Long before the Buckeyes ruled Columbus and long before fantasy football ruined your Sunday afternoon, there was a gritty little team made up of railroad workers, playing smashmouth football behind a machine shop. Their name? The Columbus Panhandles.
The Panhandles weren’t just any early football team. They were a band of boilermakers with cleats and a dream.
Born in 1901 out of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Panhandle Division (hence the name), the team started as a way for workers to blow off steam and maybe break a few bones in the process. Games were scheduled through newspaper ads and word of mouth. Practices? Usually during their lunch break.
The players ate for 15 minutes and spent the next 45 running drills behind the rail yard. The Panhandles didn’t train in gleaming stadiums. Their field was tucked behind a rail yard, echoing with hammer blows and reeking of grease.
The team had its ups and downs early on.
columbus panhandles football
The Columbus Panhandles playing a game during the 1910s at Indianola Park.
OK, mostly downs. They lost a lot. But in 1907, a sportswriter named Joseph Carr took the wheel. Carr, who managed the railroad’s baseball team and had a vision of pro football that involved more than beer money and broken noses, figured he could turn this scrappy outfit into something bigger.
Carr had two secret weapons: free train rides and the Nesser brothers.
Because most of the Panhandles worked for the railroad, they could travel for free.
That meant the Panhandles became one of the sport’s earliest barnstorming teams, playing on the road to avoid stadium costs at home. It also meant that wherever the rails ran, the Panhandles could follow—scrimmaging in small towns, industrial cities, and anywhere a crowd could gather.
Then there were the Nessers.
columbus panhandles football
The 1915 Columbus Panhandles team.
If you’ve never heard of the Nesser brothers, congratulations, you’ve been living a life untouched by early-20th-century football folklore. The Nessers were seven (!) brothers who worked as boilermakers and played like they were built out of leftover train parts. Frank Nesser, the biggest of the bunch, stood 6-foot-1 and weighed 235 pounds—a terrifying sight in 1910 when most men were built like scarecrows.
They didn’t go to college. They didn’t need to. They tackled like bulls and blocked like locomotives. They were the Panhandles’ main draw, the kind of team centerpiece you could advertise by just shouting their name. In 1921, Ted Nesser even played alongside his own son—still the only father-son duo in NFL history to share the field in the same game.
And while they never brought home a title, the Panhandles do have one claim to fame that no one can take away…
They played in what is considered the first-ever NFL game. It was October 3, 1920. The Panhandles took the field against the Dayton Triangles and lost 14–0.
After that, the team limped along. Carr eventually became president of the league—the very same league that became the NFL. The Panhandles, meanwhile, were rebranded as the Columbus Tigers in 1923. They had some flashes of competence (finishing eighth one year!) but by the late 1920s, the team faded away.
The NFL moved on. Columbus would have to wait nearly a century to see another pro football team in town, and even then, it was a spring league.
columbus panhandles football team
Columbus Panhandles team in 1921.
But the Panhandles? They mattered.
They were proof that football didn’t need packed stadiums and billion-dollar TV deals to be compelling. It could be dirty, sweaty, slightly disorganized, and still grip a crowd. It could be played by men who spent their days wielding sledgehammers and their Sundays cracking shoulder pads.