On Sep. 9, 1960, the Denver Broncos
defeat the Boston Patriots, 13-10, in the first ever game played in the
American Football League.
The Broncos had lost all five of their exhibition
games and wouldn't experience a winning season until 1973 -- after they had
already merged into the NFL.
But on this Friday afternoon, it was Denver who
was victorious.
Patriots kicker Gino Cappelletti scored the league's first
points with a 35-yard field goal to begin the game.
While
the Broncos would remain in Denver, the Patriots eventually moved south to
Foxborough. When they did, the team was temporarily renamed the "Bay State
Patriots," much to the chagrin of many sports writers. "When I came
here in February of 1971, they were the Bay State Patriots," Upton Bell,
then the General Manager of the Patriots, told the Boston Globe in 2009. "The first
newspaper headline I saw read, ‘BS Patriots.’ I said, ‘Oh, no. The ‘BS
Patriots’? Like the ‘bull [expletive] Patriots'?
"Everybody
was making jokes about us. I figured, ‘We’re not in Boston, and we’re in the
middle of New England -- why not become the New England Patriots?"
The
team did just that in March, only a month after becoming the BS Patriots.
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