1921 NFL Championship controversy

• 1. Introduction

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  The 1921 NFL Championship controversy began with a handshake agreement that cost Buffalo everything. Frank McNeil, owner of the Buffalo All-Americans, believed he had secured a simple exhibition game against the Chicago Staleys. His team had already clinched the best record in the American Professional Football Association. The championship, by any reasonable measure, was already his.

  What followed that December has been called, by Buffalo sports historians, the Staley Swindle. It is a story about the fine print in a gentleman's agreement, about a rival owner who spotted an opening and moved fast, and about a trophy that never arrived anyway. It raises a question that has never been officially resolved: who actually won the 1921 APFA title?

• 2. A Gentleman's Bargain

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  George Halas, owner of the Chicago Staleys, had watched his team lose to Buffalo on Thanksgiving and he wanted a rematch. The Staleys had refused to play road games all season, with that Thanksgiving trip to face the undefeated All-Americans as their sole exception. Halas issued his challenge, and McNeil agreed, but with a clear condition attached.

  McNeil went to the Buffalo press and stated plainly that the games his team would play at the end of the season were exhibitions, not league contests. They would carry no weight on Buffalo's standing as APFA champion. He even released the players the team had borrowed from the defunct Detroit Tigers so those players could go play one final Tigers game on December 4, the same day as the Staleys rematch. One lineman, Clarence "Steamer" Horning, was kept back. Horning would end up scoring Buffalo's only points in the Chicago game, recovering a blocked punt for a touchdown.

  McNeil scheduled the Staleys rematch for December 4, one day after a game against the tough Akron Pros on December 3. The plan required his team to defeat Akron, board an all-night train, and face Chicago the very next day.

• 3. December on the Road

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  Buffalo beat the Akron Pros 14-0 on December 3, then climbed onto a train for Chicago. Several players had already slipped away to take part in the Detroit Tigers game instead. The All-Americans arrived in Chicago shorthanded and worn out.

  Through three quarters, the depleted visitors held their own. The game was tied when Dutch Sternaman kicked a field goal, and Chicago won 10-7. McNeil was undeterred. He had told his players they were league champions. He invested in small gold footballs for each of them to mark the achievement.

  Even after the loss, the math still favored Buffalo. Because the All-Americans had played more games earlier in the season, they remained ahead of Chicago in the standings. If the season had ended on December 4, Buffalo would have kept the title.

• 4. Halas Moves the Goalposts

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  George Halas recognized that the season had not yet ended, and he acted on that immediately. Chicago scheduled two additional December games: one against the Canton Bulldogs and one against their crosstown rivals, the Chicago Cardinals. Winning both would carry Chicago past Buffalo in the standings and secure the championship.

  The Staleys beat Canton 10-0 on December 11. On December 18, Chicago could only manage a scoreless tie with the Cardinals. Because ties did not count in the APFA standings at the time, the two teams wound up with identical records.

  Halas then turned to persuasion. He argued before the other league owners that the second game in any head-to-head series deserved more weight than the first. He also pointed to the aggregate score across both Buffalo-Chicago games: 16-14 in Chicago's favor. McNeil fought back, insisting that the December games were exhibitions and should never have entered the calculation at all. Halas responded that the league had set no fixed end to the season, so every game played had to count, whether or not Buffalo meant it as an exhibition.

• 5. The Tiebreaker That Settled Nothing

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  The league's executive committee created its first-ever championship tiebreaker to resolve the deadlock. The rule they chose reflected what they described as generally accepted tradition: if two teams meet more than once in a season, the second matchup carries more weight than the first. Under that rule, Chicago's December 4 victory over Buffalo settled the title in the Staleys' favor.

  The committee's decision handed Chicago the championship, but the trophy meant to go with it never showed up. The Brunswick-Balke Collender Cup, a rotating prize established the season before, simply did not arrive. It is now believed to be lost.

  McNeil spent the rest of his life attempting to overturn the decision. The league never reversed it. The tiebreaker rule that gave Chicago the title was itself discontinued by the NFL in 1933, having outlived its usefulness after causing further complications in subsequent seasons.

• 6. Buffalo's Long Decline

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  Buffalo never recovered the ground they lost after 1921. The All-Americans had been a dominant force in the years from 1918 through 1921, but what followed was a slow erosion. For three seasons after the controversy, the team barely held above a .500 winning percentage. Then the franchise slid toward the bottom of the league standings for most of the rest of the decade.

  The All-Americans suspended operations in 1927 and folded entirely in 1929. The Staley Swindle, a phrase coined by researcher Jeffrey J. Miller, became the shorthand for what Buffalo fans and historians regard as an injustice. Miller argued most forcefully that the All-Americans were wronged by the league's ruling.

  Kenneth Crippen offered the counterargument: Buffalo's competition through the season was weaker than Chicago's, and when strength of schedule and margins of victory are factored in, the Staleys had the better year overall. The core of the dispute, as Crippen framed it, comes down to a single unresolved question of whether that December game was on or off the official record.

• 7. Rules Rewritten by Crisis

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  The 1921 controversy pushed the league to set a fixed end date for the regular season, specifically to prevent a repeat of Halas's strategy of scheduling extra games after a rival had finished playing. The rule held up for a few years. Then Chicago tried the same maneuver again, scheduling a postseason match against the Cleveland Bulldogs. The league disallowed it, the Bulldogs kept their title, and the use of postseason championship games was banned outright.

  A different crisis arrived when Chicago, by then known as the Bears, and the Portsmouth Spartans finished the season tied for first. Their head-to-head games had both ended in ties, so the "greater weight to a later game" tiebreaker could not be applied at all. The league was forced to schedule a playoff game to break the deadlock. That game pointed the way toward what would become standard practice.

  The NFL Championship Game became a permanent institution once the league divided into Eastern and Western divisions with a standardized schedule. At that point, the old tiebreaker rule was formally abolished, closing the chapter on the mechanism that had made the Staley Swindle possible.