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This is the seventeenth and final week of the NFL’s regular season, but for the final Throwback Thursday feature of the year we’ll go back to a game from the opening week, of the opening season, of the American Football League. The Los Angeles Chargers play the Kansas City Chiefs on this week’s schedule, and those two franchises also met on the first week of scheduled AFL games in 1960. This particular matchup was played on September 10th of that inaugural season, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The Chiefs’ franchise was located in Dallas and known as the Texans. They would relocate to Kansas City in 1963 and be rechristened as the Chiefs, while in a bit of irony, the Chargers would play only that first season in L.A. before moving to San Diego, where they would stay until shuffling back to LaLa Land a couple of years ago. The two teams were led by future Hall of Fame coaches, Hank Stram of the Texans and the Chargers’ Sid Gillman. The players in this contest weren’t exactly the ones anyone would identify with these clubs as the AFL progressed through the 1960s. When the Texans opened the scoring with a 12 yard touchdown pass to Chris Burford, it wasn’t thrown by the QB most linked to Stram, Len Dawson. It was Cotton Davidson, who would have moderate success in later years with the Raiders but who isn’t a household name with Chiefs’ fans. Jack Spikes scored on a short run to give the Texans a 13-0 lead before the Chargers scored on a 46 yard pass from Jack Kemp to Ralph Anderson. Kemp would go on to lead Buffalo to a pair of AFL titles in the mid-1960s but isn’t generally associated with the Chargers, and Anderson isn’t exactly Lance Alworth when it comes to memorable Charger receivers. Davidson hit a forgotten superstar of the early AFL years, Abner Haynes, with a 17 yard TD pass to widen the Texans’ lead to 20-7. Kemp then took over the fourth quarter, scoring on a 7 yard run and hitting Howie Ferguson, another forgotten player, with the winning touchdown pass from 4 yards out to give the Chargers a hard-fought 21-20 win.

Haynes was the leading Dallas receiver on the day, grabbing 7 passes out of the backfield for 62 yards while Spikes led his team’s ground attack with 62 yards on 9 carries. Kemp threw for 275 yards and the 2 scores, and his leading receivers were the forgettable Anderson, with 103 receiving yards on 5 catches, and Royce Womble, with 7 grabs for 92 yards. The Texans would extract revenge later in the season, defeating the Chargers 17-0 in Dallas. The Chargers won the Western Division but lost to the Houston Oilers in the AFL’s inaugural title game. Haynes would go on to win the league’s Most Valuable Player Award for the season. Stram and Gillman would continue to develop excellent teams throughout the ten year existence of the AFL, and the rivalry between the franchises has continued to this day.

Program from Chargers/Texans inaugural AFL game

“Keep matriculating that ball down the field, boys!” That NFL Films video, of Kansas City Chiefs’ coach Hank Stram on the sidelines of Super Bowl IV, is a treasure for football fans who love the game’s history. No history of the NFL can be written without including Stram, the subject of our NFL 100 post today. He began his coaching career as an assistant football coach and head baseball coach at Purdue in the 1940s, and it was during his eight year stint there that he first met the future quarterback his pro football coaching success would be tied to – Len Dawson. He coached at three other schools, Southern Methodist University, Notre Dame and Miami, as an assistant during the 1950s and it was at the one-year stop at S.M.U. that he would meet a fringe Mustang player who would eventually alter his life – future American Football League founder and Kansas City Chiefs’ owner Lamar Hunt.

Hank Stram in a Purdue yearbook photo

When Hunt founded the AFL in 1959, he placed his own franchise in Dallas and named them the Texans. Although he’d never been a head coach, Stram was hired for that job with the Texans. Stram wasn’t his first choice. He had tried to hire Bud Wilkinson and Tom Landry but was turned down by both. Of course Landry, a successful New York Giants’ assistant coach at the time, took the job as coach of the expansion NFL team in Dallas, the Cowboys, instead. Stram turned out to be a good hire, however. The Texans were immediately successful and won the AFL championship in 1962 by knocking off the Houston Oilers in overtime. The Oilers had won the league’s title in it’s first 2 seasons. Despite the success on the field, the Texans could not compete at the box office with the NFL’s Cowboys, and Hunt moved the franchise to Kansas City for the 1963 season and renamed them the Chiefs. Their success continued there, as Stram and Dawson led them to 2 more AFL titles, including a 31-7 win over Buffalo in 1966 that would earn them the right to play Green Bay in the first Super Bowl, known as the AFL/NFL Championship Game at the time. They lost that contest but won the AFL crown again in 1969 and upset the Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl IV, recording the newer league’s second straight title win, establishing once and for all that the AFL had reached parity with the older NFL. Stram’s Chiefs fell on hard times as the 1970s progressed, and he was fired in 1974. He returned to the NFL to coach the New Orleans Saints in 1976 but had no luck turning around the moribund franchise. His shining moment with the Saints came in 1976 as the team recorded their first win of the Stram coaching era there, beating his old team, the Chiefs, 27-17. He was highly successful as a color analyst on radio and CBS television broadcasts when he was through coaching, working in that capacity into the 1990s.

The always well-dressed Stram discusses strategy with his QB, Len Dawson

Stram was deservedly enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2003. Like many who labored in the AFL, he was an innovator who helped change the game. His Chiefs’ were the first professional team to use Gatorade on the sidelines, he introduced the “choir huddle” where his players lined up in organized lines, rather than the traditional circle. His offensive strategies included using both the I formation and the double tight end set, both used widely in the NFL today. Perhaps his greatest contribution to the game was doing intense scouting of small black colleges, where he uncovered gems like Buck Buchanan, Willie Lanier, Wendell Hayes, Otis Taylor and Emmitt Thomas. The pioneers who guided the AFL through the 1960s into reaching parity with the NFL are all a huge part of helping grow the game into the monster it is today, and Hank Stram belongs at the top of that list of pioneers.

Back in 2010, Rayonsports.com published a series of 9 posts pointing out the many players who we felt were gross omissions from the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Since then some of those players have been voted in, but there still remains some notable men who stand out as having Hall of Fame resumes but still aren’t in. For this NFL 100 post, we’ll revisit the list of players who we feel belong in the Hall, since for their 100th season celebration the league is expanding the number of candidates to be enshrined. The Hall of Fame has listed the semifinalists for the extra class and unfortunately many of the players I felt should have been included were not. The expanded class will have 20 new members, broken down as follows: 5 modern era players, 10 senior inductees, 3 contributors and 2 coaches. Let’s start with the modern era players. Former Steelers’ safety Troy Polamalu is almost a lock to be inducted in his first year of eligibility. John Lynch, former Tampa Bay safety, is a strong candidate, as is Isaac Bruce, a top receiver on the Rams’ “Greatest Show On Turf” teams in the late 1990s/early 2000s. Clay Matthews, ex-Cleveland Browns’ linebacker who had a brilliant career, is a dark horse candidate but I feel he is more than deserving. My fifth and final choice is a real long shot who really should get serious consideration – former Bills’ special teamer Steve Tasker. He is in his final year of regular eligibility and truly redefined the position of “special teams maven”.

Steve Tasker (89) blocks a punt in the Super Bowl

Looking at the senior candidates, even though expanding the number of players to be enshrined should help some long-overlooked men finally get in, the semifinalists named left off some that should have been considered long ago. Jim Marshall, Roman Gabriel, Maxie Baughan, Jim Plunkett, Lee Roy Jordan and Walter Johnson are all Hall-worthy players who didn’t make the semifinal list of 20. The Hall’s list includes some early era players I’m not familiar with, so my 10 players are going to be mostly guys who were in the NFL post-1950s. I’ve got 4 wide receivers on my list who I feel belong. They were called “split ends” or “flankerbacks” when they played. Three of them played in what I consider to be the Golden Age of pro football, the 1960s through the 1980s. They are former Raider Cliff Branch, ex-Eagle Harold Carmichael and Drew Pearson of the Cowboys. The fourth is an old-timer, Mac Speedie, who was a star on the dominant Cleveland teams of the 1940s and ’50s, catching passes from Otto Graham. The next 3 of my choices played on the defensive side of the ball. Alex Karras, former Detroit defensive tackle, should have been inducted long ago, but was probably hurt by his suspension for gambling in 1963. Pittsburgh safety Donnie Shell is another deserving candidate. As Jerry Kramer of the Packers was held back until last year by the large number of his Green Bay teammates already enshrined, Shell has been the victim of the numbers game when it comes to the amount of 1970s Steelers already in the Hall. He is more than deserving to go in with this senior class however. The last defensive player, and seventh overall of my senior picks, is linebacker Randy Gradishar of the Broncos. A stalwart of Denver’s “Orange Crush” defense of the 1970s, he has been long overlooked. My eighth choice is the player on the semifinalist list who is most deserving, former 49er back Roger Craig. He was a great all-around back who played a major role in San Francisco’s dominant era of the 1980s and ’90s. For my last 2 choices, I had to do some heavy research, since I knew very little about the old-timers on the list. One pick is Cecil Isbell. He quarterbacked Curley Lambeau’s Green Bay  teams of the 1930s and was a prolific passer in a run oriented era, hooking up with Hall of Famer Don Hutson. My other choice is Duke Slater, a five-time All Pro tackle in the 1920s. He played mostly for the Chicago Cardinals and was the first African American lineman to play in the NFL.

Drew Pearson (88) with a “Hail Mary” reception

Moving on to the coaches, one of my 2 choices stands out like a sore thumb. Tom Flores won 2 Super Bowls as head coach of the Raiders, yet is never mentioned in the same conversation as coaches like Bill Parcells or Jimmy Johnson. Johnson is on the semifinalist list but he isn’t one of my picks. My second choice is Don Coryell, who never won a championship but was an offensive innovator who belongs in the Hall. Coryell was a tough choice, as Buddy Parker also deserves consideration. He coached the last Detroit Lion teams who had any success, winning 2 championships in the 1950s for that franchise. His later years in Pittsburgh were not very successful so Coryell edges him out.

Of the contributors, my main pick is the late Steve Sabol of NFL Films. Along with his father Ed, who is already enshrined, they ushered the league into the media age with their masterful images of game action, using slow motion video, the music of Sam Spence and narration from the “Voice of God”, John Facenda, to bring true drama to the game. Frank “Bucko” Kilroy and George Young are my other choices. Kilroy was a long-time executive with 4 different franchises. He also was a good enough player to be named to the All Decade team for the 1940s. In all, his career in the NFL spanned the decades from 1943 until 2007. Young was a five-time Executive of The Year, and as Director of Player Personnel in Miami and GM of the New York Giants, was a part of 3 Super Bowl-winning organizations. Two men on the list who I didn’t consider are Art Modell and Art McNally. Modell earned the wrath of Cleveland fans when he moved the Browns to Baltimore and there is already protesting among fans that the NFL is trying to “back door” him into the Hall against the wishes of Cleveland, and other, fans. McNally was a long-time official who probably should be considered for enshrinement but my view is that officials should have their own place of “honor” outside of Canton, like maybe in the zoo with the other zebras.

Steve and Ed Sabol of NFL Films