Anti-Dynasty #59: 1920-26 Hammond Pros

Peak Anti-Dynasty Points: 33
Record: 7-28-4 (.231)
Average DVOA: -9.2%
Bottom-Five DVOA: -16.3%
Two last-place finishes in the AFPA/NFL
Head Coaches: Hank Gillo, Max Hicks, Wally Hess, Fritz Pollard, Doc Young
Key Players: B Wally Hess, E Inky Williams, OL Russ Oltz, OL Frank Rydzewski, OL Dave Tallant
Z-Score: -9.70

Yes, get all your Chicago Bears jokes out now. But we mean the original Hammond Pros: perhaps the least accurately named team in NFL history.

For the first part, they weren't really pros. This was the 1920s, the infancy of the professional game, and the Hammond Pros were a glorified sandlot team. Their players almost all had full-time jobs elsewhere, and they didn't have time to practice or train. Even in the 1920s, a team that barely worked together wasn't going to do anything against average NFL competition. For the second part, they didn't really play in Hammond. Only two of the Pros' 39 NFL games were at home, as Hammond, Indiana didn't have a field with enough stands to make games financially viable – how times change. Hammond became a travelling team, playing some games in Cubs Park, but mostly going from city to city to fill out the schedule for the new league and generally getting pasted; they bookended their time in the league with estimated DVOAs of -38.1% and -38.6%.

Ah, the 1920s; they make doing this sort of historical analysis a real mess. The league was filled with fly-by-night teams that would play for one year, get blown out by two or three established clubs, put up crazy estimated DVOA numbers, and fold. That's why this list devalues seasons where teams played only a handful of games. Otherwise, the top of the list would be filled with the Tonawanda Kardex and the Muncie Flyers and the Kenosha Maroons; teams that were happy to be there and soon enough happy to have left. By the standards of those kinds of teams, the Pros weren't that bad. They make the bottom of the list by sheer tenacity. Most owners would have gotten bored or run out of money, but Doc Young stuck it out.

See, the Pros had a history. In 1919, the year before the AFPA started, Hammond and the Canton Bulldogs played a game in Chicago on Thanksgiving Day, drawing a crowd of 12,000—an unofficial world championship game, with Jim Thorpe's Bulldogs going up against George Halas' Pros. The reception to that game was one of the final straws that convinced team owners that a professional football league would be viable. Halas left to start something called the Decatur Staleys after the game, and most of the Pros' other key players left for other, better-paying clubs, but the Pros persisted.

The NFL version of the Pros wasn't without its notable moments. They employed future Hall of Famer Fritz Pollard and 1923 All-Pro (and later pioneering record producer) Inky Williams; both men were African-American. In fact, six of the nine Black players from the early wilderness years of the league played for the Pros. This was less about a progressive hiring mindset and more about "we need warm bodies and no one else will pay you," but it at least gives the Pros a level of notoriety above and beyond other traveling teams. For the most part, however, the Pros were notable for being terrible. They went the entire 1922 season without scoring and would regularly be blown out by amateur teams with names like the Chicago Morris Supremes. In 1927, the NFL dropped from 22 to 12 teams as they cut financially unviable clubs, and Indiana was left without a football team until the 1980s.

And Hammond was left without a football team until...well, stay tuned, I suppose.