In 1925, the Pottsville Maroons won the National Football League championship on a frozen tundra and immediately lost it to red tape.
A hundred years later, local Maroons aficionados aim to keep alive the memory of what happened Dec. 6, 1925, the day the Maroons won the NFL title in famed Comiskey Park in Chicago. They’ve organized activities to celebrate the anniversary.
“There’s a lot going on,” said Diana Prosymchak, executive director of the Schuylkill County Historical Society.
Last year, the society hosted former Philadelphia Eagles quarterback and ESPN sportscaster Ron Jaworski at an event that packed upwards of 400 people into the historical society.
Just Thursday, organizers had a Pottsville Maroons trivia night. Next month, the historical society will feature a program explaining the Maroons’ history, Prosymchak said.
On Aug. 16, the society will host a dinner that celebration organizers hope will attract another former Philadelphia Eagle. They’re not ready to say who.
David Russek, a historical society board member, has developed a docudrama focused on the Maroons that he will unveil later this year. The program will be available for direct streaming online.
“The key thing is to build awareness in the community for the Maroons,” Russek said. “(We want to) help build a story amongst the youth, which maybe have gotten away from history a little bit and ... help them appreciate what they have here in this region.”
'The field was as hard as a rock'
The Maroons, already a powerhouse team in a local league, officially joined the NFL in 1925.
You read that right — the same year they joined the five-season-old NFL, the Maroons won the title. During one game that season, they beat the Green Bay Packers, 31-0.
Yep, the same Green Bay Packers.
The NFL had no playoffs then, no official championship, but newspapers widely hyped the Dec. 6 game between the league’s two best teams that way.
The Maroons, with a record of 9 wins and 2 losses, had the best record among the league’s eastern teams. The Chicago Cardinals, 9 wins, 1 loss, one tie, topped the western teams.
The day of their title matchup, the temperature peaked at 25 degrees.
“The field was as hard as a rock,” said Greg Yutko, who nowadays makes appearances wearing a replica Maroons uniform and is helping plan the festivities.
The Maroons knew rock. That day, Pottsville — which like many Northeast Pennsylvania towns produced the hard coal known as anthracite that warmed millions nationwide on days like that — pounded out an NFL championship.
Six days later, in Philadelphia, by a score of 9-7, the Maroons defeated a University of Notre Dame team that featured the return of the famed Four Horsemen: quarterback Harry Stuhldreher, left halfback Jim Crowley, right halfback Don Miller and fullback Elmer Layden. (Decades later, Crowley settled and died in Scranton in Lackawanna County.)
At the time, college teams, better organized and coached, were considered better than professional teams. Beating Notre Dame a week after beating Chicago only reinforced the Maroons’ superiority.
A costly victory
In the end, the Notre Dame game cost the Maroons their title. At the time, the NFL had an unwritten rule that teams could not play games in the territory of another NFL team.
The Frankford Yellow Jackets, who played in Philadelphia and whom the Maroons clobbered 49-0 the week before the title game, complained to the league. They said the Maroons never got their permission to play in Philadelphia.
NFL President Joe Carr, who had warned the Maroons not to play in Philadelphia, stripped away the title and suspended Pottsville from the league. (He reinstated them before the next season.) The Maroons always insisted they had received Carr’s permission.
The Cardinals played two more hastily arranged games and wound up with 11 wins and 2 losses, compared to the Maroons’ 10-2.
To this day, the league considers the Cardinals the 1925 champs, one of only two titles the franchise has won in a century. (The other was in 1947 when Hall of Fame running back Charley Trippi of Pittston in Luzerne County played for the Cardinals.)
'It's always been ours'
Three times, the NFL has examined the case and rejected the Maroons’ claim to the title. The Bidwill family, which bought the Cardinals in 1933 and still owns them, refuses to part with the 1925 title.
Some have suggested the Cardinals, who moved to St. Louis in 1960 and Arizona in 1989, haven’t won a championship since 1947 because of “the Pottsville curse.”
“Our contention is ... there's no curse that the Maroons have ever put on anybody,” Russek said. “We're above and beyond that.”
Supposedly, the NFL remains willing to talk again about restoring the Maroons' title, he said.
“But, you know, from our perspective, you can't get something back that was never given away in the first place, right?” Russek said. “It's been always ours. Whether people say that or not, it's up to them, but it's never left here. We won it on the field, and we're pretty excited to celebrate that."
That’s because one score remains settled and undisturbed, the one from Dec. 6, 1925.
Pottsville Maroons, 21, Chicago Cardinals, 7.
