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The 1932 NFL Championship Game

The Portsmouth Times called it “a mock battle on a Tom Thumb grill”. But while the field may have been Lilliputian, the game’s impact on the National Football League was Brobdingnagian. It was the weirdest game in NFL history, a fitting climax to one of the league’s weirdest finals.

By the end of the 1932 season, it appeared that the Green Bay Packers were headed for their fourth consecutive NFL championship. They had a 10-1-1 record while their closest pursuers, the Chicago Bears and Portsmouth Spartans, only had nine wins between them. But the Bears and Spartans each had just one loss, along with a bunch of ties.

On December 4, the Packers played their sixth straight game on the road, at Portsmouth. The Spartans were 5-1-4 before the game. In Chicago, the Bears (4-1-6) were hosting the Giants, who had handed the Packers their only loss in New York three weeks earlier.

Under the current method of calculating the standings, the Packers would have won the championship. A tie now counts as half loss, half win. But in 1932 a tie simply didn’t count; it was as if the game had never been played.

After Portsmouth beat Green Bay, 19-0, and the Bears beat the Giants, 6-0, the Packers were suddenly out of the game. Portsmouth’s season was over, but the Packers had one game left, against the Bears in Chicago. If the Packers won that game, the Spartans would be the new champions. If the Bears were to win, they would be tied with Portsmouth for first place.

And that’s what happened. The Bears cruised to a 9-0 victory on a snowy field in freezing temperatures. So the classification was like this, with the ties eliminated:

 	               W	L	Pct.

Chicago 6 1 .857
Portsmouth 6 1 .857
Green Bay 10 3 .769

With today’s method, it would look like this:

 	               W	L	T	Pct.

Green Bay 10 3 1 .750
Portsmouth 6 1 4 .727
Chicago 6 1 6 .692

The NFL did not have a policy for dealing with a tie for first place at the end of the season. The league didn’t even handle the scheduling, that was up to the teams themselves, so it was also up to the Bears and Spartans to find a way to break the tie. They agreed to a game in Chicago on December 11. It was not, formally, a postseason championship game, but rather a regular season game added at the end of the schedule.

Chicago was the obvious place for the game. With attendance down due to the Depression, both teams needed the money that a large crowd at Wrigley Field would bring. But, due to the weather, the Bears-Packers game had drawn only 5,000 fans, even with the possibility of a championship on the line, and the cold and snow continued as the championship game approached.

On Thursday, December 8, Chicago co-owner George Halas met with Portsmouth coach Potsy Clark and NFL president Joe Carr to propose moving the game indoors to the Chicago stadium. It had a past: the Bears and Cardinals had played an exhibition game there in 1930. It also had the weather as its theme. Chicago’s stadium could hold about 16,000 spectators and could well fill up for the game, which would likely draw only 5,000 or fewer outdoors. Clark and Carr agreed to the move, and players from both teams unanimously approved it.

There was one final hurdle. The Bears had a contract that required them to play their home games at Wrigley Field. But Bill Veeck Sr., the owner of the stadium, agreed to release them from the contract for this game.

Chicago Stadium was primarily the home track for the Chicago Blackhawks, but was also used for boxing matches and other events. For the week before the football game it had hosted a circus, so the concrete floor was covered with several inches of dirt. Trucks filled with dirt, wood chips and bark were piled on top of that base to provide more cushioning. However, it didn’t provide much traction.

Many years later, Jim Foster got the idea for Arena Football by drawing the diagram of half a football field on the outline of a hockey rink. That was the way the field was laid out in 1932. The arena floor was only about 80 by 50 yards at its widest dimensions. The compressed football field in that area was 60 yards from goal line to goal line and 45 yards from sideline to sideline. The baselines were rounded, and 12-foot-high hockey boards formed a fence that surrounded the entire area. The fence was about 15 feet from the sidelines at midfield (the 30-yard line), which left room for the benches, but it almost touched the field at the goal lines and actually curved through the box. where the end zones should have been. Goal posts were erected only at the end of the field, and were on the goal line instead of the end line.

Some special rules were adopted, based on the rules that had been used for a 1930 exhibition game at the stadium. Kickoffs were taken from the 10-yard line, and after a kickoff return, the ball moved back 20 yards. Field goals were prohibited. On a touchback, the ball went out to the 10-yard line instead of the 20-yard line.

If the ball went out of bounds, it was carried just one yard from the sidelines under the rules in effect in 1932. Due to the close proximity of the fence at Chicago Stadium, the teams agreed that the ball would be carried 10 yards and the team in possession would have to lose a down. (Some accounts say 15 yards).

Sportswriters generally expected the reduced field to produce a high-scoring game. The Bears were definitely the favorites, mainly because the Spartans were without their best player, Dutch Clark. Clark, a founding member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, was the All-Pro team quarterback six times in his eight-year NFL career. A dangerous runner, excellent kicker, and reliable passer, he led the league in scoring in 1932. But he had returned to his alma mater, Colorado College, as basketball coach immediately after Portsmouth’s victory over Green Bay, and the school did not fire him. of his homework to play against the Bears.

However, the Spartans pretty much controlled the first half, thanks to Glenn Presnell’s coaching. They were in goal range twice and probably would have had a 6-0 halftime lead had field goals been allowed. Near the end of the second quarter, Portsmouth faced fourth down at the Bears 6-yard line and Presnell carried the ball on the cut play from the single wing. When he tried to make his cut into the hole, he lost his footing on the loose earth and fell untouched. Presnell was sure he would have scored if he hadn’t slipped.

But the game was still scoreless with about ten minutes remaining in the game, when Dick Nesbitt intercepted a pass thrown by Clark’s replacement, Ace Gutowsky, and returned it to the Portsmouth 7-yard line, where it was pushed out of bounds. The ball was carried 10 (or 15) yards from the sideline and the Bears were penalized with a down under the special rule. On second down, fullback Bronko Nagurski crashed to the 1-yard line, but lost a yard on the next play, generating fourth-and-goal at the 2-yard line. Once again, Nagurski took a pass and headed down the line. . But he stopped before he got there, took a step or two back and threw a touchdown pass to Red Grange.

A furious Potsy Clark entered the field, protesting that Nagurski had not been 5 yards behind the line of scrimmage when he threw the ball, as was required at the time. But referee Bobby Cahn ruled it a legal forward pass and allowed the touchdown, Tiny Engebretsen kicking the extra point to give the Bears a 7-0 lead. A little later, a bad hit went over the head of Portsmouth punter Mule Wilson and he rolled across the end zone in search of a safety, making the final score 9-0. .

Attendance reports range from 11,000 to over 15,000. However, the most reliable figure seems to be 9,623 paid tickets, plus “several hundred Annie Oakleys”, i.e. complimentary tickets. That number appeared in the Portsmouth Times and likely came directly from team management, based on the Spartans’ portion of the gate receipts. Whatever the exact number, it was certainly a lot more than a game in the snow and cold at Wrigley Field would have turned out to be.

Each Chicago player was paid $240 and each Portsmouth player received $175 for the game, for revenue of about $15,000. The Bears had the full 22-man roster, but Portsmouth only had 16 players, so the player share was just over $8,000. Other expenses are unknown, but renting the stadium and setting it up for a football game must have eaten up a lot of the other $7,000 or so.

Regardless of the financial outcome, however, the game was considered a success. At their meeting in Pittsburgh in February 1933, the NFL owners adopted three rule changes inspired by the championship game:

1. The ball was to move 10 yards from the sideline after going out of bounds, without costing the offensive team, and markings were added on the field.

2. Moved goal posts from baseline to goal line.

3. A forward pass from anywhere behind the line of scrimmage was allowed. (Potsy Clark, still unhappy, reportedly said, “Nagurski will go from anywhere, so we might as well make it legal,” when he voted for the change.)

Those changes helped increase scoring and noticeably reduced ties. In 1932, only three of the eight NFL teams scored more than 100 points, led by the Bears with 160. The following season, five teams scored more than 100 points; the New York Giants led the way with a whopping 244 and the Packers were next with 170. The number of ties was cut in half, from 10 in 1932 to five in 1933.

At the urging of George Preston Marshall of the Boston Braves (now the Washington Redskins), the owners decided at their July meeting to reorganize the NFL into East and West divisions, with a postseason championship game between the division winners. Marshall reasoned that since the impromptu 1932 championship game had gained unprecedented coverage for the league, an annual championship game would be an excellent showcase for professional football, like the World Series of baseball. Of course, that game has become a media event like no other called the Super Bowl.

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