Meet the NFL team that lost its only game ever before folding

This offseason, Shutdown Corner will travel down memory lane with a series of stories presenting some interesting and sometimes forgotten stories from the NFL’s past. Join us as we relive some of the greatest and craziest moments in the sport’s history.

The NFL’s history contains several chapters of ignoble lore, but one otherwise forgettable franchise stands alone in a single regard: The team that played one game before folding.

The league has featured nearly 100 franchises and their offspring in its nearly 100 years of existence, including some long-forgotten ones … the Miami Seahawks? Cincinnati Celts? Detroit Panthers? Oorang Indians? (The latter was Jim Thorpe’s first team, by the way.)

Only one — the Tonawanda Kardex in 1921 — had a one-game existence. A few others, including the New York Brickley Giants (two games) and Muncie Flyers (three), had similarly minuscule lifespans in that same era. But Tonawanda is the only true one-and-doner ever in the NFL’s annals.

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One natural follow-up: Where is Tonawanda and what the heck is (are) Kardex?

Tonawanda, N.Y., once known as the “Keystone of the Niagara Frontier,” was a conservative, tony suburb of Buffalo with a population hovering around 3,000 at the start of the 1920s. But it was a town on the rise, with a heavy influx of Serbian, Croatian and Hungarian immigrants who were attracted by the influx of manufacturing jobs (several electrical power generation, steel, rubber, chemical, and aircraft plants had just opened) before other industries, such as oil refining and auto manufacturing, later made their mark there.

Sports also were beginning to take hold as a national obsession. Even though one of football’s biggest early proponents, Teddy Roosevelt, had died the year prior, the game was starting to catch fire and the end of World War I in 1919 meant a lot of young men were returning to the States with time on their hands and steam to blow off. Prohibition was amended to the Constitution in January of 1920, so (legal) drinking was not an option. Sport — with football growing in popularity — was a big outlet for young men around the country. The romanticism of the game, highlighted by George Gipp’s now famous deathbed speech to Knute Rockne, also was beginning to take shape.

In September 1920, the National Football League (then known as the American Professional Football Association) was founded. Its first champion that season — the Akron Professionals — would only last another seven years before folding. Although college football was king back then, the fledgling professional league was a way for groups of young, talented players to keep their talents alive. Franchises were piecemealed together from semi-pro teams, amateur clubs and former college All-Stars.

The All-Tonawanda team was one of these. Local players of note came together as a group while the war was still being fought overseas, and it was led by its most famous member — halfback-head coach Walter “Tam” Rose, a local hero. Rose was a former two-time Walter Camp All-American and three-time captain at Syracuse, a college football power at the time, from 1913 to 1915.

The Tonawanda team played its games in the New York Pro Football League, out of which came some of the NFL’s roots, including its charter franchise, the Rochester Jeffersons. A local office furniture company named American Kardex (which later would become Remington Rand, the company that created UNIVAC, a 1950s computer) sponsored Rose’s rabble in 1921. That would complete the team name — the Tonawanda Kardex. (Well, sort of. Previously, the team nickname had been the Lumbermen or the Lumberjacks, which apparently stuck in some future newspaper references.)

In 1920, the Kardex had a strong season — a 9-1 record — while playing games on the Tonawanda High School field, even drawing up to 3,500 fans per game. They appeared ready to make a jump to the next level.

Based on that success, they were awarded an NFL franchise on August 27, 1921. League admission fee: $50 (roughly $650 today). Other franchises welcomed to the 21-team league at the same time were the Minneapolis Marines, the Evansville Crimson Giants and a ragtag bunch known as the Green Bay Packers. (Whatever happened to them?)

Even though there was another NFL franchise, the Buffalo All-Americans, a dozen miles away, and the Rochester franchise a bit farther east, the Kardex had their sights set high.

Attracted to, as the Buffalo News noted, “touring to the big cities, where the dough lies,” the new franchise agreed to an interesting arrangement: playing all of its games on the road. One big reason was the lack of a local suitable playing facility.

That road, however, was not easy. Their first exhibition game on Oct. 9 at the Syracuse Pros was cut short because of heavy rain. It was a scoreless tie that featured little offense. From historian Ken Crippen:

“The closest either team got to the end zone was in the last quarter when All-Syracuse was able to run the ball to the Tonawanda 5-yard line. A forward pass from Purdy to Andrews crossed the goal line, but a holding penalty negated the score. The game was shortened due to rain. The field was too sloppy to continue, with the entire match lasting a total of 17 minutes of play.”

The Kardex’s next exhibition, a game scheduled for Oct. 30 against the Rochester Scalpers, was cancelled. It’s not clear why. But finally, a week later on Nov. 6, the Kardex made their NFL debut — the first and only official game in franchise history — against the Jeffersons, who were not exactly considered a powerhouse. Still, it didn’t go too well.

In front of a crowd of roughly 2,700, the Kardex started firmly defensively but were blitzed by the Jeffersons in the second and fourth quarters. The final score: Jeffersons 45, Kardex 0. Twenty-seven of the 45 points that day were scored by Rochester’s Benny “The Purple Streak” Boynton, a 170-pound B-back playing his first year of professional football.

After that, nothing. Either unable to — or uninterested in? — schedule more games, the season ended. There are no more known records of the Kardex playing another game. Soon after, the team folded.

Why? It’s not known exactly, but money certainly was one factor. Playing on the road meant that the Kardex depended on solid gates, and with one rain-shortened game, one canceled game and one blowout loss, the money could not have been flowing in.

Even if they did find stronger backers than the furniture company, Tonawanda’s fate might also have been written when the league upped its franchise fee to a whopping $1,000. According to the Professional Football Researchers Association, via the Tonawanda News, likely “wouldn’t have operated had the guarantee been 10 cents.”

Little is known about much of the team itself outside of key figures such as Rose — the quarterback is known only by his last name, “Cassidy,” and no more. Only a handful of players ever went on to play for other NFL franchises, and sparingly at that. NFL records list its home field as “Lumbermen Stadium,” which may or may not have even existed. There are few, if any, known photographs of any of the team members (and none from the 1921 season), or any known remnants of uniforms, equipment, posters or any propaganda related to the Kardex. Did they have a logo or official team colors? We don’t know. (The one listed on the team’s Wikipedia page is believed to be spurious.)

So the team drifted off into the footnotes of NFL history, largely forgotten, and swallowed up by the history that was forming in those early days with pioneer franchises such as the Packers, the New York Giants, the Racine (Chicago) — and now Arizona — Cardinals and the Decatur Staleys, which were renamed the Chicago Bears. It really wasn’t until 1925, when Red Grange made his professional debut in front of 70,000 fans, that the NFL made any kind of national imprint.

Especially prior to that, the league’s early days were wild and somewhat unregulated, with franchises whipsawed by the financial constraints of funding a team from the ground up and the matter of finding marketable talent to sell to local fans. Some made it, and those that remain today do so as multi-billion-dollar operations. The defunct ones, however, have been left to history.

But even in their brief NFL career, the Tonawanda Kardex can claim a record that almost certainly never will be matched — fewest games played.

Previous Shutdown Corner NFL throwback stories: Joe Montana’s underrated toughness | Barry Sanders’ long-forgotten final game | Jake Delhomme’s playoff nightmare | Barry Switzer, outspoken as ever | Was Sebastian Janikowski worth a first-round pick? | How Jim Harbaugh punching Jim Kelly helped Colts land Peyton Manning | Jay Cutler makes the greatest throw ever | “Has anyone ever kissed your Super Bowl rings?” | How the Patriots once faced a fourth-and-63 | The Packers survived a miserable two-decade run | “NFL PrimeTime” changed how we watch football | One of pro football’s greatest games happened in the crazy USFL | The time Warren Moon should have had 650 yards in an NFL game | In 1979, Lyle Alzado boxed against Muhammad Ali. Seriously

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Eric Edholm is a writer for Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @Eric_Edholm