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In 1970, the Kansas City Chiefs proved once again that the upstart American football lead,

but AFL really could hang with NFL teams when they defeated the Minnesota Vikings in the Super Bowl.

But the success of that Chiefs team also helped change the way that Profitball teams were built.

Today, the Athletics' Rustin Dodd has the story of the largely forgotten Chief Scout,

who helped build a Super Bowl-winning powerhouse by finding and recruiting black players who many teams overlooked.

Maybe his time was too brief, but I think his impact was so beyond his time in the league that it's still a story worth knowing and remembering.

From Wondering on the Athletic, I'm Kabyta Davidson.

And I'm under Skelto. It's Friday, February 26th, and this is the lead.

Well, so, Rustin, first, can you remind us of the racial landscape of the country and the racial landscape of football in the early 1960s?

So, officially speaking, football was integrated, desegregated in the 40s, professional football.

But the classic story is that the Washington football team did not have its first black player until 1962.

They were the last NFL team to integrate and had to be pushed by both the Commissioner of the NFL and also the Kennedy administration.

In addition, most of the major college conferences in the South were not integrated as well. They were all white.

If you were living in the South, if you were a football player from Alabama, Georgia, Texas, you know, on down the line, you had to go play it at a historically black college.

So, there were schools and systems, grambling, southern, and these classic kind of black college football programs that had operated for years.

But mostly out of the scope of, quote unquote, a mainstream America, white newspapers, obviously, we're not covering these people.

The resources were lacking. This system was not set up for black players from the South, oftentimes, to find their way to the NFL.

And also, the positions, you know, quarterback, middle linebacker, there were other positions on the field where black players were thought to not be up to the challenge.

The middle linebacker had to be the person on the field calling plays, and that person had to be white.

So, there were lots of stereotypes and other kind of systemic racism that players would face even on the field in the structure of something like the NFL.

Well, so how did Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt fit into this landscape?

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