Taking show on the road
Just over 50 years ago, halfway through the history of the NFL, the New York Jets completed one of the most unexpected championship seasons in the history of the sport.
A brash quarterback named Joe Namath helped engineer a Super Bowl victory over the heavily favored Baltimore Colts.
That now-famous journey by Broadway Joe and the boys through the AFL that ended in triumph in Miami took a lesser-known detour for the second week of the schedule.
Yes, the Jets once landed in Birmingham, Alabama.
Their opponent on Sept. 22, 1968, was the Boston Patriots, who moved their home opener more than 1,000 miles south of Fenway Park even though the Red Sox were playing their game that day on the road.
The legend has it that AFL leaders steered the Jets-Patriots game there to test Alabama’s taste for a professional team in the heart of college football country, eyeing a potential new home for the fledgling franchise.
Legion Field, built in 1927 and often referred to as “The Old Gray Lady,” has been best known for all those Iron Bowl games over the years between Alabama and Auburn. But for this weekend the big draw was on a Sunday afternoon, not a Saturday.
The AFL-NFL merger was already in the works, eventually completed after the 1969 season, and every team was facing a requirement of a stadium with at least 50,000 seats. Fenway Park wasn’t nearly big enough, so the Patriots were in a tenuous spot.
Just think: Bill Belichick and Tom Brady conceivably could have called Birmingham home during those six Super Bowl title runs.
The story of the league’s first century has been largely set in classic venues like Lambeau Field and the Polo Grounds or a modern-era building such as the Superdome.
But the fabric of the league has been sewn together, too, by dozens of off-the-radar sites forever etched in the record books.
According to the database compiled by research website Pro Football Reference, 166 stadiums have hosted at least one regular season or postseason game since the inception of the NFL in 1920. That includes rival leagues — the AllAmerican Football Conference (1946-49) and the American Football League (1960-69) — that were eventually absorbed. One hundred of those venues have hosted 17 games or more.