The Miami Dolphins are a professional American football franchise which competes in the National Football League (NFL) as a member club of the league's American Football Conference (AFC) East division. The team's headquarters, stadium and training facilities are all co-located in Miami Gardens, Florida. The Dolphins' team was founded by attorney-politician Joe Robbie and actor-comedian Danny Thomas. The Dolphins began play in the American Football League (AFL) in 1966. South Florida had not had a professional football team since the days of the Miami Seahawks, who played in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC) East Division in 1946 before becoming the first incarnation of the Baltimore Colts. The late 1960s: Origins The first professional American football team to be based in Miami and the state of Florida was the Miami Seahawks. The Seahawks entered the All-America Football Conference (AAFC) during its inaugural 1946 season, as the first major league-level sports franchise ever in Miami. However, the team lasted only one year before being confiscated by the league. Miami had been a target for the American Football League from its earliest stages. Ralph Wilson, one of the league's founding owners, had hoped to establish his franchise in Miami when he acquired his stake in 1959, but he was unable to locate a suitable stadium to host professional football games. The only stadium large enough was the Orange Bowl and at the time, only college teams were permitted to play there. This led Wilson to abandon his plans and instead establish the Buffalo Bills in Buffalo, New York. The fledgling AFL maintained its interest in Miami however, and in 1962 staged a preseason exhibition game between the Houston Oilers and the Dallas Texans. Three years later, the AFL awarded an expansion team to lawyer Joe Robbie and actor Danny Thomas. They agreed to pay the AFL $7.5 million for their franchise, an astonishing three hundred times the $25,000 the eight original AFL owners had paid for the league's charter franchises. Robbie had originally wanted to establish the new franchise in Philadelphia, but encountered resistance from the other AFL owners since Philadelphia was already home to an established NFL team. The decade had not only seen the relocations of the AFL's Texans and Los Angeles Chargers due to local NFL competition, but even that of the NFL's long-established Chicago Cardinals while the Oakland Raiders and New York Titans initially only barely survived. Such experiences