Pennsylvania Polka

Both the Philadelphia Eagles and Pittsburgh Pirates franchises were founded in 1933, after blue laws in Pennsylvania were rescinded to allow organized sports teams to play on Sundays.[1] Bert Bell and Lud Wray founded the Eagles, and Art Rooney founded the Pirates.[2] The Pirates became the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1940.[3]

Wray coached the Eagles in their first three years from 1933–1935, with no winning seasons, compiling a 9–21–1 record. In that time period, the partners exhausted $85,000 (presently, $1,792,542),[4] and at a public auction in 1936, Bell became sole owner of the Eagles with a bid of $4,500 (presently, $94,899).[5] Austerity measures forced him to supplant Wray as head coach of the Eagles,[6] but Bell also did not produce a winning season, finishing the 1940 season with a 1–10 record and a 10–44–2 overall career coaching record.

By 1940, the Steelers were on their fifth head coach in eight years. Like the Eagles, the Steelers had not posted a winning record in their franchise's history. Walt Kiesling entered his second season as head coach of the Steelers in 1940. Before the 1940 season, Rooney said if the Steelers had another losing season he would be compelled to sell the team.[7] The team started the season at 1–0–2[8] before falling at home by a score of 10–3 to a Brooklyn Dodgers squad coached by local hero Jock Sutherland.[9] He had assumed the head job for the Dodgers that year after spurning a similar offer from Pittsburgh.[10] The loss to the Dodgers began a six-game losing streak, before the team traded wins with the Eagles to cap a 2–7–2 season in which they scored a total of just 60 points.[11] Over eight years, the team had compiled a record of 24–62–5 and had lost around $100,000 ($2.1 million today).[11] Rooney was also concerned about the availability of players in the coming seasons due to the ongoing war in Europe and the specter of a military draft.[12]

After turning down several earlier offers to relocate or sell the team,[13] in December 1940, Rooney sold the Steelers to Alexis Thompson.[14] Thompson was a 26-year-old, Yale-educated heir to a steel fortune and an entrepreneur living in New York.[15]

Thompson originally sought to buy the Eagles from Bell in November 1940, but Bell connected him with Rooney to make an offer on the Steelers.[16][17] The Steelers hired Bell to negotiate the sale and promised him a 20% cut of the sale price if it sold within 30 days.[18] The purchase price was reported to be $160,000 ($3.3 million today).[19] This price was less than the $225,000 ($4.7 million today) the Detroit Lions had previously sold for, but the Lions had won an NFL championship.[13] Bell earned $32,000 from the sale.[20] The transaction was completed and announced on the same day that the Chicago Bears pummeled the Washington Redskins by a score of 73–0 in the most lopsided NFL championship game of all time.[21]

Rooney immediately took $50,000 from the sale and invested it in a 50% interest in the Philadelphia Eagles franchise, which was owned by his friend Bell, and became vice president of the franchise's board of directors.[20]

Despite the fact he now was half-owner of a team based in Philadelphia, Rooney had no intention of leaving Pittsburgh.[17] It was thought that Thompson preferred to move his new team to be nearer his New York home, perhaps to Boston, which had been without an NFL team since the Redskins relocated to Washington in 1937.[14] If Thompson had moved the team away from Pittsburgh, Rooney and Bell hatched a plan that would have seen their team split its home games between the two Pennsylvania cities and rename their squad the Keystoners.[20] However, the other league owners blocked both moves.[27]

By early 1941, Rooney was beginning to regret his decision to sell the Pittsburgh team. When he saw that Thompson had not yet established a local office for his team, as he had announced he would do by March 1, Rooney made an offer.[28] He and Bell would trade territories with Thompson.[28] This would put Thompson in Philadelphia, which was much closer to his New York base.[28] It would also ensure that Rooney's team would stay in his hometown.[28] On April 3, 1941, Thompson accepted the deal and Rooney and Bell's Eagles went to Pittsburgh, where they became the Pittsburgh Steelers, while Thompson's Iron Men moved to Philadelphia, where they took on the Philadelphia Eagles moniker. This was described at the time as "one of the most unusual swaps in sports history".[29] In fact, though the Pittsburgh team played as the Steelers, they operated under the name the "Philadelphia Eagles Football Club, Inc." until 1945.[30][31] Bell was named the Steelers head coach and Rooney became the general manager, with 10-year contracts worth $7,500 per year.[32]

Because the entire strange turn of events all took place during the offseason and the Eagles and Steelers never actually missed games in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, respectively, the NFL considers each franchise as single unbroken entities since 1933.[30] The transaction, which amounted in the end to Bell selling the Eagles and purchasing half-interest in the Steelers, as well as trading more than half of each team's rosters to each other, has been termed the "Pennsylvania Polka".[33]

Both teams continued to struggle in 1941, with the Eagles going 2–8–1 and the Steelers going 1–9–1. However, the Steelers posted their first winning record in 1942 (7–4), while the Eagles finished 2–9. In 1943, when manpower shortages stemming from World War II made it impossible to fill the roster, the two teams temporarily merged to form a team popularly known as the "Steagles." The merger, never intended as a permanent arrangement, was dissolved at the end of the 1943 season. The Steagles posted a 5–4–1 record, giving the Eagles their first winning record as a franchise and continuing the Steelers' streak. The Steelers had to combine with the Chicago Cardinals in 1944 to form "Card-Pitt"; the merged team lost all ten of their games that season. The Eagles went to three NFL Championship games under Neale, losing in 1947, and winning in 1948 and 1949. The Steelers did not win their first league title until Super Bowl IX in 1974.

After the 1949 season, Thompson sold the Eagles to a syndicate of 100 buyers, known as the "Happy Hundred", each of whom paid a fee of $3,000 for their share of the team.[34] The Rooney family has remained the owners of the Steelers since its founding in 1933, with Art's son, Dan, taking over the team following his death in 1988.

• Claassen, Harold (Spike) (1963). The History of Professional Football. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc.
• Lyons, Robert S. (2010). On Any Given Sunday, A Life of Bert Bell. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. ISBN 978-1-59213-731-2.
• MacCambridge, Michael (2005). America's Game. New York: Anchor Books. ISBN 978-0-307-48143-6.
• Rooney, Art Jr.; McHugh, Roy (2008). Ruanaidh: The Story of Art Rooney and His Clan. Pittsburgh, PA: Art Rooney Jr. ISBN 9780981476025.
• Ruck, Rob; Patterson, Maggie Jones; Weber, Michael P. (2010). Rooney: A Sporting Life. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-0-8032-2283-0.