All-America Football Conference

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The All-America Football Conference (AAFC) was a professional American football league that challenged the rival National Football League from 1946 to 1949. The league was created in June 1944 and began play in 1946.

Looking for name recognition and establish credibility, the AAFC chose popular former University of Notre Dame standout Jim Crowley as its first commissioner on November 21, 1944. As one of the Fighting Irish's legendary Four Horsemen, Crowley also had a distinguished World War II naval career and aided the formative years of the league.

The AAFC started with eight teams playing 14 games per team, an increase from the 12 per year that the rival NFL played. While the AAFC was able to successfully compete against the National Football League in many cities, outdrawing the older league in terms of attendance, the continuing dominance of the league's Cleveland Browns would prove to be a problem.

When Crowley stepped down in January 1947, the league chose another naval hero, Admiral Jonas Howard Ingram to replace him. In 1948, the Browns became the first professional football team to complete an entire season undefeated and untied — 24 years before the 1972 Miami Dolphins of the NFL would accomplish the task.

On January 22, 1949, the league's owners named yet another Naval hero, Oliver O. Kessing, to head the league. Unfortunately, the fourth year of competition in the league saw the number of franchises drop to seven and the number of team's games drop to 12, with many AAFC teams in financial trouble due to escalating player salaries.

The elder NFL also found its teams in difficulty, and a merger agreement was reached on December 9, 1949. Three AAFC teams were merged into the older league:

The Cleveland Browns, winners of all four AAFC championships, who would go on to be the NFL's dominant team of the 1950s,
The San Francisco 49ers, who would be paired with the Los Angeles Dons, and
The original Baltimore Colts, who would play just one season (1950) in the NFL. The Colts name would be resurrected for an NFL expansion franchise, the Baltimore Colts, in 1953 and relocating to Indianapolis in 1984.

One notable difference between the All-America Football Conference and the American Football League (AFL), a league which also merged (intact) with the NFL two decades later, was that the records and statistics of AAFC players and teams (most of which folded) are not considered part of the NFL record book. For example, any records and statistics which Joe Namath achieved before the New York Jets merged with the AFL into the NFL are still considered part of official NFL statistics, while Y.A. Tittle's stats as a passer for the Baltimore Colts before the AAFC merged into the NFL are not considered official NFL statistics.