In this episode of Public History with Justin, Jake, and Molly, Jake hosts a conversation with sportswriter and author David Fleming about one of the most remarkable – and unjust – stories in American sports history: the rise and fall of the Pottsville Maroons.

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Drawing from Fleming’s book Breaker Boys: The NFL’s Greatest Team and the Stolen 1925 Championship, recently re-released in a special 100th anniversary edition, the conversation traces how a professional football team from a small coal town in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, took the fledgling NFL by storm in 1925 – only to have its championship stripped away.

Breaker Boys is available in a new 100th anniversary edition.

Jake and David dig into the world that produced the Maroons: coal miners turned professional athletes, brutal early football played without modern safeguards, and a working-class Coal Region that rallied around its team during a period of enormous economic and social change.

They walk through the Maroons’ dominant season, their decisive victory over the Chicago Cardinals, the infamous exhibition game against Notre Dame, and the league decision that erased Pottsville from the NFL record books.

The episode also explores how the Maroons’ story lived on – and why the fight to restore their championship still matters a century later.

This episode explores:

• The 1925 Pottsville Maroons and the chaos of the early NFL
• Coal miners, violence, and football before helmets and safety rules
• Civic pride and sports in Pennsylvania’s anthracite region
• The Notre Dame exhibition game that changed pro football
• How and why the NFL stripped Pottsville of its championship
• Memory, injustice, and the long afterlife of a stolen title

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