page_title: Philadelphia Eagles
section_title: Wray and Bell era (1933–1940)
hierarchical_section_title: Philadelphia Eagles / Franchise history / Wray and Bell era (1933–1940)
caption_attribution_description: English: The Grand Stand entrance of the Philadelphia Shibe Park baseball stadium
context_page_description: The Philadelphia Eagles are a professional American football team based in Philadelphia. The Eagles compete in the National Football League as a member club of the league's National Football Conference East division. In the 2017 season the team won Super Bowl LII, their first Super Bowl win in franchise history and their fourth NFL title overall, after winning the Championship Game in 1948, 1949, and 1960.
  The franchise was established in 1933 as a replacement for the bankrupt Frankford Yellow Jackets, when a group led by Bert Bell secured the rights to an NFL franchise in Philadelphia. Bell, Chuck Bednarik, Bob Brown, Brian Dawkins, Reggie White, Steve Van Buren, Tommy McDonald, Greasy Neale, Pete Pihos, Harold Carmichael, Sonny Jurgensen, and Norm Van Brocklin have been inducted to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
  The team has had an intense rivalry with the New York Giants. This rivalry is the oldest in the NFC East and is among the oldest in the NFL.
context_section_description: After more than a year of searching for a suitable replacement, the NFL granted an expansion franchise to a syndicate headed by Bert Bell and Lud Wray and awarded them the assets of the failed Yellow Jackets organization. The Bell-Wray group had to pay an entry fee of $3,500 (equal to $42,030 today) and assumed a total debt of $11,000 that was owed to three other NFL franchises. Drawing inspiration from the Blue Eagle insignia of the National Recovery Administration—the centerpiece of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal—Bell and Wray named the new franchise the Philadelphia Eagles. This makes it appear that the Yellow Jackets sat out the 1932 season and returned as the Eagles in 1933. However, neither the Eagles nor the NFL officially regard the two franchises as the same, citing the aforementioned period of dormancy. Furthermore, almost no Yellow Jackets players were on the Eagles' first roster.
  The Eagles, along with the Pittsburgh Steelers and the now-defunct Cincinnati Reds, joined the NFL as expansion teams. Wray became the Eagles first head coach after being convinced by Bell, his former teammate at Penn, to take the position. The team originally planned to play their home games at Shibe Park, which was the home of the Philadelphia Athletics baseball club. When negotiations fell through the team managed to make a deal with the Athletics' crosstown rival, the Philadelphia Phillies to play at the Baker Bowl.
  The Eagles played their 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. 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 played for 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). By 1936 the club had suffered significant financial losses and was sold through a public auction. Bert Bell was the only bidder and became the sole owner of the team. Wray refused a reduction in his salary and left the team. Bell assumed the head coaching position and led the team to a record of 1-11, for last place in the league.
  In 1940 the Eagles moved to Shibe Park (renamed Connie Mack Stadium in 1954) and played their home games at the stadium through 1957, except for during the 1941 season, which was played at Municipal Stadium, where they had played from 1936 to 1939. To accommodate football at Shibe Park during the winter, management set up stands in right field, parallel to 20th Street. Some 20 feet high, these "east stands" had 22 rows of seats. The goalposts stood along the first base line and in left field. The uncovered east stands enlarged capacity of Shibe Park to over 39,000, but the Eagles rarely drew more than 25,000 to 30,000. The team finished the 1937 season 2-8-1 and would continue to struggle over the next three seasons.
caption: Connie Mack Stadium was the Eagles home field in 1940 and then from 1942-1957
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "100", "Image YResolution": "100", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0", "Image DateTime": "2006:12:21 06:05:15", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "302", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6154", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "771", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "600"}