Former All-America Football Conference Rivals Face Off in this Year’s Super Bowl

super-bowl-2013For four seasons, from 1946 through 1949, American football fans had two major leagues to follow.  In addition to the National Football League, there was the All-America Football Conference.  Competing head-to-head with the ten-team NFL for fans and players, the AAFC offered a product that was clearly the equivalent of that provided by its older rival.

In this year’s Super Bowl, the two surviving franchises of the AAFC will, for the first time, square off against each other for the championship of professional football.

The AAFC began play in 1946 with eight teams: the New York Yankees, Brooklyn Dodgers, Buffalo Bisons, and Miami Seahawks in the East, and the Cleveland Browns, Chicago Rockets, Los Angeles Dons, and San Francisco 49ers in the West.  (These Cleveland Browns are now the Baltimore Ravens.)

In 1947, the Miami team was replaced by the Baltimore Colts, and in 1949, the New York and Brooklyn teams merged (resulting in a seven-team league) while the Chicago team changed its name from Rockets to the Hornets.

After the 1949 season, the two leagues agreed to merge into a single league initially known as the National-American Football League (though the title returned to NFL the following year).  Three of the seven AAFC teams—the Cleveland Browns, the San Francisco 49ers, and the Baltimore Colts—were admitted into the NFL, and the AAFC New York Yankees were merged with the NFL’s New York Bulldogs.

Although the combined New York team—which competed against the New York Giants—was owned by the Bulldogs owner, the coach, most of the players, and the team’s name (Yanks) were taken from the AAFC franchise.  The other three AAFC teams were folded, and their players distributed to the remaining 13 teams through a draft.

The Baltimore Colts folded after the 1950 season, a decision that reduced the number of NFL teams from 13 to 12.  (In 1953, a different, and unrelated, version of the Colts began play in Baltimore.)

The two franchises remaining from the AAFC, the Browns and the 49ers, flourished in the NFL.  Those two teams had been by far the strongest teams in the AAFC, with the Browns winning all four league championships while the 49ers finished with the second best record in the league each year.  The Browns won the NFL championship in their first year in the league and finished first in their division in each of their first six years in the NFL.  While the 49ers could not match that level of excellence, they had winning seasons in four of their first five NFL campaigns.

Of course, in 1996, the Cleveland Browns left Cleveland for Baltimore, where they became the Ravens and subsequently won a Super Bowl in 2000.  (Although the NFL persists in the silly claim that the current Cleveland Browns are a continuation of the Browns of the past, all that the current team shares with the Browns of the past is the ownership of the “Cleveland Browns” trademark.)  After a couple of unexceptional decades, the 49ers emerged as one of the modern NFL’s premier teams, winning five Super Bowls in the 1980’s and 1990’s.

Although the Browns and 49ers have been in different conferences in the NFL since 1950, this is the first time that they have met for the NFL championship.  The closest that they previously came to meeting was in 1990 (following the 1989 season), when the Browns lost to the Denver Broncos in the AFC championship game.  Had they defeated the Broncos, they would have played the 49ers two weeks later in the Super Bowl.

They almost met much earlier.  In 1953, the 49ers finished one game behind the Detroit Lions in the NFL’s Western Conference while the Browns won the Eastern Conference for the fourth consecutive year.  During the 1953 regular season San Francisco lost three games, all by very narrow margins.  They lost twice to the Lions, by scores of 24-21 and 14-10, and to the Browns in an inter-conference game, 23-21.  Had they won any two of those games, they would have played the Browns for the NFL championship.  (Had they won just one, they would have played an additional game with the Lions with the winner playing the Browns for the championship.)

Since the AAFC played its game more than 63 years ago—fittingly the 1949 AAFC championship game in which Cleveland defeated San Francisco, 21-7—it is unlikely that there are large numbers of AAFC fans still around to appreciate the special character of this year’s game, but for those that are, and for students of the history of professional football, this year’s Super Bowl probably seems very significant.

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Ban on Women in Combat: A Response

I recently had the opportunity to read Professor Mazzie’s post on the lifting of the ban on women serving in combat.  As a military officer with over 20 years of service to include a recent overseas deployment to a combat zone, I thought that I would offer my personal observations and opinions related to this matter.

First, while I personally have not served on the “front lines,” I generally agree with the lifting of the ban.  Since September 11, 2001, women have served alongside men in Iraq, Afghanistan, and many other places around the world.  The majority of women have served with great distinction and all of them who have served have made great sacrifices (let us also not forget about the sacrifices that their families have made).  As Professor Mazzie notes, since September 11, 2001, 152 women have made the ultimate sacrifice for the greater good of this country. 

As a person who enlisted as a Private in 1992, I have seen how the military has grown, matured, and become more professional over the years, especially since the rapid deployment of service members over the last 11 years.  Professor Mazzie entitles her post “Ban on Women in Combat Lifted: Is the Military Ready?”  For the reasons cited above, I do believe that the military is ready.  If the military is not ready at this point in time, after 11 plus years of overseas operations in which women have played a key role in the success of these operations, I personally do not believe that the military will ever be ready.  To put it simply, I believe that the timing is right and the lifting of the ban is the right thing to do. 

All that being said, I do believe that some of the arguments made by opponents of the lifting of the ban have some validity. 

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Ban on Women in Combat Lifted: Is the Military Ready?

This week, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced that the military’s ban on women in combat will be lifted.  According to the Department of Defense, 14.6% of the nation’s military is made up of women; according to The N.Y. Times and Huffington Post, more than 280,000 of them were deployed during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  While those women were banned from combat, they often saw combat action nonetheless, as they were attached to battalions in positions that sometimes came under fire.  Of the more than 6,600 troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, 152 of them have been women. 

There may still be some combat positions that women will not be allowed to fill; however, the presumption seems to be that all combat positions are open to women unless a particular branch of the military requests an exception and presumably has the burden to prove why women should not be so allowed.  Previous opposition to women in combat often revolved around concerns about women’s strength and whether their presence might hurt unit cohesion.  Clearly, not all women will be physically capable of certain assignments. But then again, neither are all men.  At least now, those women who are capable and who want to fill those assignments will have the opportunity to do so.  The argument about unit cohesion is also one that had long been made against allowing gays—and African Americans before them—to serve in the military.  That argument, too, has been debunked, and since 2012, LBGT soldiers can serve openly.    

Allowing women in combat opens up hundreds of thousands of new jobs for women and allows women the opportunity to climb the ranks in the military.  Without combat leadership experience, military advancement, regardless of the soldier’s gender, is limited.  In the past, this limitation disproportionately stifled women’s military careers.  No longer. As The New York Times reported, General Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated in a letter that the lifting of the ban ensures “that women as well as men ‘are given the opportunity to succeed.’”

Despite the public support for allowing women in combat, there are those who oppose the idea, with one retired army general calling it “a vast social experiment in which hundreds of thousands of men and women will be the guinea pigs.” The decision, he maintains, is ideologically based and not militarily based.

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