By Darin Hayes For many reasons, the 1932 season may have been a low point for the NFL. The Great Depression was in full swing, affecting the revenue of member franchises due to dwindling ticket sales as many people could barely scrape together enough coin to eat, let alone attend a football game. The League dropped to its lowest level of participating teams ever when only eight franchises took the field under the National Football League banner that year. This low amount of teams occurred only once before in the League’s history, in 1943 amid World War II.
The financial woes had meant the demise of major and recently competitive teams such as the Providence Steam Roller, Frankford Yellow Jackets, and Cleveland Indians. Softening some of this retraction was the addition of the Boston Braves, owned by George Preston Marshall.
Despite all the setbacks early on, the season was highly successful as three teams vied for the NFL title that season: the Green Bay Packers, Portsmouth Spartans, and the Chicago Bears.
Green Bay finished the season with a 10-3 record, a great campaign by all accounts, but not when the Spartans and Bears had a higher winning percentage and virtually tied for the best record in the League for 1932.
After some alleged backroom meetings with the NFL hierarchy, the NFL brass decided that a final game to determine a Champ would be played in a unique Chicago at Wrigley Field on December 18, 1932. The title was supposed to be given to the team with the best record, as it had been for over a decade in the young NFL. The season, though, ended with the Chicago Bears and the Portsmouth Spartans in a virtual tie for the top record in the League.
It is believed that George Halas challenged the Spartans to play a game to settle the tie; they wanted no part of any Co-Champion bologna. Thus, we had the first NFL Championship! This first postseason game in NFL history had some massive twists and turns to make it quite a remarkable story, even besides the fact that a game was going to be played to determine an NFL Champion. The first odd occurrence was that Spartans star Earl “Dutch” Clark could not play in the game because he had to work. While that may sound wild to us today, professional players of that era did not make enough to make a living all year. Most had to take off-season jobs to make ends meet, even the superstars like Dutch Clark, who worked as the Head Basketball Coach at Colorado College; his hoops team had a game on that December 18, and Dutch couldn’t get off work to make the football game in Chicago. The second crazy thing that happened was that due to a freak late-fall blizzard in Chicago, the game had to be moved inside the Chicago Stadium because Wrigley was covered with deep snow and frozen with dangerous sub-zero temperatures. The playing field had to be modified to play inside, so the game was played on a field only 80 yards long and some 30 yards narrower than the regular width the teams played on all season. The last item surrounding the game happened on the contest’s only touchdown. Bronko Nagurski threw a scoring jump pass to Red Grange, but the Spartans argued that Nagurski did not meet the requirement of legal forward passes in those days of being 5 yards or more behind the line. The play stood, and the Bears won the NFL title by 9-0.