<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (DolfanDale)</div><div class='quotemain'>Actually, I tried to Google up a definitive "Modern Era" for the NFL the other night and couldn't find one, except that most references to a "Modern Era" point to the NFL-AFL merger in 1970. I didn't see anything that refered to the "Modern Era" as directly following World War II. If someone can find a place where the NFL refers to a specific time period for the "Modern Era" then I would like to see it. Yeah, the 72 Dolphins were so lily white that they have two black Hall of Famers (Paul Warfield and Larry Little) on that team. :thumbsup:</div> The Modern Era that most people refer to is not defined well anywhere. Most people agree that that it started during the 60's when the AFL and NFL began competing with each other. The 1960's are definitely post world ward 2, so that makes complete sense. To be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, *and be counted as a "modern era" player*, they look only about 25 years prior to the current year, which further complicates the definition. The 72 Dolphins were a great team, and they were playing in a league that had been integrated. There is nothing anyone can say about that. I have a problem with comparing the 1972 Dolphins to the 1952 Lions though. No one even mentioned number of games played per season, per team or rule changes in this discussion either, but I'm done. The racial component to all of this is not being addressed properly, and accusations are flying. I'm not sorry for bringing it up, because it is indeed the truth, whether that truth is convenient for anyone or not. No one is sitting here trashing Bobby Lane, and diminishing him personally. He cannot help it what time he was born in, or what other athletes that they lined up across from him. That was out of his control. I was speaking to the bigger picture. Here is a non-racial analogy that ultimately points to the exact same thing that I have been saying all along - that there isn't equal access to the competition in question, and that the Lions 1950's championships came during a time when its league was exclusively white by design. This cheapens their championships and doesn't speak of a legitimate world champion: The Olympics decide that the only countries to be invited to the games with be England, France, and Germany. The winners will be declared "World Champions" and such. The US was not invited to this competition, even though they have athletes who can perform just as well, and sometimes better than the ones who received invites. An English man wins the 100-yard dash, and breaks the world record set in previous games by a German fellow by 2 seconds. Meanwhile, in the US, a man of french ancestry runs an even faster 100-yard dash, and reports it to all. Are the Olymipic competitions complete crap at this point? The answer is "Yes".
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (DolfanDale)</div><div class='quotemain'>Yeah, the 72 Dolphins were so lily white that they have two black Hall of Famers (Paul Warfield and Larry Little) on that team. :thumbsup:</div> By "Lily White" I didn't mean 100%. Hell, Paul Brown's great Cleveland Browns teams of the early 1950's had two black Hall of Famers! (Marion Motley and Bill Willis) Since it was 20 years later for the 1972 Dolphins, you'd certainly have to raise your eyebrows at how very few black starters there were on that team. Surely they were <u>way too white</u> for their time if we used Galvy's logic across the board. We also need to keep in mind that the NFL minor league system in the 1950's (colleges) didn't except unqualified students to play football the way they have in the AFC era. I think you needed to at least be at a 9th grade level back then!
