Ernie Nevers, The Greatest Player In Jacksonville Football History
Trevor Lawrence may soon be the golden boy in Jacksonville, but he will have to do a lot to match Ernie Nevers
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The Jacksonville Jaguars are the NFL’s second-youngest team. The Southeast’s largest city got its NFL team in 1995. However, the Jags weren’t close to the city’s first professional football team. The city’s first attempt at professional football lasted just two weeks in January of 1926, but still gave Jacksonville its best professional football player ever: Ernie Nevers.
Unpaid superstar pulls stunt of going pro
Nevers was one of football’s earliest superstars as a fullback at Stanford, and is still celebrated as one of the greatest players from football’s first era along with Jim Thorpe and Harold “Red” Grange. Nevers, aka “The Big Dog,” ran for 114 yards on 34 rushes against Notre Dame in the 1925 Rose Bowl on not one but two broken ankles. He also played every snap as a linebacker and averaged 42 yards per punt, despite having no feeling below his knees.
However, Nevers shared a problem with college football players today: he wasn’t paid. In the offseasons, he either worked on his father’s ranch where he was (allegedly) one of the best prune pickers in the nation, or worked at the Starrett Meat Company to make some money.
Then in December 1925, J.J O’Brien, the manager of a professional football startup in Jacksonville, offered him $50,000 to play in five games for the team. Nevers accepted in order to “repay [his] parents immediately for the sacrifices they have made in putting [him] through school and college.”
Nevers, along with Red Grange, was vilified for signing with a professional team, as you can see from the primitive graphic above with dollar signs all over Nevers’s suit. Sportswriter/MLB Umpire Billy Evans was particularly flippant about “the stunt” of going pro in sports after Nevers did it.
The Jacksonville All-Stars: A truly Florida venture
Thus began Jacksonville’s first foray into professional football. Nevers was by far the biggest star of the “Jacksonville All-Star Team,” but the proto-Jags also featured former Georgia Tech star Red Barron (whom we spoke about on this episode of Ball Through The Ages). The team’s promoters set up two games in January 1926 against Grange’s Chicago Bears and the New York Giants. Yes, a three-week old group of semi-amateur players scheduled two actual professional teams and brought them to Jacksonville in 1926.
It went about as expected on the field with Jacksonville losing easily to both teams. Against Chicago, Nevers played every snap both ways, had at least 2 tackles for loss, threw the ball 16 times for at least 66 yards (the newspaper only mentioned two passes of 40 and 26 yards), “engaged in 16 plays from scrimmage” (which I’m pretty sure means running plays) for 46 yards and a touchdown. Oh and he averaged 54 yards on 6 punts. Imagining the player that could do all that today is a fun game. I’d go with Lamar Jackson if I had to pick.
Like many business ventures in Florida, the Jacksonville All-Stars suffered from poor, short-sighted leadership. The promoters (who may have been realtors) expected over 20,000 fans for the Bears game. When just 6,700 spectators showed up, the promoters estimated that they lost $12,500 on the game and hoped to make it up in the second game.
Well, the second game against the Giants also went poorly. Nevers tore some ligaments in his back and had to be compelled to leave the game after halftime. The team floundered without him in front of an “extremely small crowd.” Two days later, the team disbanded.
Like many before and after him, Ernie Nevers succeeded upon leaving Florida
Nevers, who was a four-sport star at Stanford, went on to play baseball for the St. Louis Browns. But he had to adopt an ineffective, underhanded pitching motion due to his back injury and lasted two seasons in the American League. He returned to gridiron with the Duluth Eskimos after his first season in St. Louis.
As you may know, Nevers had a tremendous career in the NFL. He joined the Chicago Cardinals (who would much later become the Arizona Cardinals) in 1929 as a fullback and ended up as the team’s head coach in 1930. He set the NFL record with 6 touchdowns in a game against the Bears in 1929, which was only matched by Alvin Kamara on Christmas 2020.
Nevers retired in 1931 while he could still get out in one piece, as he put it. Then, he stuck around the game as a coach until 1941. He was an inaugural member of both the College and Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Despite only being in Jacksonville for a month, Nevers is clearly the greatest football player to play professionally in Jacksonville. As of January 2021, the Jaguars have no players in the Hall of Fame (Tony Boselli is a finalist for the Hall this year), and none of their players have come close to making the mark on the game that Nevers did.
However, 94 years after Nevers’s Jacksonville exploits, the Jags now have a chance to draft College Football’s most recent golden boy in Trevor Lawrence. Maybe he’ll finally eclipse Ernie Nevers’s place in Jacksonville history. But I know one thing: Lawrence will never average 56 yards per punt.
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