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A s the 1949 holiday season approached, Bert Bell began working feverishly on the league’s upcoming schedule. Using sets of dominoes borrowed from Upton and Bert Jr., he spent most of Christmas , all of New Year’s Day, and many full days afterward huddled over his dining room table—sipping coffee and grape juice, talking on the telephone , and shifting the game pieces around in an attempt to devise an equitable 12-game schedule for 14 teams. Bell was well aware of the strong feelings held by most of the owners, especially the wealthy old-timers, about their scheduling preferences. He knew that they wanted to pad their records by playing the weaker teams early in the season to help ensure big home crowds later on. But he was determined to do the opposite and match the good teams against each other and do likewise with the weaker teams in order to keep the league standings as tight as possible. Nothing gave him greater satisfaction. “I remember my father sitting home on Sunday afternoons,” his son Upton explained. “‘Guess what, mother,’ he’d say. ‘It’s Week 4 and all the teams are still in the race.’” Placing the dominoes face down, Bell taped a name of each NationalAmerican Football League team on the back. He shifted the pieces about on a huge cardboard outlined with two-inch squares. The left side of the master chart contained playing dates. Individual club names were printed at the top with subdivisions for home and away games. If Philadelphia was playing in Detroit, for example, the Eagles’ domino was shifted to the away space under the Lions. A paper match was then inserted on the same date in the Eagles’ column indicating an away game. At the end, if all the dominoes matched up evenly, Bell hand-printed a copy of the schedule on a smaller cardboard and filed it for future reference with other proposed drafts. The 14th club on Bell’s schedule board symbolized the proposed new Buffalo franchise. By the first week of January, he had lost count on the 23. Buffalo, Dominoes, and Television Buffalo, Dominoes, and Television • 159 number of drafts; it was somewhere between 42 and 58. Conservatively he estimated that he had put in between 200 and 250 hours working on the frustrating exercise that had to be completed in time for the start of the annual league meeting on January 19. Formulating a schedule was considerably more complicated than merely shifting dominoes. Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago, and Detroit were unable to use their stadiums until the major league baseball season ended. Games had to be arranged in a sequence that kept distance traveled to a minimum. The two West Coast teams, Los Angeles and San Francisco, had to be home at the same time because two other visiting teams had to remain in that area for a pair of games whenever they made that long trip. Moreover, the makeup of the divisions had not yet been decided. The proposed addition of Buffalo created additional problems. “I can’t get anywhere working with 14 clubs,” Bell admitted to Philadelphia Bulletin sports editor Ed Pollock about two weeks before the NFL meetings. “Every time I try it, one club winds up with a schedule of seven or eight home games and that’s out of the question.” The commissioner added that he wasn’t thoroughly satisfied with any one of his schedules although some proposed 13-game slates looked rather attractive. On January 4, 1950, Bell telephoned the president of the proposed Buffalo club to inform him that he had finally worked out an “unsatisfactory ” 14-team schedule that included the Bills. The news was greeted in the upstate New York city as evidence that the franchise had been accepted by the National-American Football League. This was not the case. “Around 4:30 this morning, I called Mr. [Albert F.] O’Neill merely to tell him that I at least had something on paper,” Bell explained to Frank O’Gara of the Philadelphia Inquirer. “I had told him 10 days ago and three days ago that unless I could work out a feasible schedule, I would not be able to recommend that the league admit Buffalo. I pointed out to him this morning that the schedule did not represent more than 10 per cent of what I thought necessary. For instance, it has Buffalo playing at home November 26 and December 10—both big risks due...

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