Logo of a small college football team that plays in the Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference, the Bluffton Beavers. The Division III program played it’s first season in 1913 and currently plays its’ home games at Dwight Salzman Stadium in Bluffton, Ohio. The school has produced a pair of pro football players – Seth Burkholder, a kicker in the Arena League, and former Buffalo Bills’ star flanker Elbert “Golden Wheels” Dubenion.
1964 Topps football card of a recently deceased former player, Elbert “Golden Wheels” Dubenion, who played 9 seasons in the American Football League for the Buffalo Bills. He was a star flanker for the team and the main receiver for quarterback Jack Kemp. Dubenion was a major part of Buffalo’s back-to-back AFL championship teams in the mid-1960s. A three-time AFL All Star, he still ranks in the top 10 of Bills’ career receiving yards. After retiring as a player Dubenion worked as a scout for many years with the Bills, Miami Dolphins and Atlanta Falcons.
Today we begin our extensive four-part review of the 2019 Buffalo Bills’ season with a look at the performance of the front office and coaching staff. General manager Brandon Beane went into the free agency period last year with a plan, and he executed it well. He added a pair of valuable options in the passing game for his young quarterback, Josh Allen, in John Brown and Cole Beasley. Tight end Tyler Kroft was a gamble since he had injury issues, and the gamble didn’t work as Kroft missed significant time with a foot injury and made very little impact when he did get on the field. Beane also completely remade the team’s offensive line. Center Mitch Morse was the star attraction of the free agents and he was a consistent performer all season after having concussion issues in training camp. Also added were starting guards Jon Feliciano and Quinton Spain, who both became instant starters and major upgrades over the 2018 guards. Tackles Ty Nsekhe and La’Adrian Waddle had mixed results due to injuries. Former first round draft pick Kevin Johnson was added to the secondary and provided important cornerback depth all year. The rest of the signees were a mixed bag of players who provided help here and there during the season, with kick return specialist Andre Roberts being the most notable. Beane had an outstanding college draft, plucking players who should be cornerstones of the franchise in the future. Early choices Ed Oliver, Cody Ford, Devin Singletary and Dawson Knox all became starters who flashed potential to develop into Pro Bowl players. Late rounders Jaquan Johnson and Darryl Johnson were major special team contributors and Darryl Johnson was a regular part of the defensive line rotation also.
As for the coaching, head man Sean McDermott continued to preach “trusting the process” and has built a great culture among his players in his 3 seasons. In last season’s review, I commented that McDermott’s “process” had to translate to wins in 2019, and it did just that as the team finished 10-6 and locked up a wild card spot. He still is winless against Bill Belichick’s New England club, with the three year record now at 0-6. Plenty of fans were clamoring for offensive coordinator Brian Daboll to be fired after the offense was mediocre this season, but he really produced adequate results considering the young QB, the totally revamped O-line and the fact that a couple of his main weapons, Singletary and Knox, were rookies who delivered typical rookie-like inconsistent results. Leslie Frazier did a great job coordinating the defense. He was masterful at mixing up coverages and having a good knack for blitzing at the right times. It was very telling that Tennessee defensive players, after upsetting the Ravens in the playoffs, reported that they developed their game plan to stop Lamar Jackson “using the Buffalo model”. The Bills had a new special teams coordinator in 2019, Heath Farwell, and the special teams really didn’t do much that was special during the season. In fact, a blocked punt cost them a game against the Patriots and they also allowed a 100+ yard kickoff return for a touchdown against Miami. It’s a good sign moving forward that McDermott, at his postseason press conference, stressed that there was still much room for improvement heading into next season. Facing a much tougher schedule in 2020, standing pat won’t cut it for this club.
Logo of a college football team that plays in the Big Sky Conference, the Montana Grizzlies. The school first fielded a team in 1897 and has claimed a pair of Division I – FCS national championships, in 1995 and 2001. Former Grizzly players who have gone on to play pro football include Jimmy Wilson, Doug Betters, Raul Allegre, Colt Anderson, Scott Gragg, Dan Carpenter, Guy Bingham, Trumaine Johnson, Mike Tilleman and Tim Hauck.
2019 Donruss football card of recently retired linebacker Lorenzo Alexander, who enjoyed a 14 year career in the NFL with 4 different franchises. He was mostly a special teams player but in his last stint in Buffalo became a starting linebacker and valuable leader on the defense. Alexander was a two-time Pro Bowler and has been nominated for the prestigious Walter Payton Man of The Year Award numerous times in his career, including the current season with the Bills.
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
Logo of a defunct pro football team that played in the National Football League from 1930 until 1943, the Brooklyn Dodgers. The team played at Ebbets Field, sharing the stadium with the Dodger baseball club. They were renamed the Tigers in 1944 but folded after that season, with their players being dispersed to the Boston Yanks franchise. There are four Hall of Famers who played for the franchise – Red Badgro, Benny Friedman, Bruiser Kinard and Ace Parker.
1955 Bowman football card of former pro kicker Ben Agajanian, who kicked for 10 different teams for a total of 13 seasons spanning 19 years and 3 decades. He is one of only 2 players who played in the All America Football Conference, the American Football League and the NFL. After having four of his toes crushed and amputated in a work accident in college, “The Toeless Wonder” went on to become one of pro football’s first kicking specialists. He was a member of championship teams in 1956 with the Giants and 1961 with Green Bay. After retiring at age 45 Agajanian worked as the Dallas Cowboys’ kicking coach for 20 years.
“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.
Logo of a small college football team that plays in the Southwestern Athletic Conference, the Prairie View A&M Panthers. The school began play in 1907, and has claimed 11 conference titles and 5 Black college football national championships. The Panthers also hold the dubious record of having lost the most consecutive games, a total of 80 between 1989 and 1998. Some Panther alumni who have played pro football include Jim Kearney, Otis Taylor, Ken Houston, Sam Adams, Clem Daniels, Alvin Reed, Jim Lee Hunt, Jim Mitchell and Charley Warner.