Charley Trippi
January 28th, 2009 | Published in Player Bios
As anyone following the Super Bowl coverage now knows, the last time the Cardinals won the NFL championship was 1947, while they were still playing in Chicago. One of the stars of the 1947 team was Charley Trippi, pictured here on one of his rookie cards, a 1948 Bowman. (Charley’s other rookie card is a 1948 Leaf. Both Bowman and Leaf printed football cards in 1948.)
Reading about Trippi and the rest of the Cardinals’ “Million Dollar Backfield” (also Paul Christman, Elmer Angsman, and Pat Harder) led me to look at Charley’s stats. I knew he had played halfback, but on his stats page I noticed that in 1951 and 1952 he also had a lot of passing statistics. Cool, I thought, he played quarterback for awhile, too. Then I noticed he had punting stats. And kick and punt return stats. And interception stats. The guy played five positions!
