Remembering the Cincinnati Reds, one of the worst teams in NFL history

Did you know the Cincinnati Bengals were the city’s second NFL team?

The Cincinnati Reds football team played 90 years ago in what was also known then as the National Professional Football League. But the Reds lasted less than two seasons.

Back in the 1930s, college football dominated interest and news coverage over the professional game. The NFL was still a young league, founded in 1920, with dozens of new franchises cropping up or joining from smaller leagues, then quickly folding.

In July 1933, Cincinnati was awarded a new franchise to be called the Cincinnati Reds, the same name as the baseball team. The principal owner was Dr. M. Scott Kearns, the Hamilton County coroner. The Reds also used Redland Field (Crosley Field) as their home, with headquarters in the Metropole Hotel.

Former Buffalo Bisons coach Al Jolley was named head coach. He played tackle for several short-lived NFL teams in the 1920s, including the Oorang Indians, a traveling team from LaRue, Ohio, that consisted entirely of Native American players and was coached by the great Jim Thorpe. (Jolley was part of the Wyandot Nation.)

Smashmouth football was how the game was played

Football was a different game then. The oblong ball was the size of a melon. Nearly every play was a run – bodies smashing together at the line of scrimmage, hoping to gain a yard or two. Everyone played on both offense and defense. And proficient punting was often praised. In the stats for one game, the Reds punted 17 times.

And the equipment was a far cry from the protective gear of today. Shoulder pads were flimsy and made of canvas and bone. Helmets were leather with no face mask.

The Reds’ uniforms were red pants and stockings, with red jerseys for home, white for away games. Their red helmets had a white front panel and three white stripes along the crown, giving them a distinctive look.

Reds started out slow during the 1933 season

Football was not a year-round gig. The Reds players began training on Sept. 3 for their first game on Sept. 17, a 21-0 loss to the Portsmouth Spartans (who became the Detroit Lions the following season) at Universal Stadium in Portsmouth, Ohio.

The Red eleven (to use a term from the day) easily handled the likes of the Troy Flyers and Memphis Tigers in non-league games but just couldn’t score against the pros. The Reds scored just 3 points total in their first six official games against NFL teams.

Midseason, the Reds signed halfback “Jarring Jim” Bausch, a gold medalist in the decathlon in the 1932 Summer Olympics and touted as the best all-around athlete since Jim Thorpe.

“The Reds new backfield ace … passes, kicks and runs the ball with equal facility and he will be relied upon heavily to help the Reds break into the win column of the league standings,” The Enquirer wrote at the time.

Bausch’s first game was a scoreless tie with the Pittsburgh Pirates (the future Steelers). But at least that was a move in the right direction.

The Nov. 5 game against the Philadelphia Eagles was a 6-0 loss in sloppy mud, the third game in a row at Redland Field that they played on a soggy gridiron. Only 300 spectators showed up.

Jolley was fired the next day and assistant coach and part-time quarterback Mike Palm took over. With Palm at the helm, the team looked sharper.

Lew Pope scored the Reds’ first touchdown – in their seventh game – on a 46-yard scramble against the Chicago Cardinals, leading to the Reds’ first win, 12-9. The next week, the Reds bested the Spartans, 10-7, before a crowd of 7,500 at Redland Field.

The most talked about play of the season was Gil LeFebvre’s 98-yard punt return for a score against the Brooklyn Dodgers in the last game, a 10-0 Reds victory.

LeFebvre, a 152-pound halfback, “caught the ball on his 2-yard line and put a climax to his fine day’s work by a slashing, zigzag run of 98 yards through the entire Brooklyn team,” The Enquirer’s Lou Smith wrote. He set an NFL record that stood until 1994.

Despite a strong finish, the Reds ended the season 3-6-1 and are tied for the second-fewest points scored in an NFL season: 38.

One of the worst teams in NFL history

The 1934 season was even worse.

In August, Charles “Chile” Walsh, owner of the non-league St. Louis Gunners football team, offered $20,000 ($450,000 in 2022) to buy the Cincinnati squad that was heavy in debt due to poor attendance. But the league objected to the sale because traveling to St. Louis would be too expensive for eastern teams.

So the Reds began the 1934 season with quarterback Algy Clark as player-coach. Yet they offered nothing but futility on the field and struggled to fill seats. It was the middle of the Great Depression, after all.

Still, 7,500 came out to watch Red Grange, Bronko Nagurski and the 1933 champion Chicago Bears beat Cincinnati 21-3 at newly renamed Crosley Field. But the Reds struggled to even host games. The rest of the Reds’ home games were played at Xavier University’s Corcoran Stadium (in a rare night game under the lights), Triangle Park in Dayton and Universal Stadium in Portsmouth.

The league finally approved the sale of the Reds in late October. After an exhibition game against the St. Louis Blues (a 35-7 loss), the Reds headed to Philadelphia for their final game on Nov. 6, losing 64-0.

“The Reds, knowing most of them would be jobless after Tuesday’s game, had no incentive to battle, so were buried under the largest score ever made in the league,” the United Press reported in the Cincinnati Post. It’s still the NFL record for biggest blowout.

Directly after the game, the Reds franchise and the remainder of its season was taken over by the St. Louis Gunners, who won their first game. Maybe because they didn’t use any Reds players.

The 1934 Reds had an 0-8 record, and gave up 243 points while scoring just 10 on the season. The Reds and Gunners combined to score only 37 points, the fewest in NFL history since records became official in 1932.

In the 18 games in franchise history, the Reds were shut out 10 times.

But it was a difficult situation. A new team with three coaches in two years, a rotating roster, little practice and not even a home stadium, all while being sold and shut down in the middle of the season.

Cincinnati fielded another professional, but non-NFL, football team in 1937 named the Cincinnati Bengals. They were also not too successful, folding after the 1941 season.

Then, Paul Brown founded the current Cincinnati Bengals in 1968. The team originally played in the AFL until the NFL-AFL merger in 1970 gave Cincinnati its second NFL team.

Sources: Enquirer and Post archives, Pro Football Reference (www.pro-football-reference.com), NFL.com, Wikipedia, Gridiron Uniform Database, “America’s Game: The NFL at 100” by Jerry Rice and Randy O. Williams.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Before the Bengals, the Reds were Cincinnati's first NFL team