Depending on how closely you follow football, the name O.J. Brigance may or may not be familiar to you. I’ll confess that it didn’t ring much of a bell for me, even though he’s done something that no one else has. I’d say and likely never will again, but at the rate we’re going here…
Anywho, O.J. Brigance is the only person ever to have won a Grey Cup and a Super Bowl for the same city.
“Wait,” said someone who pays attention to football but is probably a little young. “How can that be?”
Because the CFL didn’t just start doing stupid things last year, that’s how.
In 1993, the league admitted its first United States-based franchise, the Sacramento Gold Miners. After modest success, the league then expanded further in the U.S. in 1994 with the Las Vegas Posse, Baltimore Stallions, and Shreveport Pirates. For the 1995 campaign, the American teams were split off into their own South Division, and two more teams, the Birmingham Barracudas and Memphis Mad Dogs, were added; at the same time, the Posse folded and the Gold Miners moved, becoming the San Antonio Texans. In 1995, the Stallions became the only non-Canadian team to win the Grey Cup.
Despite all American teams having the advantage of not being bound to the CFL’s minimum Canadian player quotas, only the Stallions proved to be an on-field and off-field success. The establishment of the National Football League’s (NFL) Baltimore Ravens, worsening financial problems among the league’s core Canadian teams, and the inconsistent performance of the other American teams prompted the CFL to abandon its American experiment and retrench its Canadian operations. The Stallions organization was used as the basis for a revival of the Montreal Alouettes.
You can read a bunch more about all of that here if you’d like, including Baltimore’s variety of names.
It was all over by 1996, but we were half way to history.
O.J. Brigance was on that Baltimore Grey Cup team. When it folded, he went on to play seven seasons in the NFL. He played for a number of teams, among them the aforementioned Baltimore Ravens with whom he won the Super Bowl in 2001, thus becoming the answer to a very odd trivia question.
Sadly, he died of ALS in August of this year. He was 56.
The native of Houston, Texas spent five seasons with the B.C. Lions and Baltimore Stallions, winning a Grey Cup in his final CFL season in 1995.
He played 90 career regular-season games, recording 322 defensive tackles, 53 special teams tackles, 35 sacks, nine fumble recoveries, and two interceptions.The six-foot, 236-pound defender spent the next seven years in the NFL as a member of the Miami Dolphins, Baltimore Ravens, St. Louis Rams, and New England Patriots.
He made 42 total tackles, three forced fumbles, and two fumble recoveries over 98 career regular-season games.
Brigance retired following the 2002 season and was hired as Baltimore’s director of player development in 2004, a role he held until his death. He won the Best Overall Player Development Program award in 2005 and 2006.
He was diagnosed with ALS in 2007, which led he and his wife, Chanda, to found the Brigance Brigade Foundation, a nonprofit designed to raise money and awareness about the disease.