finished 3-10-1. Attendance doubled the next season, though, as the team surpassed the .500 mark and challenged for a division crown.
It was prior to that 1947 season that the Bills became the Bills. Fans were asked to submit names for the team, with the winning entry depicting the team’s players as members of a posse, harking back to the days of William “Buffalo Bill” Cody.
Also in 1947 is when merger talks between the AAFC and NFL — both of which saw their franchises struggle to keep up with the salaries their players commanded as a result of drawing cross-league interest — started taking place. These talks turned serious in 1948, and by the end of the 1949 season the merger was complete.
The NFL took three AAFC teams — the Baltimore Colts, San Francisco 49ers and powerhouse Cleveland Browns — but not the Bills. Buffalo fans formed a group to raise funds and petition for a team, but the NFL owners voted down the proposal by a 9-4 vote (all 13 owners needed to agree for the Bills to have survived).
Crippen’s book is certainly extensive, even if chock full of unnecessary numbers (such as records set for numbers of punts that weren’t returned in a single game). His writing style is competent, but it’s somewhat hard to digest so many statistics in such a condensed space, and Crippen’s unwillingness to maintain proper verb tense (referring to Buffalo as “their”) is distracting.
Even so, this book — two-thirds of which contains box scores, season rundowns and profiles of every Bills player — is a compelling read for local football fans. Having all of this information in one place is fantastic, as is the memory of Buffalo football being relevant.
Contact Paul Laneat 693-1000, ext. 116.
IF YOU READ
• WHAT: “The Original Buffalo Bills”
• BY: Kenneth R. Crippen
• DETAILS: Published by McFarland and Company, 293 pages
• GRADE: B
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BOOK REVIEW: Bills’ origins explored in historical football text
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