DOG: Cardinals & Steelers Were Once One Team

I'm sort of the resident Stiller historian around these parts so I'm going to start off the Steel City Slant Super Bowl coverage with a little history lesson.

Once upon a time back when the Germans and Japanese were the bad guys and Al-Queda didn't exist, the Steelers and Cardinals merged to form an NFL team known as Card-Pitt. The year was 1944 and it was the height of World War II.

As many of you know an ill-fated merger between the Steelers and Eagles -the Steagles- in 1943 resulted in complete chaos. So why Art Rooney thought a similar merger with the (then) Chicago Cardinals the following year would be any different, I cannot say. No doubt with all the available strong young men drafted to fight the war, football players were hard to come by. The decision was driven by pure economics. Rooney was just trying to keep his team afloat.

What I can tell you from a very old friend of mine, Joe Maloney, who lived it and fought in the war was this: The Great Lakes Naval Training Center could have whipped any team in the NFL that year. Joe was 18 in 1944 and played football in the service with Otto Graham. He told me that 1939 Heisman Trophy winner, Nile Kinnick, once had played for Great Lakes before he got there but I am unable to substantiate this. Kinnick, a Naval pilot (as was Joe) died in a training mission in 1943. But by Joe's personal account I can assure you the best football players in America were on one armed services team or another. Until they shipped out for their battlefront assignments.

This left the Card-Pitts with the worst rag-tag bunch of players in the league. Their record was 0-10. They and the Brooklyn Tigers that same year were the first teams to go winless in a full NFL season. A Pittsburgh sports writer once wrote that they should be named the Carpits because every other team in the league walked all over them.

The team played 5 home games. Two at old Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, two at Comiskey Park in Chicago, and one inexplicably in Philadelphia. They wore the uniforms of the Chicago Cardinals and were co-coached. The team set the record which still stands today of averaging only 32.7 yards per punt. They had a player mutiny. And the most famous event was a brawl they had with the Washington Redskins where police had to take the field to break up the near riot. It is said that Art Rooney himself jumped down from the stands to enter the fight but order was restored before he actually took a swing at someone. Can you imagine what Goodell would have to say about something like that?

The day the season ended the partnership was dissolved. The end of the war in 1945 assured the Steelers enough players to field a team exclusively their own the following year. The Cardinals soon recovered from this mess to win the NFL Championship in 1947 and play in the Championship game again in 1948. The Steelers never really recovered until 1972.

The Cardinals moved to St. Louis in 1960 and again to Arizona 1988 and have not even come close to a championship since 1948 when they were in Chicago.

So now we are two separate teams in two separate conferences. Two hungry dogs fighting over a single bone. I know which dog I have in this fight... the Stiller Dog!! (Mike Vick, if you're reading this from your jail cell, this in no way implies a correlation between dog fighting and NFL football.)