History of The National Football League in Los Angeles - The Early Years

The Early Years

The first NFL team to name itself after the city of Los Angeles was the Los Angeles Buccaneers in 1926. However, this was a road team, based in Chicago, made up of Californians, primarily University of California and University of Southern California alumni. The historian Michael McCambridge says that the Buccaneers became a road team because the Los Angeles Coliseum Commission had banned pro teams from its stadium. However, the difficulty of transcontinental travel in the era before modern air travel must have also been a factor in the decision to base the team in the Midwest. The upstart American Football League also featured a similar Midwest-based road team of West Coast players, the Los Angeles Wildcats. Both Los Angeles teams performed respectably on the field but folded after the 1926 season. Ironically, the Wildcats' last game was an exhibition in San Francisco against the Buccaneers in January 1927.

The first major professional football team to actually reside in Los Angeles was the Los Angeles Bulldogs, who operated both as an independent and as a member of several other leagues from approximately 1934 to 1948, in its later years reduced to minor status. The NFL had actually admitted the Bulldogs to the league for the 1937 NFL season, but reneged on the agreement because of travel concerns (the great distance between the Bulldogs and every other team, plus having to cross the Rocky Mountains in an era when travel by airplane was still a rare and hazardous endeavor, proved to be too much of a risk for the NFL to be willing to take).