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My Dayton Triangles Project

The following post originally appeared on thisbrucesmith.com. I moved it here to consolidate all Dayton Triangles-related content on one site.

I grew up within walking distance of American professional sports history, but didn’t know about it until much later. North of downtown Dayton, Ohio on an October afternoon in 1920, the first game between members of what would become the National Football League was played. That day, the Columbus Panhandles visited the home-standing Dayton Triangles at Triangle Park. The Triangles won the game 14-0. There was another game played that day in Illinois, but in the Central time zone, so the Triangles-Pan Handles game was almost certainly the first to kick off.

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Draft Excerpt: A Wild Finish

The following post originally appeared at thisbrucesmith.com. I moved it here to consolidate all Dayton Triangles-related content at this site.

The following short excerpt is from my Dayton Triangles book project. It describes a key moment in the prehistory of the Triangles: the second Dayton city independent football championship game between the Saint Mary’s Cadets and the Olt-Superba Oakwoods, played on November 27, 1913. The description of the game is summarized from reporting by Robert Husted of the Dayton Journal. The Dayton Daily News account of the game is apparently lost along with several other pages missing from both the online ProQuest archive and the microfilm archive at the Dayton Public Library. I plan to go through the Dayton Herald and will add any additional information from there in a later draft.

The game was a rematch of the first championship game played between the same two teams on November 16, and won by the Cadets in a 14-9 upset over the defending champion Oakwoods. Some of the first names are omitted; it was common practice in the day for the sports writers to refer to players by last name unless they had brothers playing in the same game (as was often the case with the Sacksteder and Kinderdine brothers, among others).

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Dayton Triangles 1918 Championship Year

The following post first appeared on thisbrucesmith.com to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Dayton Triangles team that won the Ohio League football championship. I’ve moved the post here to consolidate all Dayton Triangles-related content on this site.

As I continue my research with the goal of writing a history of the Dayton Triangles football team, I’m struck by 1918. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Triangles’ “championship year” that saw them acclaimed by consensus as the best team in the Ohio League. But it was also a strange, and in some respects tragic, season. I’ve taken to calling it “the year of the asterisk”.

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The NFL’s First Replay Controversy

The following article originally appeared on thisbrucesmith.com. I’ve moved it here to consolidate all Dayton Triangles-related content on this site.

The research for my Dayton Triangles podcast project took me into the period when Triangles player/coach/manager/owner Carl Storck continued to serve as an NFL executive after the sale of the Triangle franchise. This post discusses the first of two major controversies in Storck’s brief, stormy tenure as league president. My focus here is less on Storck’s role than on the historical significance of what I argue was “the birth of replay” — eighty years ago.

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Now on YouTube

With 2019 now ended, I have moved the podcast to YouTube and discontinued it at Buzzsprout. Nothing against Buzzsprout, but the podcast just didn’t draw that much interest and I couldn’t see the point of continuing to pay for continued hosting. You can continue to support the podcast through donations.

If you’d like to skip reading the various articles and just get to the episodes, here’s a playlist with all the episodes in order: