Professional Football Researchers Association Forum

Rupert Patrick wrote: The Bengals have theirs just about scanned but have no plans to make them available on their website - not sure why.

It might cost them money for extra bandwidth.

Rupert Patrick wrote:I've gotten a game book (actually a stat sheet was all they had) for the 9/9/1963 Bills-Chargers game about from the Chargers PR guy a month ago. The stat sheet was the same thing the Bills had; the game book wasn't in those CD's with all the Bills game books that I got at the meeting in Buffalo last summer. This Bills-Chargers game is the game that has the only missed field goal in AFL history that I haven't been able to track down the distance of.

The Chargers' George Blair missed "from the 19 and 34" according to the San Diego Union's game recap on page 35.

Andrew McKillop wrote:

Rupert Patrick wrote:I've gotten a game book (actually a stat sheet was all they had) for the 9/9/1963 Bills-Chargers game about from the Chargers PR guy a month ago. The stat sheet was the same thing the Bills had; the game book wasn't in those CD's with all the Bills game books that I got at the meeting in Buffalo last summer. This Bills-Chargers game is the game that has the only missed field goal in AFL history that I haven't been able to track down the distance of.

The Chargers' George Blair missed "from the 19 and 34" according to the San Diego Union's game recap on page 35.

Thanks, I already have those, but I am trying to find the field goal missed by the Bills Mack Yoho. Does anybody have access to the Buffalo local newspapers for 9/9/63 and 9/10/63? I tried to use that Fulton NY Postcards site but could never get it to work right.

Ah, too bad, I thought maybe that was the data you needed.

I checked into the Fulton website and it appears they don't have any Buffalo newspaper pages from September of 1963 uploaded yet.

The Buffalo-Erie County Public Library has the Buffalo News digitized to back then and before. They are on microfiche. (did I spell that right?) A few years ago I did some research on a few games in Buffalo for whoever runs the NFL uniforms database website. I doubt I am going to have the time any time soon to get over there again. Sorry Rupert.

Rupert Patrick wrote:
Thanks, I already have those, but I am trying to find the field goal missed by the Bills Mack Yoho. Does anybody have access to the Buffalo local newspapers for 9/9/63 and 9/10/63? I tried to use that Fulton NY Postcards site but could never get it to work right.

The site's a pain to use, to be sure. My preferred method for searching is to put the entire name of the newspaper as he has it listed along with the year all in quotes, for example, "Buffalo NY Courier Express 1963" and then add further keywords or phrases in quotes as needed. It's not perfect and it's hard to narrow down specific dates, but I have at least gotten some useful info that way. For a while I was trying to browse pages and narrow down dates that way, but quickly realized there's a lot of mish-mash in a given year. It's a great resource for Buffalo and Philly stuff, but man, what a mess.

I am pleased to announce that I just received from the Detroit Lions Director of Foorball Communications Eamonn Reynolds, the Detroit Lions game books for the years 1948 thru 1968. I just downloaded them, and have not looked at them, but I believe them to be complete. We've already got the Lions game books for 1969 thru 2018 (although we are missing a half dozen or so Lions game books from the 1980's) so this constitutes everything in the Lions archives. It is going to take me a couple weeks to process these game books, as they arrived in a single pdf file for each season, and I need to split these files for each game and rename each file for each game. I was requesting a couple game books from the guy with the Lions, and he said all of the Lions game books had been converted to pdf files. I asked how far back they went, and he said they went back to 1948, so I told him the PFRA was building a public database of all NFL game books and we would love to have the Lions game books and I got them. As soon as I have them processed, I will email them to Ken and he will upload them to the site.

Rupert Patrick wrote:I am pleased to announce that I just received from the Detroit Lions Director of Foorball Communications Eamonn Reynolds, the Detroit Lions game books for the years 1948 thru 1968. I just downloaded them, and have not looked at them, but I believe them to be complete. We've already got the Lions game books for 1969 thru 2018 (although we are missing a half dozen or so Lions game books from the 1980's) so this constitutes everything in the Lions archives. It is going to take me a couple weeks to process these game books, as they arrived in a single pdf file for each season, and I need to split these files for each game and rename each file for each game. I was requesting a couple game books from the guy with the Lions, and he said all of the Lions game books had been converted to pdf files. I asked how far back they went, and he said they went back to 1948, so I told him the PFRA was building a public database of all NFL game books and we would love to have the Lions game books and I got them. As soon as I have them processed, I will email them to Ken and he will upload them to the site.

Thank you, Rupert!!

ehaight wrote:

Rupert Patrick wrote:
Thanks, I already have those, but I am trying to find the field goal missed by the Bills Mack Yoho. Does anybody have access to the Buffalo local newspapers for 9/9/63 and 9/10/63? I tried to use that Fulton NY Postcards site but could never get it to work right.

The site's a pain to use, to be sure. My preferred method for searching is to put the entire name of the newspaper as he has it listed along with the year all in quotes, for example, "Buffalo NY Courier Express 1963" and then add further keywords or phrases in quotes as needed. It's not perfect and it's hard to narrow down specific dates, but I have at least gotten some useful info that way. For a while I was trying to browse pages and narrow down dates that way, but quickly realized there's a lot of mish-mash in a given year. It's a great resource for Buffalo and Philly stuff, but man, what a mess.

The mystery of the missing missed field goal has been solved. In going back thru the email from the guy from the Chargers, I noticed he actually sent me two documents, not one, and the second one was the game book. The missing field goal by Mack Yoho I was looking for was 34 yards.

It looks like my suggestion to the Redskins about putting their archives online has reached the right people. I followed up with them last week and they said they are tentatively planning to go ahead with it in the following off-season.

After suggesting the same to the Packers, it looks like the Packers are now also considering digitizing their archives and putting them online.

The Colts are in the process of digitizing their entire archives (game books, flip cards, media guides, press releases, coaches film, etc.) as we speak and the goal is to put it ALL online. Their special projects guy actually wanted to talk to me about what he was doing. I mostly listened and just asked questions about what the extent of what was in the Colts archives. He wanted my input and I told him I really wasn't in a position to give input other than to say once the documents are digitized, please continue to take proper care of them.

It took three months and emails to three different people in the Falcons PR department before I got a response. I was told there will be no game books from the Falcons for the foreseeable future. They are in the process of moving their historical items to another site and their game books are in storage and they never got around to digitizing their game books. They didn't give an ETA for when this would be completed.

Like the Falcons, it took three months and emails to three different people in the Giants PR department before I got the right person. I got a couple game books from the Giants.

I finally heard back from the Panthers and got the two game books I needed from them. I now have all of their game books.

Still no response from the Bears or Eagles. Tried to contact the Cowboys, Raiders and Seahawks, never heard back. Had a bad experience trying to get game books from the Jets.

I started going thru the game books from 1960 forward, opening up each game book and making sure all four (or five) quarters were there and they were all readable. In some cases if I had two different game books for the game I was able to use the Ilovepdf.com site to cobble the two game books into a single decent game book. I also fixed the game books, flipping the pages so they are all in the right direction. If I only had one game book for the game and there was a missing page or an unreadable page(s), I flagged the game book as an upgrade. Last night I finished going thru 1992, which was the first season I found where I had all the game books and no upgrades.

From 1960-92, after going thru a total of 6.427 game books, I found a total of 302 game books for which we need upgrades. Of those 302, there are 22 for which we already have the game books from both teams for a particular game and neither is either 100 percent complete or readable. (One of these 22 game books, by the way, is the 11/18/85 Giants-Redskins MNF game when Theismann broke his leg; I got game books from the Giants and Redskins and both game books were identical and they had legibility issues) It is hoped that possibly the Pro Football Hall of Fame has a decent copy of these game books.

I am going to need some serious help deciphering some hand-written 1949 Lions game books. There are four of them for the 10/8 (at Pittsburgh), 10/23 (at Chi. Cardinals), 11/13 (at Chi. Bears), and 11/20 (at NY Giants) games, and ideally I think at least two people should be deciphering these independently to ensure they both reach the same conclusions on their own. I think as historians we have a responsibility to try to decipher these hand-written documents into a general play-by-play form as many of us are authorities on the players of this era. These game books should be being put online shortly, but if you wanted to get a look at them now, PM me with your email address and I'll send them to you. The handwriting is hard to make out on these and unfortunately I don't think we have any Pharmacists among the PFRA membership, but if you're familiar with the players of the era, you might be able to assist with this.

We have the number of game books we need from 1960-2018 down from 961 last month to 872.