Before Title IX, Toledo Had the Winningest Team in Pro Football History — the Toledo Troopers
If you caught 13abc‘s segment tonight — reporter Lissa Guyton’s “Tackling history: The Toledo Troopers” — you already know the jaw-dropping headline: before Title IX, Toledo was home to the winningest team in professional football history. Not the Browns. Not the Steelers. The Toledo Troopers, a women’s team that won seven consecutive championships from 1971 to 1977.
The Troopers took the field for the first time on Aug. 6, 1971, in the Women’s Professional Football League, and they simply did not lose. Under head coach Bill Stout, they went 47-1 from 1971 to 1977, and Stout insisted his team be taken seriously, never as a gimmick. In 1983, the Pro Football Hall of Fame recognized the Troopers as the winningest team in pro football history — a story John Millen tells in rich detail.
The star was halfback Linda Jefferson, who rushed for 9,250 yards and 150 touchdowns — more career touchdowns than Jim Brown’s 126. By any measure, she was one of the greatest football players ever to come out of Toledo.
What makes the story even more Toledo is who these women were. The 82 women who played for the Troopers between 1971 and 1979 were everyday Toledoans — housewives, factory workers, hairdressers, teachers, bartenders and mail carriers — who practiced after work and played like champions on the weekends. Together they compiled a 58-4-1 record before the team disbanded in 1979.
The honors kept coming long after the final whistle. The Troopers were the first team inducted into the Women’s Football Foundation Hall of Fame in 2014, and their story is told in Stephen Guinan’s 2022 book “We Are the Troopers” and the documentary of the same name, reviewed by Sport in American History.
Fifty-five years after that first kickoff, the Troopers remain a point of Toledo pride — proof that long before women’s sports had the spotlight, Toledo women were already the best in the game. For readers who want more, the book and the documentary are well worth a look.
Featured image: The Eastern State Women’s Football Team, October 20, 1945. Photo: public domain (CC0), via Wikimedia Commons.
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