1922 NFL season

• 1. Introduction

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  The 1922 NFL season was only the third in the league's existence, and it very nearly began without one of its most beloved franchises. The Green Bay Packers had been voted out of the league in January, cast aside after a gambling scandal exposed star college players secretly moonlighting as paid professionals. The league itself had just been renamed, borrowing its new title from baseball's oldest circuit. And yet, by October, all 18 teams that opened play would survive the season economically, a feat the league had never managed before. This is the story of a young and fragile league trying to hold itself together, punish its own members, and convince a skeptical country that professional football deserved to exist.

• 2. The Scandal That Shook the APFA

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  Before the league even reached its winter meeting, scheduled to open on January 28 in Canton, Ohio, sensational headlines had already done their damage. Several prominent college football players had been playing for money on professional teams during the 1921 season. The heart of the trouble was in Illinois, where a Taylorville pro team had hired Notre Dame players, and rivals from Carlinville countered by recruiting University of Illinois ringers, all amid a local gambling frenzy. The Green Bay Packers were pulled in as well, with player-coach Curly Lambeau charged with obtaining three Notre Dame stars, Hunk Anderson, Hec Garvey, and Ojay Larson, for the Packers' roster.

  College coaches moved quickly to denounce the arrangement. Fielding Yost, head coach at the University of Michigan, declared that the menace of professionalism was robbing collegiate football of many of its greatest character-building qualities and destroying the ideals of loyalty and sacrifice. Knute Rockne and Notre Dame issued walking papers to eight players. The University of Illinois disqualified nine of its own, including two players who would later become Chicago Bears, Joey Sternaman and Laurie Walquist.

  APFA president Joe F. Carr argued that league rules already expressly prohibited using college players, but the defense did little to cool the public outrage. At the Canton meeting, Packers owner John Clair chose to accept blame personally, apologizing to the other owners and asking that Green Bay's withdrawal from the league be accepted. The motion passed unanimously, and Carr announced to the press that a unanimous vote had dropped the Packers from membership.

• 3. A New Name and a Tighter Ship

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  With the scandal still fresh, the 18 team representatives assembled in Canton in January 1922 used their winter meeting to remake the organization from the ground up. The old model had resembled an NCAA-style supervisory association; the owners now pushed toward something more compact and closely controlled. The franchise fee, which had never actually been collected from charter members when the league was founded in 1920, was raised from $100 to $500.

  The league also shed its original name. The American Professional Football Association became the National Football League, a title borrowed directly from the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs, the oldest and most venerable sports league in the country. The name change happened officially on the 24th of June 1922.

  To prevent a repeat of the college-player scandal, every team was now required to post a $1,000 performance bond, forfeit if they were caught employing active college athletes. The league also attempted to impose a salary cap of $1,200 per game. Several financially troubled clubs did not return for the new season, including big-city franchises like the Cleveland Indians, Cincinnati Celts, Detroit Tigers, and a Washington Senators entry, as well as smaller outfits like the Muncie Flyers and Tonawanda Kardex. Filling some of those gaps were new entrants: the Milwaukee Badgers, the Toledo Maroons, and a traveling team built around Jim Thorpe, the former Cleveland Tiger and contemporary sports legend, based out of tiny La Rue, Ohio, called the Oorang Indians.

• 4. The Packers Come Back

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  By early June, NFL officials were quietly working to bring Green Bay back into the fold. The scheduling meeting was set for the weekend of June 24-25 at the Hollenden Hotel in Cleveland. On June 9, NFL secretary Carl Storck sent Lambeau a blank franchise application and a cover letter giving the time and place of the upcoming owners meeting, a signal that all was forgiven provided a new $500 franchise fee and the $1,000 performance bond were paid.

  Lambeau arranged financing and traveled by train to Cleveland. He applied for a new team under the name the Green Bay Football Club, listing himself as the registered owner. The club played the 1922 season under the name the Green Bay Blues, though the subterfuge fooled almost no one. The national press kept calling them the Packers throughout the year. The club officially returned to its original name in 1923, confirming what everyone already knew.

• 5. Canton's Perfect Record

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  While the off-field drama consumed much of the league's energy, on the field a single team dominated. The Canton Bulldogs finished the 1922 season with a record of 10-0-2, winning the NFL championship. It was the first of two consecutive titles for the Bulldogs. Head coach Guy Chamberlin led the team at Lakeside Park, under owner Ralph Hay.

  Across the entire league, 75 games were played by the 18 competing teams. League president Joe F. Carr reported total attendance in excess of 400,000. For the first time since the league's founding, every team that opened play under the NFL's banner in October made it through to the end of the season without folding for financial reasons. That kind of stability had eluded the league in its first two years, and Carr had reason to point to the 1922 season as a turning point. The Racine Legion, sponsored by an American Legion post and funded by a malted milk millionaire from Racine, Wisconsin, was among the teams that completed the season, a sign that the league's new franchise structure was beginning to hold.