Broncos, Bengals and the Big Red Machine
The first regular-season victory in Bengals history came at the expense of the Broncos at UC’s Nippert Stadium on Sept. 15, 1968.
But the ties between the Broncos and Bengals didn’t start with that first meeting. They include a stint the two teams had as division rivals, their shared use of the color orange, and even baseball’s Big Red Machine.
The story begins in 1959, with planning for the birth of the American Football League the following year.
The AFL was founded by Lamar Hunt, the 27-year-old son of one of the world’s richest men, Texas oilman H.L. Hunt. H.L. was said to be the inspiration for the character J.R. Ewing on the TV series, “Dallas.”
Lamar Hunt wanted a pro football team for his hometown of Dallas. He tried unsuccessfully to buy the NFL’s Chicago Cardinals, and was told repeatedly that the 12-team league was not going to expand any time soon.
Hunt's solution was to start his own football league with other prospective team owners who had also been closed out of the established NFL.
His first recruit was Bud Adams, another Texas oilman who wanted a team for Houston. Hunt then set out to find four more suitors to round out the six-team league he envisioned.
Among them was Bob Howsam, owner of the Denver Bears minor league baseball club. Howsam built Denver’s 18,000-seat ballpark, Bears Stadium, in 1948. Years later, Bengals fans would come to know that venue as Mile High Stadium.
Howsam was a successful baseball man, twice being named Minor League Executive of the Year by The Sporting News. He wanted to bring major league baseball to Denver, and was to be the owner of a team in a proposed third major league, the Continental League of Professional Baseball. Headed by legendary baseball executive Branch Rickey, the league planned to begin play in 1961.
Howsam began expanding Bears Stadium to meet the Continental League’s attendance requirements, and wanted to add a pro football team as an additional tenant. So when Hunt came calling in 1959, Howsam was receptive.
In August 1959, Hunt and Adams formally announced the AFL’s plans to kick off in fall 1960. Six cities were lined up: Dallas, Houston, Denver, Minneapolis, New York and Los Angeles. The seventh and eighth teams, Buffalo and Boston, were soon added.
With a competing football league quickly becoming a reality, the NFL took notice. Chicago Bears owner George Halas, chairman of the NFL’s expansion committee, announced the NFL now had plans to expand by two. He named Dallas and Houston as potential cities.
When the AFL owners gathered for their inaugural draft in November 1959, they learned of another blow delivered by Halas: He had persuaded the Minneapolis group to defect to the NFL. The AFL then chose Oakland as its eighth member, a team that ironically would be named the Raiders.
In January 1960, the NFL approved two new teams in Dallas and Minneapolis (but not Houston).
The Dallas Cowboys were put on the field in 1960 to coincide with Hunt’s Dallas Texans' first season. Because the expansion approval came after the NFL had held its college draft in November, the Cowboys played their first season without the benefit of a draft class. The Minnesota Vikings kicked off in 1961.
Howsam’s pro football team was now a reality, but his hopes for his own Major League Baseball team for Denver collapsed when the Continental League owners abandoned their plans in August 1960. Regardless, capacity at Bears Stadium had been doubled in time for the AFL’s inaugural season.
Money was tight for the fledgling Broncos, and the team struggled on the field. Howsam found one infamous way to save money. He outfitted the Broncos in used uniforms, left over from the defunct Copper Bowl, a college all-star game in Tucson, Arizona. The colors were brown and gold, with one particularly garish feature: vertical brown and gold striped socks.
After two seasons, financial difficulties and a 7-20-1 record, Howsam sold the Broncos and Bears Stadium. But life would go on for the Broncos and for Howsam.
In 1962, the new Broncos ownership group hired Jack Faulkner as head coach. Faulkner was a Youngstown, Ohio, native who played college football at Miami, Ohio, under coach Sid Gillman. Faulkner was hired as an assistant when Gillman became head coach at the University of Cincinnati in 1949. After also coaching under Gillman with the NFL’s Rams and the AFL’s Chargers from 1955 to 1961, Faulkner took over the Broncos in 1962.
He set out to change the team’s image, and started by burning their infamous uniforms in a public bonfire at the end of training camp. Faulkner wanted a new color scheme.
During his time in Ohio, Faulkner came to admire coach Paul Brown’s Cleveland Browns, who were the kings of pro football in that era. The orange, brown and white-clad Browns dominated the All-America Football Conference from 1946 to 1949 before the league folded. They joined the NFL in 1950, and won the championship their first year in the league.
All told, Brown’s team played in 11 championship games in their first 12 seasons, winning seven titles.
The Browns made an impression on Faulkner, and "embedded orange in his mind," according to denverbroncos.com. This prompted him to select orange, blue and white as the Broncos’ new colors.
New ownership in Cleveland also brought change for Paul Brown. In 1961, his team had been sold to a New York advertising executive, Art Modell. After two years and several clashes, Modell fired Brown in January 1963, a move that deeply wounded the Ohio coaching legend and sent him into pro football exile.
Brown’s son Mike set out to help his father get back into the NFL.
“I was a young lawyer in Cleveland and wet behind the ears,” current Bengals owner Mike Brown told The Enquirer in a June 2014 interview. “I was intent on righting the wrong, if you will, in my mind.”
An opportunity soon arrived that might have led the Brown family to the Mile High City.
“The Denver Broncos were for sale. And I went out to Denver, I met with them and my father elected not to go forward with that. I think we could have,” Mike Brown said.
Paul Brown was wary of getting involved in the underdog AFL’s struggle with the NFL. “My father had come out of the All-America Football Conference. He had been involved in a league that failed. He had had his fingers burned,” Mike Brown said. “He didn’t want to run the risk, and I think that that was fully understandable.”
As it turned out, Paul Brown’s return to pro football ended up coming through the AFL after all. The NFL and AFL had added teams in Atlanta and Miami, respectively, in 1966. That same year, the two leagues settled their bitter conflict by agreeing to a merger.
They began playing a championship game after the 1966 season — known today as the Super Bowl — but would continue playing separate league schedules for four more seasons. The merger agreement called for two new franchises to be added no later than 1968, one in each league. All teams would be fully integrated in 1970 under the umbrella of the National Football League.
Brown’s expansion group, seeking a team for Cincinnati, wanted to join the NFL but lost out to New Orleans. “We, in our mind, were pursuing a NFL franchise,” Mike Brown said.
But with the merger agreement in place, Paul Brown settled for the final spot in the AFL.
“My father came to realize that there was no longer going to be the war between the AFL and the NFL, that there was a merger now, and we would not have the peril that he remembered from back with the All-America Conference," Mike Brown said. "It was going to be one.”
When it came time to design his new team’s uniform, Paul Brown chose a simple design reminiscent of the Cleveland Browns’ uniforms. The Broncos also factored into the decision. In his 1979 autobiography “PB, the Paul Brown Story,” Brown wrote: “My one key principle was ‘nothing too flashy’ because nothing is worse than a bad team with a crazy-looking uniform. The old Denver Broncos’ vertical-striped stockings had made them a laughingstock in the early ‘60s, and I was determined to avoid anything that might bring ridicule while we struggled to become respectable.”
The orange, black and white-clad Bengals took the field in 1968. They were allocated into the AFL’s Western Division, where the Bengals and Broncos spent two seasons as division rivals. “Oakland, San Diego, Denver, Kansas City and way out here, us,” Mike Brown said. “We were happy to be up and running, to be included, but we did not feel that that was the best fit for a Cincinnati franchise.”
When the merger completed in 1970, the Bengals moved into a more geographically appropriate division. But if it weren’t for Paul Brown, the Bengals might still be playing in a division with Denver. As the deadline to complete the merger approached, sentiment grew among owners to keep the alignments as they were, with the 10-team AFL becoming one conference and the 16-team NFL the other.
Paul Brown led the charge to realign into two equal 13-team conferences. “That was resisted by many in the NFL who looked down on the AFL, and (by) some in the AFL, who felt proud about what they had accomplished and wanted to stay apart,” Mike Brown said.
Paul Brown argued that the agreement the Bengals had signed called for realignment. “We argued — forcibly — that the deal that was given us — the contract we signed — gave us the belief, by its terms, that there would be a full merger. That there would be two equal conferences,” Mike Brown said.
Opinions were swayed when Edward Bennett Williams, who represented the Washington Redskins, told the owners that no court in the land would say that there shouldn’t be a full and complete merger. “Edward Bennett Williams was the rock star of the legal profession at that time,” Mike Brown said. “He stood up and said that our position was the right position.”
Realigning meant that three NFL teams would have to join the American Conference, something they were reluctant to do. The result was a marathon owners’ meeting at NFL headquarters in New York.
“We were all in there and we sat in little schoolboy chairs,” Mike Brown said. “(NFL Commissioner Pete) Rozelle sat up at the front. And this meeting was started as a massive impasse.”
After an exhaustive debate that lasted through the night into the following day, the Cleveland Browns, Pittsburgh Steelers and Baltimore Colts agreed to move to the American Conference. Cleveland and Pittsburgh were paired with the Bengals and Adams’ Houston Oilers in the Central Division, the precursor to today’s AFC North.
“We were very excited,” Mike Brown said. “For two years we had played in the old AFL. Now we were in the American Football Conference, in a division that made sense for us.”
Howsam also found his way to a place that made sense for him when he returned to baseball. He was named general manager in 1964 of the St. Louis Cardinals, who went on to win the World Series that year.
As Cincinnati worked to land the Bengals, a place to play became an obstacle. Crosley Field, the home of the Reds, was too small for pro football. Reds owner Bill DeWitt was reluctant to move the team to a proposed multi-purpose stadium on the Ohio River.
In 1967, DeWitt sold the Reds to a group headed by Frank Dale, publisher of The Cincinnati Enquirer and a supporter of Cincinnati’s proposed Riverfront Stadium. Dale then hired Howsam as Reds vice president and general manager in 1967.
Howsam beefed up the farm system and hired more scouts. In October 1969, he hired Sparky Anderson as the team’s new manager. Howsam had hired Anderson twice before as a minor-league manager with the Cardinals in 1965 and in 1967 with the Reds’ Double-A Asheville, North Carolina, team.
Key pieces to the championship puzzle came sandwiched between World Series losses in 1970 and 1972.
In 1971, Howsam acquired future Hall of Fame 2B Joe Morgan from the Houston Astros and OF George Foster from the San Francisco Giants.
“Our lack of speed and defense had been magnified by our new stadium,” Howsam told The Associated Press in 1975. “We went after Morgan because he was a base-stealer and because we thought he would team with David Concepcion to give us a better double-play combination that would help our pitching.”
It all came together for the Big Red Machine with the famed “Great Eight” lineup of Morgan, Foster, Johnny Bench, Tony Perez, Dave Concepcion, Pete Rose, Cesar Geronimo and Ken Griffey Sr.
The lineup fueled World Series victories in 1975 and 1976, when the Reds became the first NL team to win back-to-back World championships since the 1922 New York Giants.
Howsam stepped down in 1978 and turned the reins over to his longtime assistant, Dick Wagner. For several years afterward, the team struggled, including a franchise-worst 101-loss season in 1982. Howsam returned for a two-year stint in 1983.
Howsam later would help bring the Colorado Rockies to Denver as a member of the Colorado Baseball Commission in the early 1990s and served as a consultant to the team. His vision of Major League Baseball at Bears Stadium finally materialized in 1993, when the Rockies played their first two seasons at Mile High Stadium.
Howsam was elected to the Reds Hall of Fame in 2004. He died in 2008.
"I felt really bad that football didn't get off to the start I had hoped for in Denver,” Howsam once told the Denver Post. “But I also feel that I reached the highest peak a person could reach in baseball."
Information for this story was gathered from “PB: The Paul Brown Story”, by Paul Brown with Jack Clary; “America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation,” by Michael MacCambridge; “Ten-Gallon War,” by John Eisenberg; “Rozelle: Czar of the NFL,” by Jeff Davis, Enquirer reporting and archives; The Denver Post, denverbroncos.com and The Associated Press.