December 18, 1932: A Playoff game is held to determine the Champion of the National Football League. Snow forces the young League indoors for the 1st time.
There had been controversies for the League title in 1921 and 1925, so having a definitive title game would have helped. This time, there would be no questions.
The Chicago Bears, owned and coached by NFL founder George Halas, and with the all-time greatest running back tandem of Red Grange and Bronko Nagurski, were the best team in the League. Their record was 6 wins, 1 loss... and 6 ties.
They began the season badly, not scoring at all in their 1st 4 games. Their 1st 3 games were all scoreless ties, away to the Green Bay Packers, away to New York's Staten Island Stapletons, and against the Chicago Cardinals. And then the Bears lost 2-0 at home to the Green Bay Packers, so they were 0-3-1.
For a reason I haven't been able to find, the Cardinals shared Wrigley Field with the Bears and baseball's Chicago Cubs for the 1932 season, instead of playing their home games at the White Sox' Comiskey Park like they usually did. So while the 0-0 tie between the Chicago teams was at Wrigley, it was officially a home game for the Cardinals.
The Bears snapped out of it. The Stapletons came into Wrigley, and the Bears beat them, 27-7. The Bears made an Eastern swing, and tied the Boston Braves (the team that would become the Washington Redskins) 7-7, and beat the New York Giants 28-8. With 3 straight home games, they tied the Portsmouth Spartans, 13-13; beat the football version of the Brooklyn Dodgers, 20-0, and beat the Cardinals, 34-0.
Portsmouth, Ohio, across the Ohio River from Portsmouth, Kentucky, about 100 miles east of Cincinnati, was one of those small Midwestern cities like the ones that founded the NFL: Green Bay, Wisconsin; Decatur, Illinois, from whence the Bears came; Muncie, Indiana; Canton, Ohio; Rochester, New York. Of those, only Green Bay survives today.
The Spartans began in 1930, and were 5-6-3. But under head coach George "Potsy" Clark, they started 1931 out at 8-0, before falling to 11-3, and finishing 2nd in the NFL to the Packers. With a backfield -- both offensive and defensive in those days -- of Earl "Dutch" Clark (no relation to Potsy), Glenn Presnell, LeRoy "Ace" Gutowski and Roy "Father" Lumpkin, they were 5-1-3 when they hosted the Bears at Universal Stadium on November 27, the Sunday after Thanksgiving. The game ended in a 7-7 tie.
The Spartans played just 1 more game, beating the Packers, 19-0 at home. The Bears played 2 more, both at Wrigley, beating the Giants 6-0 and the Packers 9-0. The Bears had finished 6-1-6, the Spartans 6-1-4. Under current rules, with winning percentage being the decider, and ties being counted as half a win and half a loss, the title would actually have gone to the Packers: Their 10-3-1 record gave them a winning percentage of .750, to the Bears' .692 and the Spartans' .636. Of course, under current rules, every team would have played the same number of games: The Packers had played 14, the Bears 13, the Spartans 11.
But ties weren't counted, and so the percentages were actually Bears .857, Cardinals .857, and Packers .769. After winning the NFL Championship in each of the preceding 3 seasons, Green Bay were out, and there was a tie for the title. So a Playoff game was set for Sunday, December 18, at Wrigley Field, since it had more seats than Universal Stadium. The Spartans did not object: Money from gate receipts mattered more than home-field advantage. It was the depth of the Great Depression, after all, between the electoral rejection of Herbert Hoover and the Inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
But Chicago was hit by snow, and it stayed cold all week. It was impossible to play the game at Wrigley, or at Comiskey, or at Soldier Field, or at the University of Chicago's Stagg Field, or at Northwestern University's Dyche Stadium.
In 1929, the Chicago Stadium, on the West Side, opened as the new home of the NHL's Chicago Black Hawks. In 1930, the Bears and the Cardinals had played a postseason charity exhibition game indoors there. George Halas suggested to Potsy Clark that they move the Playoff game to the Stadium. Since the only other option was to wait until an outdoor stadium was available, by which point his team might have gotten stale in waiting, he agreed.
A week before the game, the concrete surface had tanbark, the bark of oak trees, placed atop it, for a Salvation Army-sponsored circus. Elephant manure that had seeped into the surface produced an odor that caused a Bears player to throw up on the field. And because of the limited dimensions of the indoor arena, special rules were adopted for the game:
- The tanbark-covered field itself was only 80 yards long -- 60 yards between the goal lines -- and 45 yards wide, 10 yards narrower than the regulation width at the time.
- The goalposts were moved from the endlines to the goal lines.
- Every time a team crossed the 10-yard line, the ball was moved back 20 yards to allow for the shortened field.
- For the first time, all plays started with the ball on or between the hash marks, which were 10 yards from the sidelines.
- The forward pass, officially legal only from 5 yards behind the line of scrimmage, was legalized from anywhere behind the line of scrimmage.
- Drop kicks (still relatively common) and field goals would not be used in the game, for fear of footballs going into the stands, and the referees running out of them.
The high temperature for that Sunday in Chicago was 20 °F, warmer than anticipated earlier in the week. Attendance was listed at 11,198 -- about half the heated Stadium's capacity, but probably more than would have braved the cold at Wrigley, had the snow been removed from the field to make playing a game there possible. The host Bears wore white jerseys, the Spartans purple.
With terrible footing on the mulch, limited room for the offenses to work, and the circumstances of the era making the NFL a defense-oriented league at the time, anyway, the defenses dominated the game's 1st 3 quarters, with the game remaining scoreless. Bears quarterback John Doehling's 1st pass flew into the stands, as did most punts and kickoffs, rendering the fear that caused the cancellation of dropkicks and field goals very real. One punt collided with a Black Hawks sign. Another hit Al Melgard, the Stadium's organist. Only 1 punt had the chance to be returned.
On one drive, the Spartans were in position to score when Presnell tripped before he could reach the end zone. In the 4th quarter, the Bears scored on a controversial touchdown: Carl Brumbaugh handed the ball off to Nagurski, who pulled up and threw to Grange in the end zone for the score. The Bears later scored a safety after the Spartans fumbled the ball out of their end zone, making the final score 9-0, and the Bears were Champions.
To eliminate the circumstances of the 1932 Playoff -- barring the weather, which, of course, even George Halas couldn't control, or at least buy control of -- the NFL got seriously revamped prior to the 1933 season. The liberalized passing rules required by the smaller field from the Playoff were written into the regular rules. So was the creation of hashmarks, to keep the ball closer to midfield, lengthwise. Putting the goalposts on the goal line was kept, until they were moved back to the end line in 1974.
The League was divided into an Eastern Division and a Western Division, with each team playing each of its Division opponents home and away, no more, no less; and each Division winner facing the other in an NFL Championship Game, to determine a definitive title-winner.
The Western Division winner would host the Championship Game in odd-numbered years, the Eastern winner in even-numbered years. The Bears won the 1st such game, beating the Giants, 23-21 at Wrigley. The following year, the Giants beat the Bears at the Polo Grounds in New York.
All these changes, and a slimmer football that was introduced for the 1934 season, led to more scoring, and fewer ties, and helped increase the NFL's popularity. It was these changes that turned the NFL from what could still be called a minor league into a major league.
In 1934, Detroit radio executive George Richards bought the Spartans, and moved them, making them the Detroit Lions. They won the NFL Championship in 1935. The 8,500-seat Universal Stadium, the Spartans' former home, is one of the few remaining relics of the early NFL: It has been renamed Spartan Municipal Stadium, after both of the teams famous for playing there, the other being Portsmouth's Notre Dame High School.
Today, Portsmouth is home to about 18,000 people. It was the hometown of Major League Baseball stars Al Bridwell, Del Rice, Rocky Nelson, Al Oliver, Gene Tenace and Larry Hisle; baseball executive Branch Rickey; opera singer Kathleen Battle; Ohio Governor Ted Strickland; and "singing cowboy" Roy Rogers.
In 1968, the American Football League's Houston Oilers moved into the Astrodome. In 1970, with the rest of the AFL, they were merged into the NFL. On September 27, 1970, they played the NFL's 1st indoor regular-season game, losing to the Miami Dolphins, 20-10. In 2022, out of the NFL's 32 teams, 10 play under domes, 5 of them having retractable roofs, allowing both indoor and outdoor games. The Chicago Bears are not one of them, but the Detroit Lions, who used to be the Portsmouth Spartans, are.
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December 18, 1932 was a Sunday. Baseball was out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. There were 2 games in the NHL. Chicago Stadium was available because the Chicago Black Hawks were on the road, and played the New York Americans to a tie, 0-0 at Madison Square Garden. And the Detroit Red Wings, in their 1st season under that name, beat the Boston Bruins, 2-1 at the Olympia Stadium in Detroit.
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