History
The original Minneapolis Marines were a unique semi-pro team made up of players who had begun playing together as youngsters in 1905, in a youth league with a weight limit of 115 pounds. None of them ever played football for a high school or college team. Their top player was quarterback Rube Ursella, an outstanding kicker who had a 22-year professional career, including four stints as a player-coach in the NFL.
The Marines won the city championship in 1910, then lost in the title game two years in a row. One of the players, Johnny Dunn, took over as team manager in 1913 and brought in a coach, Ossie Solem, who had played end at the University of Minnesota. Solem later coached Syracuse and Iowa. The team also added some outside players for the first time. The major addition was Bob Marshall, one of pro football's first black players. Marshall, who had starred at Minnesota, was a 6-foot-2, 195-pound end.
That year, the Marines won the city championship game, 33-0, and they followed that with a 48-0 victory in 1914.
Having overpowered the local opposition, Dunn moved the team to Nicollet Park, home of the Minneapolis Millers baseball team, and began scheduling games against out of town teams in 1915. Over the next three years, the Marines won 34 straight regular season games. However, they lost twice and played one tie in an annual Thanksgiving Day game against University of Minnesota all-star teams.
After missing the 1918 season entirely because of the influenza epidemic, the Marines lost several of their top players, including Marshall and Ursella, to the Rock Island Independents, and they were never again a top-notch team. In 1921, Dunn bought a franchise in the American Professional Football Association, hoping that games against APFA teams would bring in enough spectators and revenue to allow him to rebuild the team, but it didn't happen. He pulled out of the league, which had become the NFL, after the 1924 season.
In 1929, Dunn and Val Ness became co-owners of a new NFL franchise, the Minneapolis Red Jackets, so named because the Marines had worn red jerseys, but that didn't work either. Beginning November 8, 1930, the Red Jackets virtually merged with another weak team, the Frankford Yellow Jackets. Frankford could play home games only on Saturday because of Pennsylvania's blue laws, so the merged team played as the Yellow Jackets on Saturdays and as the Red Jackets on Sundays. That didn't help. After the season, Minneapolis dropped out of the NFL.