Los Angeles Wildcats - American Football League Play

American Football League Play

As the team began league play, it became evident that Wilson was not the only weapon that the Wildcats had. Coach Jim Clark had the versatile Mal Bross for either rushing and receiving duties; ends Ray Flaherty and Jim Lawson dutifully caught passes from Wilson, while Duke Morrison ran when Wilson didn’t take the ball. Furthermore, no fewer than four Wildcats handled the kicking job at one time or another.

Originally scheduled to play only 10 games, the Wildcats played additional contests as last-minute “fill-in” opponents as one team after another in the American Football League folded or otherwise left the league. Immediately after tying the Chicago Bulls in Comiskey Park, the team trekked to Toronto’s Maple Leaf Stadium for a game with the New York Yankees, which also played games on back-to-back days. The Yankees won, 29-0. It was not the first weekend in which the Wildcats played on consecutive days (they actually did so on three other weekends); their Thanksgiving Day contest with the Bulls (a scoreless tie) was their third in a five day stretch.

By the end of October, the Cleveland Panthers and Newark Bears have closed up shop; the Brooklyn Horsemen merged with their NFL cousins, the Brooklyn Lions in early November, and the Boston Shamrocks, a team that was subsidized by Pyle’s money dropped out. In the four weeks from the departure of Cleveland and the exit of Boston, scheduling “holes” were filled by the two traveling teams of the AFL: the Wildcats and the Rock Island Independents… that is, until November 21, when the Independents – charter members of both the NFL and the AFL – joined the exodus from the younger league by calling it quits after a 3-0 loss to the Bulls. With only two weeks remaining in the season, the Wildcats, Yankees, and Bulls – three teams owned (or co-owned) by Pyle and Grange – and the Philadelphia Quakers were the last teams remaining, with only the Quakers reporting a profit.

Only two official AFL games were left to play in December 1926. On the 5th, the Wildcats shut out the Bulls 5-0 on a frozen field in Comiskey Park, while the Bulls hosted the Yankees the following Sunday as the visiting team wrapped up the 1926 season of the American Football League with a 7-3 victory. At the same time, in a snowstorm at the Polo Grounds, the league champion Quakers were crushed, 31-0, by the New York Giants in a game that marked the end of the American Football League, December 12, 1926.