The Louisville Brecks regretted ever coming to Evansville.

Curtains of rain smacked against their leather helmets as the football team struggled to find footing on a field that quickly devolved into muddy stew.

But the weather wasn’t the biggest problem. It could have been 80 degrees and sunny, and they still couldn’t have stopped the massive men that kept crashing through their defensive line.

Their opponents on Oct. 2, 1921, were the Evansville Crimson Giants. And boy, was the name apt.

Reportedly 6’4" and 250 pounds, star player/coach Franklin Fausch lorded over the smaller Louisville squad. Then there was Herb Henderson, a former Central standout and Ohio State All-American running back and kicker who could boot a ball more than 80 yards.

Together, the two decimated the Brecks en route to a 21-0 win.

More than 1,500 fans screeched from the Bosse Field stands. They’d just witnessed history: the first game for Evansville’s very own NFL team.

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Known as the American Professional Football Association back then, the NFL consisted of 18 teams, largely hailing from mid-sized cities. And Evansville was one of the first to join.

The Crimson Giants stormed through the league in 1921. But a mix of mismanagement, fan indifference and a merciless beating in Green Bay soon brought it all crumbling down. By 1922, they were gone.

The 2019 NFL season kicks off on Thursday when the Chicago Bears battle the Green Bay Packers. It’s a giant stretch to say Evansville could ever support an NFL franchise nowadays, but hey, Green Bay is about the same size.

Who knows? If things had gone differently 98 years ago, there is a sliver of a chance we would all be prepping for tailgates this weekend.

'Big thing for Evansville'

On Aug. 21, 1921, Fausch – a football enthusiast and owner of a local battery company – attended a meeting in Chicago. His goal was simple: to talk the soon-to-be NFL into giving Evansville a professional team.

At the end of the day, he sent a telegram to the Courier.

“Evansville Crimson Giants received franchise in the American Professional Football Association,” he wrote. “Big thing for Evansville.”

He put together a team as fast as he could, largely drawing from a gaggle of former high school standouts and college stars known as the Ex-Collegiate. A bruiser fantastically named Bourbon Bondurant went on to shatter a Louisville Brecks player’s shoulder in that inaugural game.

They practiced when they could. Sometimes they couldn’t get access to Bosse Field until late at night when the high school teams finally vacated it. To see the ball, they’d park their cars on the field and flip on their headlights.

Then there was the problem of scheduling. Unlike today, when NFL players rake in millions and team owners bathe in billions, most of the Crimson Giants made $50 a game.

“It was more like a part-time job,” Henderson told the Evansville Press' Dave Johnson in 1983. “Hell, you couldn’t make a living at it. The players played it because they loved the game.”

A dominant team

That love shone through on the field.

After dominating the Brecks in the season opener, the Crimson Giants rattled off six wins in their first eight games, including a 90-0 curb-stomping of the semi-professional New Albany Calumets.

A game like that could never happen now — imagine the Colts nixing a game against the Texans so they could play the Evansville Blue Cats — but the Crimson Giants often dipped into the semi-pro circuit.

During that 1921 season, only five of their games came against other NFL squads — a scheduling quirk that kept the team out of the NFL’s official history.

But the American Professional Football Association was rife with lawlessness. Players joined multiple teams to nab an extra check. And moonlighting college stars played under assumed names to avoid getting kicked out of school.

Chuck O’Neil beat them all, though. The former Michigan and Army standout joined the Crimson Giants that September. He was fantastic on the field — but he may not have remembered it.

“O’Neil couldn’t play unless he was drunk,” a former player told The Press in 1970.

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'An awful score'

Despite all that success and fun, the Crimson Giants still couldn’t draw fans to Bosse Field.

“If we had 1,200 to 1,500 at a home game, we had a crowd,” Henderson said in ’83. “Back then, Evansville was a baseball town. People knew what baseball was about, but they weren’t really into football.”

To make money toward the end of the ’21 season, Fausch put the Crimson Giants on the road, trekking to Wisconsin to face the Packers. Because of work, only 11 Evansville players could make the trip.

The game, predictably, was a disaster. The Packers and player-coach Curly Lambeau — the namesake of Green Bay’s famous field — dissected Evansville 43-6.

A reporter from the Courier was so shell-shocked that he refused to go into details.

“Green Bay walloped (Evansville) by an awful score,” the game story read in full.

The end

The Crimson Giants won a game or two after that, but they were never the same.

Fausch’s scheduling mistakes caused the team to miss several weeks, including a slated matchup with the Chicago Staleys — the team that would go on to become the Bears.

Money was a huge problem, too. The players, already underpaid and overworked, were also tasked with selling tickets, and when Fausch stopped handing out checks every week, they pocketed the ticket money for themselves.

Players split off. Fausch struggled to pay rent at Bosse. The dream — so bright on Oct. 2, 1921 — fizzled.

They weren’t alone in their dismal fate. Of the 18 NFL teams that played in 1921, only three survived: the Bears, Packers and what would eventually become the Arizona Cardinals.

In 1922, the Crimson Giants managed only three games, all on the road. Their last opponent was the same as their first: the Louisville Brecks. They lost 13-6.

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Information from the Evansville Courier and Evansville Press archives. Contact columnist Jon Webb at jon.webb@courierpress.com.