When the NFL agreed in 1966 to merge with the AFL by 1970, many insiders figured Birmingham would have a team in professional football’s top league. 57 years later, Birmingham still has never had an NFL team. Part 1 in a series from CregStephenson:
So why was Marshall so confident in 1966 that Birmingham was on the cusp of achieving big-league football status and why didn’t it happen? The story is long and more than a little complicated.
The two leagues continued to battle for territory through much of the 1960s, with the AFL grabbing Miami and Cincinnati and the NFL placing teams in Minnesota, Atlanta and New Orleans. The rapid expansion of both leagues created instability, particularly in markets such as Denver and Boston, both of which had less-than-ideal stadium situations.
Birmingham of course had Legion Field, built in 1927 but renovated and expanded in 1961 to increase its seating capacity to 54,600 and again to more than 68,000 in 1965. Alabama and Auburn both regularly played home games there, with the season-ending Iron Bowl its yearly neutral-site showcase. Tom Cosby, who worked for the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce for more than 35 years, was involved in several of those efforts in the 1970s and 80s. After a while, it became akin to an abusive relationship.
Over the years, many have dismissed pro football’s potential in Birmingham for the sole reason that it is primarily a college sports town. Alabama and Auburn — but not professional sports — could thrive in the market, many people thought. Until the mid-1960s, however, such a venture was a non-starter for one obvious reason — segregation. Efforts to overturn local ordinances forbidding Black and White people from participating together in sporting events failed repeatedly and resulted in Birmingham losing its Southern League baseball team for two seasons beginning in 1962.
Birmingham lost its minor-league baseball team for three seasons in the early 1960s over the city's refusal to integrate. Once the city struck down segregation statutes, the team returned in 1964, and later featured such African-American stars as Reggie Jackson. Jackson is shown during a 1967 exhibition game with Charlie Finley, who owned both the Kansas City Athletics and the Birmingham A's.
Morrow and his compatriots also broached the idea of relocating an existing team. Denver, whose citizens had voted down a stadium bond issue in March 1966, was at the top of the list. The NFL by this time had added two expansion franchises in the South: the Atlanta Falcons in 1966 and the New Orleans Saints in 1967. That also wasn’t particularly good news for Birmingham.
Mere days after the Patriots-Jets game was announced, the name of yet another AFL franchise emerged in connection with Birmingham. This time it was the Dolphins, who had averaged a mere 28,535 for games at the 70,000-seat Orange Bowl in their second season. The NFL-AFL merger and the related expansion had pushed the league to 26 teams by 1969. No other franchises would move for more than a decade, and there would be no further expansion until 1976.
“Clearly, you had a major transition in the economy that began in the late 60s,” Corley said. “So you have these two events coming together — the desegregation with the Civil Rights Movement, and deindustrialization with the steel industry beginning to suffer from international competition from Japan and from Germany as those economies finally recovered after World War II.
“A number of people have said to me over the years that the best chance to have gotten an NFL team was my dad’s opportunity,” son Hugh Morrow IV said. “My mother always said she didn’t think it was a real opportunity, that it was just leverage to force the merger between the AFL and the NFL. If the last realistic chance was in the late 60s, that was the last chance that some of the warts that ended up becoming well-known about Birmingham, you could have covered them up.
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