Texas Football League

The Texas Football League (TFL) was a semi-professional American football minor league that operated in primarily in the United States from 1966 through 1971. The league, which initially comprised six franchises from Texas and Oklahoma, was formally announced in May 1966.[1] The league was supposed to begin with eight teams, but entries from Hammond, Louisiana and New Orleans were not accepted. With the addition of two franchises in 1967, the TFL expanded to two four-team divisions.

During the 1967-68 offseason the Continental Football League offered a merger of operations with the TFL, but was turned down by TFL commissioner George Schepps. He additionally challenged the CFL to pit its champion against the TFL's champion for the 1968 campaign.[2]

On January 25, 1969 it was announced that the Continental Football League was adding the entirety of the eight-team TFL to its ranks. The TFL joined as a separate entity and was placed into the new Texas Division (itself split into East and West). The TFL teams were mostly scheduled to play against each other but did also play interleague contests.[3] Joining the Texas division was the Mexico Golden Aztecs, the first American football franchise based in Mexico. The TFL's San Antonio Toros defeated the Indianapolis Capitols, 44-38 in overtime, to capture the last Continental League championship. (The Toros would ultimately win five straight league titles from 1967-71.)

With the dissolution of the CoFL in early 1970, the Toros announced the formation of the Trans-American Football League, hoping to add teams in a number of major markets; the TAFL planned teams in Birmingham; Tampa; Hershey, Pennsylvania and even Chicago and Los Angeles, in addition to San Antonio and existing Continental teams in Dallas-Fort Worth and Memphis (relocated from Las Vegas).[4] By the time the league played its 1970 season, it was once again mainly based in Texas, with two other Continental teams, the Omaha Mustangs and Texarkana Titans, joining the loop.

In 1971, the Trans-American Football League took the unusual step of becoming the first football league to schedule and play all of its games in the spring rather than the autumn, a move that attracted the attention of Sports Illustrated pro football columnist Tex Maule. The 1971 TAFL season ran from April 25 to June 26 [5]. Although Maule commented that the Trans-American league's four teams' Fort Worth to San Antonio lineup "barely makes it Trans-Texas", he also noted that "This is the first bona fide attempt to play spring football," a gimmick that the United States Football League did on a larger scale eleven years later.

On the other hand, attendance for the four teams "reached a new low" and, as sports historian Bob Gill would note in 2002, "it was clear by mid-June that the concept of spring football was dead— and probably the Texas League along with it" [6]. The TAFL folded after its spring 1971 season.