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1914 – 1921
The test:The test runs here, on the O'Brien pattern: a documented team of record absent from the file would be a failure; a documented absence is a finding. The finding is a scene, not a franchise.
What the record holds: South Bend had an early professional and semi-professional football scene in the years around the First World War, documented in the one specialist history of the subject — Emil Klosinski's Pro Football in the Days of Rockne (2006), which gives the South Bend scene sustained attention, devotes a chapter to "South Bend Notre Dame and the Pros," and builds its account on the memories of five men who played that early brand of football. Rockne himself moved through that world as a young professional with out-of-town clubs before and beside his Notre Dame years — the man belongs to the football leg and to People; the scene is this entry's. What the scene never produced was a club of league record: no South Bend team stands in the franchise record of the American Professional Football Association or the National Football League, in the record, and the city's professional football line in this history therefore prints at exactly this size — a documented semipro world of the 1910s, gathered in one book, and no franchise behind it.
Sources:
- Emil Klosinski, Pro Football in the Days of Rockne (Panoply Publications, 2006) — the South Bend scene of circa 1914–1919, its chapter on South Bend, Notre Dame and the pros, and its basis in five old-timers' accounts, as the book's own record describes them.
- The professional league franchise record as reached — no South Bend club in the APFA/NFL line; printed as a searched result, at that strength.