The team Pottsville still calls champions
A coal-region team
The Maroons came up in the 1920s as Pottsville's own — a roster largely of working coal miners and mill hands from Schuylkill County. They turned professional, joined the National Football League in 1925, and quickly became one of the young league's best.
December 6, 1925: Pottsville 21, Chicago 7
On December 6, 1925, the Maroons traveled to Comiskey Park and beat the Chicago Cardinals, 21–7 — the head-to-head meeting many at the time saw as settling the championship.
Beating the Four Horsemen
Six days later, in Philadelphia, the Maroons beat a barnstorming all-star team built around Notre Dame's famed "Four Horsemen," 9–7, before a Shibe Park crowd of about 11,000. Maroons captain Charlie Berry kicked the winning field goal late in the fourth quarter. For the young professional game, beating the college stars was a landmark win.
The suspension
That Philadelphia game was the problem: it sat in territory the NFL had granted to the Frankford Yellow Jackets, and league president Joseph Carr had warned the Maroons in advance not to play it. Pottsville owner Dr. John Striegel said the league first approved the game, then told him to call it off. Carr suspended the Pottsville franchise the next day, and the league's members upheld the suspension at their annual meeting in Detroit in February 1926.
The title goes to Chicago
With Pottsville suspended, the 1925 title was left unsettled. The Chicago Cardinals finished with the better record, but their owner, Chris O'Brien, declined the championship — he wanted one won on the field. The NFL today recognizes the Cardinals as the 1925 champions, and they hold it still. In Pottsville, the loss has never been accepted.
A century of trying to get it back
Pottsville never let it go. The NFL has revisited the case more than once over the decades and has never overturned it. The league did honor the Maroons as one of pro football's early great teams, and the Pro Football Hall of Fame later recognized Pottsville with its Daniel F. Reeves Pioneer Award. The team's players carved a trophy out of anthracite coal that now sits in the Hall of Fame in Canton, and the saga reached a national audience through David Fleming's book "Breaker Boys: The NFL's Greatest Team and the Stolen 1925 Championship."
The 2025 centennial
In 2025, a hundred years on, Pennsylvania marked the anniversary: the General Assembly designated August 16, 2025 "Pottsville Maroons Championship Day," and the Schuylkill County Historical Society gathered the team's story and artifacts for the town to celebrate.
Two Pottsville institutions
The Coney Island opened in 1917 and has served Pottsville ever since — out of the same anthracite-era streets the Maroons played for. We ran the "then & now" ad above for the centennial: one Pottsville institution raising a glass to another. We're not affiliated with the Maroons or the NFL — just proud to help keep the town's story going.