On a Los Angeles practice field in the fall of 1960, in the first season the American Football League ever played, Charlie Brueckman lined up at middle linebacker for a franchise not yet a year old. Brueckman, the former University of Pittsburgh lineman who went on to play linebacker for the Washington Redskins and the original Los Angeles Chargers, died on July 20, 2026, according to a notice from Wilson Funeral & Cremation Service, which recorded him as a resident of Charlotte, North Carolina. He was 90.

Born Charles William Brueckman on November 23, 1935, in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, he attended Sto-Rox High School before enrolling at the University of Pittsburgh, where he played center and linebacker for the Panthers. In 1957, his senior season, teammates voted him a team co-captain alongside tackle Jim McCusker, and wire-service panels named him a second-team All-America selection and a first-team All-Eastern honoree, capping a college career built on the kind of interior line and linebacker play that rarely draws headlines but wins games.

The San Francisco 49ers picked him in the ninth round of the 1957 NFL Draft, but Brueckman served in the U.S. Army before turning pro. He broke into the league with the Washington Redskins in 1958, appearing in nine games, then spent the 1959 season in the New York Giants organization, a path typical of the era's linemen, who often moved between rosters as teams pared down their squads each summer.

In 1960 he found a lasting place with the Los Angeles Chargers, one of the eight charter franchises of the brand-new American Football League. The team's own history of that inaugural roster lists Brueckman among its linebackers, alongside future Chargers Hall of Famer Emil Karas, and he appeared in all 14 games that season, starting eight at middle linebacker. The Chargers went on to the league's first championship game, played January 1, 1961, in Houston, where they fell to the Oilers, 24-16. It closed out a professional career that spanned 23 games across the NFL and AFL, with one recorded sack along the way.

Brueckman's name endures in two records built to hold it: the University of Pittsburgh's list of 1957 team captains and All-America honorees, and the Chargers' own account of the roster that opened the American Football League's first season, before the merger and the Super Bowl, when eight fledgling franchises and linebackers like him were still proving that a second pro football league could last.