The Panthers of the Tangerine Bowl

From Franklin to Orlando

The franchise arrived in Orlando the way most minor-league franchises arrived in warm-weather cities in the middle 1960s: by leaving somewhere colder, and by carrying a suitcase full of new names.

It began as the Franklin Miners in 1958, a small-town Western Pennsylvania club in the Eastern Football Conference. It became the Paterson Miners in 1962, moved to New Jersey, joined the newly formed Atlantic Coast Football League, and won the ACFL championship over Providence in double overtime that same season. It became the Newark Bears in 1963, won another ACFL title, and finished as runners-up in 1964. In 1965 the Newark Bears joined the newly formed Continental Football League as one of its eight founding clubs and finished 5–9. The quarterback was a former Penn State fullback turned Philadelphia Eagles rookie halfback turned Atlantic Coast Football League Most Valuable Player. His name was Don Jonas. He was the only piece of the franchise that would matter in the story ahead.

In 1966, ownership took the last stop. Tom Granatell, a New Jersey businessman who had bought into the club during the Paterson years, moved the operation nine hundred miles south to Orlando. He renamed the club the Panthers. He rented a stadium the city had built in 1936 as a Works Progress Administration project and called the Tangerine Bowl. He hired Perry Moss to coach the team.

Moss was not a minor-league lifer. He had quarterbacked Illinois to the 1947 Rose Bowl. He had played briefly for the Green Bay Packers. He had been the head coach of the Montreal Alouettes in the CFL from 1960 to 1962. He had won a Grey Cup as an assistant. He was a serious football man, and Granatell had given him the keys to a franchise almost no one in Florida had ever heard of.

The pieces were in place. A stadium built for football. A market with no NFL competition anywhere south of Baltimore. A head coach who had been to the top of two leagues. A quarterback with a chip on his shoulder and something to prove.

The Continental Football League had, in the space of one franchise transfer, assembled the pieces most of its other markets never quite found.

Year One — The Sellout Summer

The Panthers opened the 1966 season on the last day of July in Moundsville, West Virginia, in front of 5,215 fans at the Wheeling Ironmen's home field. They won 31–7. Six days later, on August 6, they came home to Orlando for the first time. Ten thousand four hundred thirty-one people showed up to the Tangerine Bowl to watch a football team most of them had not known existed a month earlier. The Panthers beat the Brooklyn Dodgers 35–10.

They did not lose again in the state of Florida that summer.

By Labor Day weekend, when Toronto came in to draw that seventeen-thousand crowd, the Panthers were 5–0 and Don Jonas was on his way to the first of what would be three consecutive Continental Football League Most Valuable Player awards. By the end of September, they were 8–1. By the end of October, they were 11–1. They finished the regular season 12–2. The two losses were a September road stumble at Norfolk and a 28–27 heartbreaker to the Montreal Beavers at the Tangerine Bowl. Every other game, they won. They scored 35 or more points in ten of their fourteen regular-season games. They finished first in the Continental Football League's Western Division by four full games.

In the division playoff, they beat the Charleston Rockets 31–24 at home in front of 7,857 fans. That put them in the first Continental Football League championship game in the five-year history of the league.

On December 4, 1966, at Temple Stadium in Philadelphia, they lost that game 20–17 in sudden-death overtime to the Philadelphia Bulldogs. The rights to broadcast it had gone to ABC for five hundred dollars.

The Panthers had come within one possession of a championship in their first season in Orlando. Nobody in Florida had ever seen anything like it. Nobody in the Continental Football League had, either.

The Dynasty

The Panthers opened 1967 with a loss at Charleston. They did not lose another game that mattered.

Jonas, in his second Orlando season, threw the ball 407 times, completed 203 of them, went for 3,446 yards, and threw 41 touchdowns. It was, and would remain, the best statistical season of his career. He was the Most Valuable Player of the Continental Football League for the second time.

The defense that Moss built around him was the story the box scores missed. That defense had a twenty-four-year-old defensive end out of Jackson State named Coy Bacon. Bacon would leave the Panthers after 1967 to play fourteen years in the National Football League. He would go to three Pro Bowls with the Cincinnati Bengals and the Washington Redskins. He would be one of the most feared pass rushers in professional football through the middle of the 1970s. In 1967 he was a defensive end learning his craft in the Continental Football League, and he was learning it under Perry Moss, in the Continental Blue and gold of the Orlando Panthers.

The Panthers finished the 1967 regular season 11–3, first in the Atlantic South. In the Atlantic Playoff they went into Norfolk and beat the Neptunes 21–17 in front of 10,604 fans at Foreman Field. Then they got on a plane and flew across the country to Anaheim, California, to play the Orange County Ramblers for the Continental Football League championship.

On December 10, 1967, at Anaheim Stadium — the new home of the Los Angeles Angels of the American League and the future home of the Los Angeles Rams — the Orlando Panthers won the Continental Football League title, 38–14, in front of 8,730 fans. It was the franchise's first professional championship since Paterson had beaten Providence in the 1962 ACFL final. Jonas threw four touchdown passes. Perry Moss had a ring.

Somewhere in the middle of that 1967 season, Don Jonas got the phone call that defines the story of his career. Lou Saban, the head coach of the American Football League's Denver Broncos, was offering him a contract to come play in the AFL. Jonas turned it down. He would explain the decision in interviews for years afterward, and the language never changed much: Orlando was paying him well. Orlando was playing him. Orlando was winning. Denver was the only team in the American Football League, in his own words, that had been a perennial loser to that point. He stayed in Florida.

He would be MVP again in 1968.

That year the coaching changed. Perry Moss left Orlando for Marshall University, a decision that would end with an 0–9–1 season, a resignation over recruiting violations, and a strange kind of grace: he was not on the plane when Southern Airways Flight 932 went down carrying most of the Marshall football program on November 14, 1970. Moss was gone from Huntington by then.

To replace him, the Panthers promoted from within. Dick Pesonen — a former defensive back with the Dallas Cowboys, the Minnesota Vikings, and the New York Giants — had been the Panthers' defensive backs coach since 1966. Now he was the head coach.

Pesonen's Panthers did not miss a step. They went 10–2 in the regular season, first in the Atlantic Division. They beat the Indianapolis Capitols 28–14 at home in the divisional round in front of 5,916 at the Tangerine Bowl. And then, on November 30, 1968, at that same Tangerine Bowl, they played the Orange County Ramblers again for the Continental Football League championship.

Ten thousand one hundred thirty-four people came to watch. It was the largest crowd the Continental Football League drew to any championship game in any of the five years the original league played.

The Panthers won 30–23. Two Continental Cups. Three straight championship games. Three straight MVP awards for Don Jonas.

The Orlando Panthers were, by any honest measure of the record, the best football team the original Continental Football League ever produced.

Indianapolis, 1969

The 1969 season was supposed to be the three-peat.

The Panthers went 10–2 again, first in the Atlantic. Jonas played the way he had played in every other Orlando season, which is to say he played like a professional quarterback in a league that was mostly not paying professional quarterbacks. The Tangerine Bowl kept filling up: 12,318 for the home opener against Fort Wayne, 12,769 in October against the Alabama Hawks, 10,310 in November against Norfolk. In a five-year league that spent most of its time explaining away small crowds, the Panthers spent that season, as they had every season, doing the opposite.

Then the league changed the postseason format. The old Continental Football League had spent 1969 in a merger dance with the Texas Football League, which sent the San Antonio Toros and three other clubs into the Continental as a new Texas Division. That made four divisions instead of two conferences. It also made the road to a championship longer.

On November 29, 1969, at Bush Stadium in Indianapolis, the Orlando Panthers played the Indianapolis Capitols in the Eastern Conference Championship. It was the same Indianapolis Capitols the Panthers had beaten a year earlier in the Tangerine Bowl. This time, in front of 5,775 fans in the Indianapolis cold, Indianapolis won 27–7. The Panthers' three-year run at the top of the league was over.

A week later, on December 6, 1969, at that same Bush Stadium, Indianapolis beat San Antonio 44–38 in sudden-death overtime to win the final Continental Cup. It is the game that lives on in league lore. It is not the game the Panthers were supposed to be watching from home.

Within weeks, the Continental Football League was gone. By early 1970, the league office had shut down. The Panthers were still standing. They were also, quietly, in trouble.

The Cautionary Half

The football team the Panthers had built worked. The business the Panthers had built did not.

The Panthers had won by paying professional football players. Jonas, at his peak, was making a professional football player's salary. Bacon, before he had left for the NFL. The defensive front. The receiving corps. The roster the two Continental Cups were built on was not a minor-league roster with a couple of stars. It was a professional roster, top to bottom, and it was funded by an ownership group that had, for four seasons, been willing to spend ahead of the revenue coming in the door.

The revenue was real. Ten thousand paid, most Saturdays, in a stadium that held seventeen. Two championships. Three straight championship-game appearances. A working relationship with the Tangerine Bowl. Merchandise, program sales, sponsors, a market that had shown up in numbers no other city in the league had matched.

It was not enough. The payroll had run ahead of the plan.

When the ownership group changed hands after 1969, the new owners were not willing to keep paying what Granatell's group had paid. Jonas — the three-time MVP, still at his peak, still thirty-one years old and playing the best football of his life — was let go. So were others. The football team the Panthers put on the field for their last season was not the football team that had won two championships. The season ended. The Panthers folded.

That is the cautionary half. It is the half every league that follows the original Continental Football League has to learn from, and it is the half the new Continental Football League has taken most seriously.

The Panthers were not destroyed by their football. Their football was excellent. They were not destroyed by their market. Their market was better than any of the other markets in the league they played in. They were destroyed by the gap between the two, by an ownership approach that put payroll first and matched revenue to it second, and by a league that could not, when the numbers finally ran out, catch them.

The new Continental Football League is being built the other way around. Every ownership group brought into the league in 2027 arrived with a written commitment, a paid deposit, and compliance with league standards on capitalization and reserves before the first game is scheduled. Media distribution runs through the league's own channels rather than a national television contract that isn't coming. Payroll is matched to what the market will actually support, not to what an owner would like the market to look like.

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The Panthers won on the field. Every league that has come after them owes a piece of its playbook to the way they lost off it.

The Panthers of the Tangerine Bowl

What Orlando Built

Three lines run out of Orlando in 1970 and are still running today.

The first is the football people. Perry Moss coached at Marshall, then bounced through NFL assistant jobs with the Bears and the Packers in the 1970s, then came back to Orlando in 1986 as UCF's defensive coordinator. In two seasons at UCF he installed the "46" Defense Buddy Ryan had made famous with the 1985 Bears, and he produced the first winning season and the first playoff appearance in UCF football history. In 1991, at sixty-five years old, he became the first head coach of the Orlando Predators of the Arena Football League. He went 59–25 with the Predators over seven seasons. He was inducted into the Florida Sports Hall of Fame, then the Arena Football Hall of Fame. He died in DeBary, Florida, in August 2014, at eighty-eight. Between 1966 and 2014, if you were watching Orlando football at any level, at some point you were watching Perry Moss.

Dick Pesonen went back to the NFL. Coy Bacon played fourteen years in the league and put together a defensive-end career that produced 130 or more career sacks in the era before the NFL kept the statistic officially. Don Jonas signed with the Toronto Argonauts in the CFL, moved to Winnipeg in 1971, and won the CFL Most Outstanding Player Award that season — beating out every player in Canadian professional football, including future Hall of Famers.

The second line is the University of Central Florida. In 1979, when UCF's president Trevor Colbourn decided that Orlando ought to have a major college football program, the man he asked to build it was Don Jonas. Jonas coached UCF for its first season on a volunteer basis, without a paycheck, because — in his words — "Orlando and the University of Central Florida deserved a major college football program." The Knights went 6–2 that first year, averaged 11,240 fans per home game, and set a Division III attendance record of 14,138. Jonas coached three seasons, went 14–12–1, and stepped aside. UCF is today a program in the Big 12 Conference. The tree that grew from the Orlando Panthers has a real branch of major college football hanging off it.

The third line is the market itself.

In 1966, the city of Orlando was a citrus town of ninety thousand people. In 2026, the Orlando metropolitan area is home to just under three million. It is the third-largest metro area in Florida. It is one of the ten largest metropolitan areas in the United States without a National Football League franchise. Orlando has, in the sixty years since the Panthers' first game, supported the Arena Football League's Predators, the NBA's Magic, the ECHL's Solar Bears, Major League Soccer's Orlando City SC, and the National Women's Soccer League's Pride. The Tangerine Bowl — expanded in 1976, renovated in 1989, renamed the Florida Citrus Bowl and then Camping World Stadium — now holds 65,438 people, four times the crowd Don Jonas played in front of the night he won the 1968 Continental Cup.

The demand curve the Panthers uncovered in Orlando on Labor Day weekend in 1966 has not gone anywhere. It has only grown.

The Answer Key

The original Continental Football League was five seasons long. It produced one true dynasty. That dynasty was Orlando. The Panthers were the affirmative case — the argument the league made, in the one market where the pieces came together, that professional outdoor football in the summer window, in a city the NFL wasn't serving, could work and could win.

The Panthers proved the market. The market never went away. The stadium got bigger. The city got bigger. The appetite got bigger.

The new Continental Football League is not the same league. Its standards are stricter. Its capitalization requirements are real. Its revenue model does not require a national television deal it does not have. Its ownership groups are screened, deposited, and committed in writing before they are announced. It will not repeat the mistake that ended the Panthers' run — the mistake of running the football ahead of the business.

What it can repeat is the argument. Orlando is a professional football market. It was in 1966, when 17,258 people came to the Tangerine Bowl on a Saturday night to watch a team that had not existed six months earlier. It has been in every decade since. And somewhere in the ownership community around Central Florida — the boosters, the developers, the sports-and-entertainment executives, the families who have carried Orlando sports through six decades of expansion and contraction — there is a group that can look at the Panthers' story and see the answer key.

The Orlando Panthers played their last Continental Football League game on November 29, 1969, at Bush Stadium in Indianapolis. The league they helped build is still writing its next chapter.

Somewhere, someday, there will be a Saturday night at Camping World Stadium in front of a Continental crowd, and the Panthers will already know how the story starts.