Anti-Dynasty #43: 1923-1929 Dayton Triangles

Peak Anti-Dynasty Points: 59
Record: 5-42-4 (.137)
Average DVOA: -16.8%
Bottom-Five DVOA: -23.5%
Three last-place finishes in the NFL
Head Coaches: Carl Storck, Lou Mahrt, Fay Abbott
Key Players: B Fay Abbott, E Harold Fenner, T Ed Sauer, G Al Graham, C Hobby Kinderdine
Z-Score: -3.92

Five wins in 51 games. I don't care who you are or when you played, that is an embarrassing set of results. It's not the lowest winning percentage of any team on our list, but the Columbus Panhandles and Rochester Jeffersons played barely half this many contests. This was an established team (by 1920s standards, at least) showing up week after week and getting crushed.

The Triangles were highly competitive throughout the 1910s, winning the Ohio League in the pandemic year of 1918 and finishing in the upper half of the standings in their first three seasons in the NFL, led by an extraordinarily stingy defense. At their peak, they only allowed 13 points in eight games in 1917, and they allowed single-digit points per game from 1920 to 1922 as well—not as impressive back then as it would be today, but still significantly better than average, even in the offensively depressed environment of the time. Very roughly translated (and I stress very roughly), that would be defensive DVOAs somewhere around -10.0% in today's money, a perfectly respectable result. That continued even into the terrible era we're looking at here. In 1925, they allowed 84 points in eight games, and they were doing this all on the road while intentionally scheduling the toughest teams they could find; they had the third-hardest strength of schedule that year. The problem was they only scored three points all season.

The culprit was the modernization of the game. The Triangles continued to use and recruit local players first and foremost—they started as a rec football club from employees at Delco and neighboring factories, and didn't expand much beyond that. They stuck to that ideal even as the Lambeaus and Halases of the world were beginning to sign top college players from around the country. This, as it turns out, is not a record for success. In addition, their home stadium, Triangle Park, could barely seat 5,000, and didn't draw even those sorts of crowds. The only way to remain financially viable was to become a travelling team, taking the $2,500 guarantees to go get beaten by the best and brightest.

The Triangles were an ideal traveling team. They were not nearly as bad as their record would indicate for most of this period; they managed an estimated DVOA of -3.6% going 0-7-1 in 1925 and even hit positive numbers during their 1-6-1 1927 season. They were a team you could schedule, knowing they'd come in and give you a solid game, but not so solid that you couldn't come out with a win by 10 points or so—mooks you could defeat to send the crowd home happy. They had the name recognition from being a successful franchise from the 1910s, they had a handful of All-Pros to hype, they were centrally located and thus could get to the Polo Grounds as easily as they could get to Wrigley Field—they were, by quite some margin, the most successful traveling team in NFL history. That's why they were one of only three teams, joining the Bears and Cardinals, to play in every season in the 1920s. They survived the culling of 1926, where 10 teams were cut for being financially weak. The Triangles were basically Barry Horowitz; a beloved jobber to the stars.

Finding the cutoff point for these early teams is difficult. 1929 was the last season for the Dayton Triangles, because the franchise was bought and moved to Brooklyn, becoming the Brooklyn Dodgers (we'll meet them shortly). The Dodgers became the Tigers and then merged with the New York Yanks, who we have already talked about. The Yanks players formed the New York Bulldogs, who became the New York Yanks, who were sold to become the Dallas Texans, who went out of business and sent their players to the Baltimore Colts. You could argue that Indianapolis is, in a roundabout way, the direct descendant of the Triangles, and that all these teams are just one big franchise with a convoluted history. The NFL doesn't see it that way, with the Colts not claiming any of this history, and figuring out just where one team ends and another begins is a Gordian Knot. We're ending the legacy of the Triangles here, as the team changed cities, owners, name, colors, and about 70% of the roster when they moved. But, if you consider, say, the old Browns and new Ravens one team, there's an argument for keeping this going.

If you consider the Triangles and the Dodgers to be one coherent team, the resulting 38-105-12 monstrosity would end up in the top 20 on this list. But that is a story for a later entry.