In 1921, the Green Bay Packers’ maiden season in what is now the National Football League, four players joined them after starting out with the Rock Island Independents. A year later, the Packers acquired four more players from the Independents.
Also in 1922, with the Packers literally drowning in red ink, George Whitney Calhoun, the team’s co-founder and secretary of the Green Bay Football Club, wrote with envy about the support Rock Island received from its fans.
“Rock Island is the best supported professional football team in the middle west,” Calhoun wrote in the Green Bay Press-Gazette.