The Early NFL: Small Towns, Short Rosters and Unstable Franchises

By 4Football Staff · September 27, 2026 · 10 min read

In the 1920s and early 1930s the NFL was a shaky league of small-town clubs that came and went. Here is how it worked, why so many teams failed, and what finally steadied it.

If you could visit the National Football League of the mid-1920s, you would find it hard to recognize. There was no Super Bowl and no national television audience. Teams played in places like Rock Island, Illinois; Kenosha, Wisconsin; and Pottsville, Pennsylvania. Rosters were small, many players held other jobs and a team that was in the league one year might be gone the next.

This is the version of the NFL that many fans never hear about, because the league's later success overshadowed it. Yet the years between the founding in 1920 and the mid-1930s decided whether professional football would survive at all. Most pro football leagues in American history have failed. The NFL did not, partly because it learned from the instability of these years.

This article describes how the early league operated, why small towns hosted so many of its teams, how rosters worked, what caused franchises to fail and the events that began to turn the league into something more permanent. For how the league began, see the article on the founding of the NFL.

Why small towns?

It seems strange today that a league would be built around towns the size of Canton or Green Bay. In the 1920s, though, small towns were an attractive place to start a team.

• Low costs. A small-town team did not need a large stadium. It could play on a high school field, a fairground or a baseball park.
• Local pride. In a town with few entertainment options, a team could draw a loyal crowd. Local businesses supported the team, and the local newspaper gave it coverage.
• A ready pool of players. Many players had come from regional colleges and were happy to play on weekends while keeping a day job.
• Industrial sponsors. Companies in mill towns and factory towns often backed teams as a form of advertising and community goodwill. The Decatur Staleys, sponsored by a food manufacturer, are a famous example.

Big cities had advantages too, such as larger crowds, but they also had competition from college football, baseball and other entertainment. Pro football had not yet shown it could compete for attention in a big market, so the early league leaned on places where it was the main event.

A tour of the early clubs

The league's members changed so frequently that a complete list is long. A few examples give a sense of the range.

Some of those facts are worth emphasizing. The Oorang Indians were a team created partly as promotion for an Ohio dog kennel owned by Walter Lingo. According to the usual account, the players were Native Americans, Thorpe played and coached, and games included halftime entertainment that showed off the kennel's dogs. It was a marketing project as much as a team. The Portsmouth Spartans, from a small city on the Ohio River, were sold in 1934 and moved to Detroit, where they became the Lions. And the Packers, the only small-town club from that era to remain in the league continuously, did so through an unusual structure. The team was reorganized in the early 1920s so that the community, not an individual, owned the club. That structure has largely continued in the form of a publicly held nonprofit corporation, and it is a reason the team survived when others failed.

Rosters: small, tough and versatile

Early NFL rosters were very small compared with modern ones. The exact numbers varied by team and year, and the sources differ, but a typical early roster might have been a couple of dozen players or fewer, and some clubs went into games with only a handful of replacements. A famous example is the Duluth team of 1926, whose star was Ernie Nevers. The club's owner, Ole Haugsrud, had signed him to a contract, and the team traveled extensively, playing many games with a roster of roughly fifteen to twenty players. Its players became known as the "Iron Men" because there were so few of them.

Short rosters had consequences for how the game was played.

• Players went both ways. With so few players, most stayed on the field for offense, defense and sometimes special teams. Specialists were rare.
• Positions overlapped. A halfback might run, pass, punt and play defensive back in the same game.
• Injuries were a major problem. When a starter was hurt, a team might have no one equivalent to replace him, and games were sometimes played shorthanded.
• Equipment was minimal by today's standards. Many players wore only a leather helmet or none at all. The NFL did not require helmets until the 1940s. The longer story is in the article on the evolution of the football helmet.

The result was a game that favored durable, versatile athletes. Fans of the era admired players who could do many things and endure a full game.

Player-coaches and player-owners

Another feature of the era that surprises modern fans is how many of the people in charge were also on the field. George Halas played end for the Bears while also coaching and running the club, and Curly Lambeau did a similar job for the Packers. Jim Thorpe was a player-coach with the Oorang team. This overlap made sense when budgets were tight: a person who could play, coach and handle the business side saved the team several salaries.

It also meant that the sport's early strategists learned by doing. The coaches who later shaped the league's style had spent years taking the same hits as their players, and they had to run practices, arrange travel and sell tickets in the same week. Rivalries that still exist, such as the one between the Bears and the Packers, began in this setting, between clubs run by men who knew each other personally.

Why franchises failed

The 1920s and early 1930s were a period of constant turnover. The league had a few teams at the start, grew to more than twenty in the middle of the 1920s, and then shrank again. The usual statistics describing this churn, such as the number of teams that joined and left, differ from source to source, but the pattern is clear. Dozens of franchises came and went.

Several causes recur in the histories.

1. Thin finances. Teams depended on ticket sales. A rainy Sunday, a poor home schedule or a disappointing season could ruin a club's finances.
2. Small markets. In a town of a few thousand people, the number of potential spectators was limited. A team could not grow beyond that ceiling.
3. Competition for talent and fans. Rival leagues and independent clubs sometimes lured players away, and in the biggest cities pro football struggled to compete with the college game.
4. No shared revenue. Visiting teams were often paid a share of the gate, but the league had no sophisticated way to support weaker clubs.
5. Owners' limited resources. A franchise might be run by one local businessperson. When he lost interest or money, the team folded.
6. The Great Depression. The economic collapse that began in 1929 made it harder for fans to buy tickets and for owners to cover losses.

The league tried to manage this through consolidation. In 1926 the NFL had roughly two dozen teams, but in 1927 it trimmed its membership sharply, to about a dozen, by dropping weaker clubs. By 1932 the league was down to eight teams. That is a very small number compared with the league today, and it reflects how fragile the enterprise had become.

The Pottsville dispute of 1925

One episode illustrates both how loose the league's authority was and how emotional its disputes could be. In December 1925, the Pottsville Maroons were among the strongest teams in the league. Late in the season, Pottsville played an exhibition game in Philadelphia against a team of former Notre Dame players. That game took place in the area that the league had assigned to the Frankford Yellow Jackets, and Frankford complained that Pottsville had violated its territorial rights.

The league suspended Pottsville, and the team lost its chance to continue in the title race. The Chicago Cardinals were then recognized as champions for 1925. Pottsville supporters have argued ever since that the team deserved the title, and the issue has come up in later discussions among league owners, who have not changed the record. The details of the dispute, including who knew what and whether the game should have been allowed, are argued in different ways. The most important lesson is that the league's territorial system was a real attempt to protect franchises, and that it could be used to settle a title dispute.

The big-city anchors

While small-town clubs struggled, a handful of teams in larger places gave the league a more stable core.

• The Chicago Bears and Chicago Cardinals. Chicago was home to two NFL clubs, and the Bears in particular developed into a strong franchise.
• The New York Giants. Tim Mara reportedly bought the New York franchise in 1925 for a modest sum, and the team became a fixture in the country's biggest market. The 1925 season was also when Red Grange's barnstorming tour came to New York, an event described in the article on Red Grange and the rise of professional football.
• The Green Bay Packers. Small by population, but supported by a community that treated the team as its own.

These teams helped show that pro football could succeed in larger places and that a long-lasting franchise needed local loyalty and steady leadership. They also provided the league with a core of clubs that could survive the years when others failed.

A rival league and a league that had to respond

The NFL did not have the field to itself. In 1926, Grange and his manager started a rival, the American Football League, which lasted a single season. The existence of competitors forced the NFL to defend its territory and its players. It is one of several short-lived rival leagues discussed in the article on pro football leagues beyond the NFL.

What changed in the early 1930s

By the early 1930s, the league was smaller but more stable, and it began to make changes that would define its future.

• A playoff in 1932. The Chicago Bears and the Portsmouth Spartans finished the 1932 season tied for first. The league arranged a playoff game to decide the title, and because of bitter cold and snow it was moved indoors to Chicago Stadium, where it was played on a shortened field. The Bears won. The game showed that fans were interested in a championship game.
• Divisions and a title game in 1933. The league split into Eastern and Western divisions and scheduled a championship game between the winners. This created the structure that later generations would recognize, with division races leading to a title game.
• Rule changes that opened the game. In 1933 the league made several rule changes, including a rule that allowed a forward pass to be thrown from anywhere behind the line of scrimmage and the introduction of hash marks to move the ball away from the sideline. Those changes helped make the game more exciting.
• The college draft in 1936. The league began holding an annual draft of college players, designed to spread talent more evenly among teams and to give weaker teams the first chance at the best new players. You can see the modern version on our draft page.

None of these changes made the NFL rich overnight. Pro football remained second to college football in popularity for years. But they gave the league a structure that could attract stable investment.

What the early years taught the league

If you want a sense of how far the league has come, compare the eight clubs of 1932 with the full list on our teams page, and look at how the divisions they pioneered now appear on the standings page.

Looking back, it is possible to identify several lessons the league took from this era.

• Territory matters. Protecting a club's home market was necessary if owners were to invest.
• A shared structure beats a loose association. Standings, a schedule and a title game gave the league a story that fans could follow.
• Parity helps survival. The draft was an attempt to keep weak teams from falling permanently behind.
• Big markets and small markets can coexist, but the league has to find a way to support the small ones. This idea eventually led to the revenue-sharing model the league uses today.

Reading early NFL history carefully

If you read more about this period, be prepared for inconsistencies. Early records were kept casually. Team names changed, franchise histories are sometimes disputed, and the league has revised its official records over the years. When you see an exact figure for a crowd or a salary, look for the source. And keep in mind that stories about colorful characters have often been polished in retelling.

The short version

• The early NFL, from 1920 into the 1930s, was built around small towns, with teams such as Green Bay, Canton, Rock Island, Duluth and Pottsville.
• Rosters were short, players often went both ways, and equipment was minimal.
• Franchises failed because of thin finances, small markets, competition, the Depression and weak league structure; the league shrank to eight teams by 1932.
• The 1925 Pottsville dispute showed how territorial rules could decide a title argument.
• Big-city teams such as the Bears, Giants and Cardinals, plus the community-owned Packers, formed the stable core.
• The 1932 playoff, the 1933 divisions and title game, rule changes and the 1936 draft began the move toward the modern league.