Sunday, December 26, 1999
'50s Cardinals compare to '90s Bengals
BY JOHN ERARDI
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Of history's worst football teams who have decades all to themselves, the 1950s Chicago Cardinals are most akin to the Bengals when it comes to falling from grace so soon after a championship.
The Cardinals played in the NFL Championship in 1948, losing to Philadelphia, 7-0. They also had played in the 1947 championship game, beating Philadelphia, 28-21.
But in the '50s, the Cardinals flopped.
They went 33-84-3 (a winning percentage of only .275). They were plagued by a variety of problems, among them bad coaching and the lack of a good quarterback.
They were so bad that the other NFL teams and CBS-TV paid to get them out of the league. It's all detailed in the book The League: the Rise and Decline of the NFL, by David Harris.
Mr. Harris wrote that a considerable portion of the $500,000 paid to the Cardinals to compensate them for the improvements they had made to Soldier Field was mere prelude to moving the Cardinals to St. Louis for the 1960 season.
Why had CBS become involved? Because Chicago was the only city in the league that had a split market — the Bears were the city's other NFL football team. Back then, an entire city would be blacked out from watching a home game on TV whether or not the game was sold out. With two teams in Chicago, this meant the nation's second-largest TV market was almost always under the blackout.
The presence of the new commissioner, Pete Rozelle, had a lot to do with the Cardinals' move out of Chicago, Mr. Harris wrote. Mr. Rozelle didn't want any weak sisters in the league.
And besides, let's give the Cardinals their due. As bad as they were, they weren't truly bad quite as quickly as the Bengals.
After playing in the 1948 title game, the Cardinals went a full five years before going on the kind of bender — 1-10 — that would be regarded in retrospect as something truly reminiscent of the Bengals.
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