Off the grid(iron), but not forgotten: the NFL’s Brooklyn Dodgers
By Cary Osborne
There was a Pug, not a Puig. A Jock, not a Joc. And an Ace, but it wasn’t Kershaw.
But they were the Dodgers.
I claim to be a pretty knowledgeable football fan, but had no idea until recently that the NFL had its own Brooklyn Dodgers.
In 1930, the Dodgers became an NFL franchise and for the next 15 seasons played at Ebbets Field. They changed their name to Tigers in 1944 before merging with Boston Yanks in 1945 and ultimately folding in 1952).
“Generally an unsuccessful team,” was how Roger Godin, the author of the book “The Brooklyn Football Dodgers: The Other Bums,” characterized the franchise.
Godin, currently the team curator for the NHL’s Minnesota Wild, took an interest in the football team because his mother was born in Brooklyn and spent much of her childhood there. He also found it curious that an NFL team carried the same name as the Major League Baseball franchise.
“There really was no relationship,” Godin said of the two teams. “They both used Ebbets Field and carried the same name, but there wasn’t a connection.”
The team never won a division title, but finished second three times — in 1933 (to the New York Giants), 1940 (to the Washington Redskins) and 1941 (to the Giants again).
Those latter teams were owned by Dan Topping, who later went on to become owner of the New York Yankees.
“(The 1940 and 1941 teams were successful) largely through the efforts of a guy named Jock Sutherland, who had been a successful college coach at Pittsburgh,” Godin said. “Topping hired him in ’40, and he was one of these guys who had the touch.”
Sutherland coached the Dodgers just those two seasons. The franchise’s all-time leading passer was Ace Parker, who was enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1972. Parker also played two Major League seasons for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1937 and 1938. The all-time leading rusher was a man named Pug Manders. He led the NFL with 486 rushing yards in 1941.
In 1946, another Brooklyn Dodgers football team sprung up and played in the All-America Football Conference, a competitor to the NFL. In the winter of 1947–48, the baseball Dodgers’ team president and general manager Branch Rickey and owners John L. Smith and Walter O’Malley purchased the team — as noted in our own Jon Weisman’s book “100 Things Dodgers Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die.”
A little more than a year later, the baseball Dodgers got out of the football business and the team was absorbed by the AAFC’s New York Yankees football team.
