Professional Football Researchers Association Forum

It has been documented in several books and is common knowledge that Lamar Hunt tried to either start or buy an existing franchise in the NFL and spoke to Bell several times. When Bell told him that the NFL was not planning on expanding anytime soon was he speaking more for the group of owners or was that his thinking as well?

I seemed to get the impression that his response to Hunt was something like at this point your not going to get this group of owners to agree on expansion so try buying an existing club. Which could make it seem Bell was open to it but the owners weren't or he was just trying to put it a nice way and not appear to be the bad guy.

Was there an actual expansion plan in place before the AFL started?

As a practical matter, the NFL couldn't expand because the league bylaws required that there had to be unanimous approval by all of the owners-- and George Preston Marshall had made it clear that he was adamantly opposed bringing any one else in. It only took 10 of 12 votes to amend the bylaws, and they voted 11-1 to do that at their January 1960 meeting

On October 19, 1959, a couple of months after the AFL founding was announced, George Halas told the press that the other owners were going to amend the bylaws, and said that the it was "a culmination of five years of planning" and that they hadn't done it sooner because "Our intent was to expand when competition among our clubs began to equalize itself on an extremely high level. We now have reached that plateau." That plateau was reached, apparently, four weeks into the 1959 season, I'm sure that it was pure happenstance that the AFL had just been organized....

Halas said also that the location of the first two expansion teams would be Dallas and Houston or Minneapolis-St. Paul, which (another remarkable coincidence, no doubt) just happened to be three of the six locations originally announced for the AFL.