Portland Loggers

Continental Football League (1969)

Tombstone

Born: August 6, 1969
Folded: Early 1970

First Game:
Last Game:

CoFL Championships: None

Stadium

Civic Stadium

Marketing

Team Colors:

Ownership

Owners: Paul O’Hollaren, Andrew Cook, Bobby Grayson, et al.

Our Favorite Stuff

Continental Football League
Logo T-Shirt

Variously described as everything from “semi-pro” football to the “third Major League” behind the NFL and AFL during the late 1960’s, the Continental Football briefly established a sprawling network of pro football clubs that stretched from Florida to Mexico City to British Columbia. The Continental League helped launch the careers of Hall-of-Famers Bill Walsh and Ken Stabler and other NFL stars of the 1970’s including Otis Sistrunk, Bob Kuechenberg and Coy Bacon.

Our friends at Old School Shirts make the only Continental League shirt we’ve found and like all of their retro Americana tees, it’s soft and fits great!

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Background

The Portland Loggers were a One-Year Wonder in the minor Continental Football League during the autumn of 1969.

The Loggers formed in the first week of August 1969, with less than three weeks to get organized before their home opener at Civic Stadium on August 24th. Portland inherited the contracts of the CoFL’s defunct Orange County Ramblers club. The Ramblers had played in the league’s championship game in both the 1967 and 1968 seasons. The Loggers’ top skill position players – quarterback Jerry Otterson, running back Bob Jackson, and receiver Rhome Nixon – were all Ramblers holdovers.

The Loggers’ last-minute formation showed when a puny crowd of just 2,316 fans turned out for the team’s Portland debut, a 17-10 victory over the Fort Worth Braves. The win evened the Loggers’ record at 1-1. But they would win just two more games all season, en route to a 3-9 last place finish in the Continental League’s Pacific Division.

Demise

The Loggers folded at the end of the 1969 season, as did the rest of the Continental Football League.

Top receiver Rhome Nixon (58 receptions, 940 yards, 9 TDs) went on to a decent career in the Canadian Football League with the Ottawa Rough Riders and was a key contributor to that team’s 1973 Grey Cup championship run.