![]() He took it on the cheap, too, because the Broncos were operating on a shoestring. “I was as nervous as a kid at his first prom when I took the Denver job.” “I was scared to death people in the United States would never forget the scandal,” he said in a newspaper interview that year. Although eventually exonerated, he didn’t return to the States until he was offered the Broncos’ job after winning five Canadian league championships. The Giants’ passing halfback, he had been banned by NFL commissioner Bert Bell for his involvement in an attempt to fix the 1946 Championship Game against the Bears, not because he accepted a bribe but because he failed to report it being offered. Filchock had been in self-imposed exile north of the border. They were 16-point underdogs, although their colorful coach, Frank Filchock, claimed later to have snookered the Pats because he said he was only experimenting with personnel in the preseason and had never won an exhibition game in his 10 years as a coach in Canada.įilchock was brought down from Canada to coach the team by Broncos owner Bob Howsam, who also owned the Denver Bears, a Yankees farm team. The Broncos won, 13-10, which is amazing in itself because they had lost all five of their exhibition games by a combined score of 192-53, all on the road, including a 43-6 shellacking by the Patriots four weeks earlier. “And so a new league was born,” marvels Jim Saccomano, the retired Broncos public relations director who serves as the team’s unofficial historian. And when it was over, the game receipts from the $5 tickets were carried in a shoe box to the bank. ![]() It was a Friday night because most New Englanders were then Giants fans and the Patriots didn’t want to go up against the NFL team’s TV broadcasts on Sundays and because they dared not compete against Harvard and Boston College on Saturdays. The first game in AFL history was played Sept. Pro football doesn’t get any more rudimentary than the game that started it all when the Broncos and Patriots, with Frank Tripucka and Butch Songin quarterbacking, played before 21,597 fans and no TV audience at Boston University’s Nickerson Field. DENVER - Pro football doesn’t get any more glamorous than the AFC Championship Game Sunday afternoon with its two future Hall of Fame quarterbacks, a couple of teams worth a combined $3 billion, 50 million TV viewers and a modern stadium full of rabid fans.
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