In 1931, Philadelphia's NFL franchise, the Frankford Yellow Jackets, who had won the NFL Championship in 1926, went bankrupt and ceased operations midway through the season. After more than a year searching for a suitable replacement, the NFL granted an expansion franchise to a syndicate headed by former University of Pennsylvania teammates Lud Wray and Bert Bell.
In exchange for an entry fee of $2,500, the Bell-Wray group was awarded the assets of the failed Yellow Jackets organization. Drawing inspiration from the insignia of the centerpiece of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, specifically the National Recovery Act's "blue eagle," Bell and Wray named the new franchise the Philadelphia Eagles, with Bell as president and general manager and Wray as head coach. Neither the Eagles nor the NFL officially regard the two franchises as the same, citing the aforementioned period of dormancy. The Eagles simply inherited the NFL rights to the Philadelphia area. Further, Wray and Bell assembled an almost entirely new team; only a single player from the 1931 Yellow Jackets ended up with the 1933 Eagles. The new team played its first game on October 15, 1933, against the New York Giants at the Polo Grounds in New York City. They lost the game 56-0.[1] The Eagles struggled over the course of their first decade, never winning more than four games. Their best finish was in their second season, 1934, when they finished tied for third in the East. For the most part, the Eagles' early rosters were composed of former Penn, Temple and Villanova players who put in a few years before going on to other things. In 1935, Bell proposed an annual college draft to equalize talent across the league. The draft was a revolutionary concept in professional sports. Having teams select players in inverse order of their finish in the standings, a practice still followed today, strove to increase fan interest by guaranteeing that even the worst teams would have the opportunity for annual infusions of the best college talent. Between 1927 (the year the NFL changed from a sprawling Midwestern-based association to a narrower, major-market league) and 1934, a triopoly of three teams (the Chicago Bears, New York Giants and Green Bay Packers) had won all but one title since 1927 (the lone exception being the Providence Steam Roller of 1928).
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