American Football League Influence
Conversely, the American Football League actively recruited players from small colleges that had been largely ignored by the NFL, giving those schools' black players the opportunity to play professional football. As a result, for the years 1960 through 1962, AFL teams averaged 17% more blacks than NFL teams did. By 1969, a comparison of the two league's championship team photos showed the AFL's Chiefs with 23 black players out of 51 players pictured, while the NFL Vikings had 11 blacks, of 42 players in the photo. The American Football League had the first black placekicker in U.S. professional football, Gene Mingo of the Denver Broncos (Mingo's primary claim to fame, however, was as a running back, and was only secondarily a placekicker); and the first black regular starting quarterback of the modern era, James Harris of the Buffalo Bills. (Marlin Briscoe, a wide receiver/defensive back for the Denver Broncos, also started several games as the Broncos' third-string quarterback at around the same time as Harris, but he returned to wide receiver after leaving the Broncos.) Willie Thrower was a back-up quarterback who saw some action in the 1950s for the Chicago Bears.
Read more about this topic: Black Players In American Professional Football
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