Cliff Battles, Hall of Fame running back
for the Boston and Washington Redskins, 1932-37.
December 13, 1936: The NFL Championship Game is played, and it proved to be pivotal in the history of the league. The Green Bay Packers played the Boston Redskins… at the Polo Grounds in New York.
This game, 30 years before the 1st Super Bowl, was the first NFL title game, under any name, to be played at a neutral site. Redskins owner George Preston Marshall, having had small crowds for his home games at Fenway Park, decided that Boston didn't care about pro football, so it didn't deserve a pro football team.
The Redskins went 7-5 in 1936, though that was good enough to win the Eastern Division. They went 4-3 in home games. They got 15,000 fans for a 7-0 loss to the football version of the New York Giants on October 4, only 4,000 for a 17-7 win over the Philadelphia Eagles on October 18, 7,000 for a 13-10 win over the Chicago Cardinals on November 1, 11,220 (for some reason, they didn't settle for an estimate that time) for a 7-3 loss to the Packers on November 8, 12,000 for a 26-0 loss to the Chicago Bears on November 15, 5,000 for a 30-6 win over the football version of the Brooklyn Dodgers on November 22, and 7,000 for a 30-0 win over the Pittsburgh Pirates (who became the Steelers in 1940) on November 29. That's an average of 8,746 fans per home game.
Well, it was the Great Depression. And Boston is not exactly known for having nice weather in Autumn. However, Harvard University went 3-3-1 at home that season, and averaged 22,143 fans per home game. Boston College played 8 home games that season, going 5-1-2 in them. They averaged 10,833 fans for their 3 games at Alumni Field (predecessor to the current Alumni Stadium), and 16,720 for the 5 they played at Fenway.
One of those BC "home games" at Fenway was a 0-0 tie with Boston University, in front of 15,000. BU went 5-1-2 overall that season, but attendance records for their games are incomplete. The point is, the Depression and the weather didn't hurt Harvard, BC or BU as much as it hurt the Redskins.
So, since the Eastern Division Champion was the home team for NFL Championship Games played in even-numbered years, he asked NFL President Joe F. Carr for permission to move the game. Packers owner-coach Earl "Curly" Lambeau was in favor of it, since the visiting team would receive a share of the gate, and he wanted a bigger share.
Carr gave permission, and Marshall called up Horace Stoneham, owner of baseball's New York Giants and their ballpark, the Polo Grounds, and asked if he could rent it out. Stoneham was happy for the money, and he took it. (Football Giants owner Tim Mara had no say in it.)
The attendance at the Polo Grounds was 29,545, larger than for any home game that the Redskins had played in their 5-season history. In the 1st quarter, Arnie Herber threw a 48-yard touchdown pass to Don Hutson, the NFL's 1st great receiver, and the Packers went up, 7-0. In the 2nd quarter, Ernest "Pug" Rentner ran the ball in from 2 yards, but the Redskins missed the extra point, and it was 7-6 Green Bay at the half.
The Redskins did not score again. Herbert threw an 8-yard pass to Milt Gantenbein for a touchdown in the 3rd quarter, and Bob Monnett ran the ball in from 2 yards in the 4th quarter, making the final score Packers 21, Redskins 6.
Having moved his Championship Game to Boston, Marshall, who lived in Washington, D.C., moved his team there. (He had previously owned a pro basketball team, the Washington Palace Five.) The next year, 1937, the Redskins won the NFL Championship in their 1st year in the nation’s capital, and have been an enormous success ever since – frequently on the field, and always at the box office, even when the team hasn’t played well.
Marshall, whose innovations helped move the League forward, but whose prejudices held his team back, had a stroke in 1963, rendering him incapable of running the team from then until his death in 1969. The team got better in the 1970s, and were a perennial contender thereafter, reaching 4 Super Bowls, winning 3, in 9 years from 1983 to 1992. Its racist operations faded away, but the racist name stuck until 2020, when they became "The Washington Football Team" for 2 years, before settling on "Washington Commanders."
Boston would try its hand at pro football a few more times, never succeeding, until the American Football League set up the Boston Patriots in 1960. This team would eventually succeed, although it would take the AFL-NFL merger of 1970, a move out to the suburb of Foxborough, and a change of name to the New England Patriots.
Even so, into the 1980s -- especially in 1983 and '84, when Doug Flutie was quarterbacking BC -- there were times when the Patriots were only the 5th-most popular football team in Boston, behind BC, BU, Harvard, and Notre Dame. In those 2 seasons, BC played 5 home games at what was then named Sullivan Stadium, averaging 51,745. In contrast, the Patriots, not a bad team at 8-8 in '83 and 9-7 in '84, averaged 47,702. That included 2 games that wouldn't have sold out BC's Alumni Stadium, which then seated 32,000.
It would be interesting if the Commanders and Patriots ever played each other in a Super Bowl. Between them, they have played in 16 Super Bowls – counting the pre-Super Bowl era, 22 NFL Championship Games – but never against each other.
UPDATE: The Green Bay Packers have the largest team Hall of Fame of any team in the "Big Four" North American sports: The NFL, MLB, the NBA and the NHL. From their 1936 NFL Championship, they have inducted co-founder, owner, general manager and head coach Earl "Curly" Lambeau; co-founder George Whitney Calhoun; executives Frank Jonet, Gerald F. Clifford, Fred Leicht, Emil Fischer and Lee Joannes; backs Johnny "Blood" McNally, Arnie Herber, Hank Bruder, Clarke Hinkle, Bob Monnett, Joe Laws and Chester "Swede" Johnston; ends Milt Gantenbein and Don Hutson; tackle Charles "Buckets" Goldenberg; guards Mike Michalske, Len Evans, Paul "Tiny" Engebretsen and Russ Letlow; center George Svendsen; trainer Carl "Bud" Jorgensen and team doctor W. Webber Kelly; and the team's 1st broadcaster, Russ Winnie.
Lambeau, Herber and Hutson have also been inducted into the Wisconsin Athletic Hall of Fame.
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December 13, 1936 was a Sunday. This was the only football game played that day, college or pro. Baseball was out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. There were 2 games played in the NHL. The Boston Bruins beat the New York Americans, 4-3 at the old Madison Square Garden. And the Detroit Red Wings beat the Chicago Black Hawks, 2-1 at the Chicago Stadium. At the time, an entire 20-minute overtime period was played, regardless of whether anyone had scored, and Marty Barry scored the winning goal 7 minutes exactly into the overtime, with the remaining 13 minutes played.
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