History
Although the Columbus Panhandles were charter members of the American Professional Football Association, they had their best years before 1920, when the APFA was founded.
Joe Carr was their founder. He worked for the Panhandle Division of the Pennsylvania Railroad for a time, before becoming a sportswriter with the Ohio State Journal in 1900, at the age of twenty.
Carr became involved in sports promotion a year later, when he organized the Panhandle White Sox, made up mainly of railroad employees. Then, in 1904, he put together a football team, the first edition of the Columbus Panhandles. That team folded quickly, but Carr tried it again in 1907.
The new version lasted for 20 years. It was a unique team. Almost all of its players also worked for the railroad, so they practiced on their lunch hours and after work. They didn't have to pay to take the train, so the Panhandles played most of their games on the road, often sleeping in haylofts on overnight trips to keep expenses even lower.
They weren't an outstanding team, but they were good enough to draw respectable crowds wherever they went. Many people came out just to see the remarkable Nesser brothers. Seven of the eight brothers played for Columbus at various times. The best of them, 250-pound Frank Nesser, was also a boxer and minor-league baseball player who frequently played for other teams in important games.
One of the younger brothers, Al Nesser, started with the Panhandles but moved to Akron in 1917 and played for several other teams, including the 1920 Akron Pros squad that won the first NFL championship (although, of course, the league was called the American Professional Football Association then).
There's no record that the Panhandles actually joined the APFA when it was organized in 1920, but they're usually included in the standings because they played five games against APFA teams.
However, they remained basically a semi-pro team made up almost entirely of home-grown players, and the three Nesser brothers still with the team were past their prime. The Panhandles simply couldn't compete in the league, which became the NFL in 1922.
That was the last season for the Panhandles, but essentially the same team, known as the Columbus Tigers, continued playing in the NFL from 1923 through 1926. They had no more success with the new name than with the old.
The Panhandles' major legacy to the NFL was Joe Carr, who took over as the league's president in 1921. He held the job until his death in 1939, after he had guided the league from its small-town, semi-pro origins to genuine professional status. Ironically, that was a transition that the Panhandles had never made.