The Steagles?

In the autumn of 1943, with the world locked in a brutal war and American boys dying on foreign soil, the National Football League found itself facing a very different kind of crisis. The rosters were gutted. Young men who would’ve been tossing pigskins were now carrying rifles. The draft didn’t care how tight your spiral was. It was a time when baseball teams borrowed from the minors, and pro football was scraping together anyone who could strap on a helmet and still stand upright.

That’s how we ended up with one of the strangest, most human, and weirdly heartwarming stories in NFL history. The Steagles. It sounds like something out of a comic strip. But in 1943, it was as real as ration books and blackout curtains.

Philadelphia and Pittsburgh weren’t exactly brotherly back then. The Eagles were still a young franchise without a winning season to their name. The Steelers were even worse off, stuck in a near-perpetual rebuild. With the war effort draining players faster than the league could replace them, both teams were hanging by a thread.

So the owners did something unthinkable. On June 19, 1943, Art Rooney of the Steelers and Alexis Thompson of the Eagles agreed to merge their franchises for one season only. The league gave it a nod, and the team was officially listed as the “Phil-Pitt Combine.” But the fans, as fans do, came up with a much better name. The Steagles.

From the get-go, it was an awkward marriage. Two cities, two franchises, and two very different head coaches. Walt Kiesling from Pittsburgh was old-school and gruff, not exactly the compromising type. Greasy Neale from Philadelphia was sharp, sarcastic, and had a deep football mind. They didn’t just disagree—they barely tolerated each other. One player later said practices were like a tug-of-war with the football stuck in the middle. Neale took the offense, Kiesling the defense, and neither wanted input from the other. Players recalled how bad the tension got. Some even remembered practices derailing as coaches stomped off in opposite directions.

Then there was the roster. Or what was left of it. Some players were too old for the draft. Others were classified 4-F, deemed medically unfit for service. Some held down full-time defense jobs and only played on Sundays. Tony Bova, a receiver, was blind in one eye and partially blind in the other. Ted Doyle, a tackle, worked on the Manhattan Project during the week and protected quarterbacks on the weekend. These men weren’t just playing football—they were shouldering a double burden, serving their country and their teammates in different ways.

And here’s the twist. The Steagles weren’t bad.

They opened the season with a 17-0 shutout over Brooklyn. Then they ran over the Giants. Suddenly this oddball Frankenstein’s monster had some bite. They wobbled a bit in the middle of the season, going 3-3-1. But they rallied late, finished 5-4-1, and landed third in the Eastern Division. It marked the first time the Eagles ever finished with a winning record, and only the second for the Steelers.

For fans back home, it was more than just football. In a country where every newspaper had a front page filled with battle reports and casualty numbers, the Steagles were a reprieve. They gave the folks in Pennsylvania something to cheer for, to argue about, to rally around. They reminded people that some form of normalcy still existed, even if it came with a stitched-together name and a shared stadium.

When the season ended, so did the partnership. In 1944, the league tried a similar experiment with Pittsburgh and the Chicago Cardinals. That team, dubbed “Card-Pitt,” flopped hard. They went winless, and their own players mockingly called them the “Carpets,” because everyone walked all over them. The failure of that merger only made the Steagles stand out more. Somehow, against all odds and in the middle of a global war, the Steagles had worked.

They never made the playoffs. They never raised a banner. But the Steagles remain a beloved oddity in NFL lore because they captured something rare. They were a patchwork team held together by grit, compromise, and a shared sense of duty. They were football’s version of the Home Front, scrappy and unglamorous, but absolutely necessary.

They showed us that even in times of chaos, when traditions are tossed out and nothing feels certain, people can come together, fight through the mess, and still find a way to win. Maybe not with perfection. Maybe not with harmony. But with heart.

And in a world that had gone mad, that was more than enough.