1932 NFL Playoff Game

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 18th of December 1932, professional football went indoors for the first time in league history, and nothing about American football would ever be quite the same. The Chicago Bears and the Portsmouth Spartans had finished the regular season knotted together at the top of the National Football League standings, each with a 6-1 record and identical winning percentages. No clear champion existed. The league had to invent a solution on the fly, and that solution, a single extra game played inside the largest indoor arena in the world, planted the seeds for everything the NFL would become. How did two teams end up perfectly tied? Why did elephant manure from a circus play a role in the evening's events? And how did a disputed four-yard throw by a fullback change the rules of the game forever?

• 2. The Tie That Forced a Fix

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  Since the NFL's founding season in 1920, the league title had gone to whichever team posted the best winning percentage, with tied games simply left out of the calculation. That system had produced disputed outcomes before, with four of the first six championships drawing some form of controversy. Only once, in an earlier season, had two teams finished level at the top: the Chicago Staleys and the Buffalo All-Americans had both gone 9-1, yet league officials controversially handed the title to the Staleys using a tiebreaker. In 1932, the math produced a repeat dead heat. The Spartans and the Bears each finished 6-1, their tied games stripped from the winning-percentage formula, leaving them inseparable. The defending champion Green Bay Packers had gone 10-3-1 that year, a record that, under almost any other reasonable counting method, would have handed them a fourth consecutive championship. Had ties counted as half a win and half a loss, as the post-1972 rules would later require, the Packers' net differential of plus-seven would have placed them ahead of both the Spartans and the Bears, who each finished at plus-five. The Packers had even controlled their own fate at the season's end, but dropped their final two games to the Spartans and the Bears in succession. The head-to-head tiebreaker between Chicago and Portsmouth offered no resolution either: their two meetings during the regular season had ended 13-13 and 7-7. The league, caught without a rule for this exact situation, arranged what was essentially a replay of those two deadlocked contests.

• 3. A Circus Left Its Mark

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  Chicago Stadium had opened just three years before the Playoff Game, and it held a maximum of 26,000 spectators, making it the largest indoor arena in the world at that time. The original venue for the game had been Wrigley Field, the Bears' home stadium, but severe blizzards and forecasts of brutal wind chill made an outdoor game untenable. Moving inside solved the weather problem but created several new ones. A week before the game, the Salvation Army had sponsored a circus inside the stadium, and workers had spread tanbark over the concrete floor to accommodate it. That same tanbark remained on the field for the football game. Elephant manure from the circus had worked its way into the mulch, producing an odor pungent enough to make at least one Bears player vomit during play. The city of Chicago was no stranger to indoor football: local teams had played at the Dexter Park Pavilion as early as 1917, when the Racine Cardinals and the Evanstons met in a scoreless tie. The Bears and Cardinals had also played a charity exhibition at Chicago Stadium two years earlier, after the 1930 season, with the Bears winning 9-7. Still, nothing quite like a league championship game had ever been staged indoors at this scale. With footing unreliable and the smell of the circus still hanging in the air, the stadium set the stage for one of the strangest nights in professional football history.

• 4. Rules Built for an Arena

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  The reduced dimensions of Chicago Stadium forced the NFL to improvise an entirely new set of ground rules for a single evening. The field measured only 80 yards in total length, with just 60 yards between the goal lines and a width of 45 yards, ten yards narrower than the standard regulation field of the era. To keep the ball in play on the shortened surface, any time a team advanced past the 10-yard line, the ball was moved back 20 yards to reset the drive. Because the stadium walls stood close to the sidelines, the NFL also ruled that every play would begin with the ball placed on or between the hash marks, which were set ten yards from the sidelines. The goal posts were pulled in from the end lines and repositioned on the goal lines themselves. Drop kicks and field goals were banned entirely. Punts and kickoffs flew into the stands with such regularity that by the final whistle, only a single punt had been returned the entire game. Bears quarterback John Doehling's very first pass of the evening sailed into the crowd. One punt struck a Chicago Black Hawks sign. Another hit the organist while he was playing. The temperature that Sunday reached 20 degrees Fahrenheit, warmer than forecasters had expected earlier in the week, but the tanbark surface still made footing treacherous for both sides.

• 5. The Disputed Touchdown

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  For three quarters, the defenses controlled the game completely, and the scoreboard stayed at zero. Portsmouth came close to breaking through when Glenn Presnell, in position to reach the end zone, tripped on the mulch-covered surface before he could score. The Bears relied heavily on fullback Bronko Nagurski in the running game, though their drives frequently ended after just three plays as coach Ralph Jones chose to pooch kick rather than gamble on the shortened field. The breakthrough came in the fourth quarter, and it came with immediate protest from the Spartans. Carl Brumbaugh handed the ball to Nagurski, who stopped short and threw a forward pass to Red Grange in the end zone. Under the rules of the time, a forward pass was legal only if the passer had retreated at least five yards behind the line of scrimmage before throwing. The Spartans argued loudly that Nagurski had not gone back the required five yards. The officials let the touchdown stand. Later in the quarter, the Bears scored a safety when the Spartans fumbled the ball out of their own end zone. The final score was Bears 9, Spartans 0. Despite the game counting in the official standings, the loss dropped Portsmouth to 6-2, which placed them third in the final rankings, behind even the runner-up Packers.

• 6. Rules That Rewrote the Game

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  The 1932 Playoff Game drew large enough crowds and enough enthusiasm to persuade the NFL that playoff football was worth keeping. Beginning with the 1933 season, the league broke from its long-standing practice of mirroring college football rules and adopted its own distinct rulebook. Three of the improvised rules from the arena game became permanent: the goal posts moved to the goal line, all plays started with the ball placed on or between the hash marks, and the forward pass became legal from anywhere behind the line of scrimmage rather than only from five yards back. That last change arrived with a notable endorsement. Spartans head coach George Clark, whose team had argued bitterly against Nagurski's throw just weeks earlier, reportedly quipped that the rule should pass because "Nagurski would do it anyway." NFL Commissioner Joseph Carr, who had attended the game in person and kept his ticket stub in a personal scrapbook afterward, described the rule changes as providing better scoring opportunities that would improve the game for both players and spectators. The most consequential legacy of the evening was structural: in 1933, the NFL expanded to ten teams, split into two divisions, and introduced a scheduled championship game between the division winners. That game, the NFL Championship, served as the league's title contest for decades and was the direct forerunner to the Super Bowl. The 80-yard field used that December night would not be seen again in the NFL for 87 years, until a 2019 preseason game between the Raiders and Packers at IG Field in Winnipeg, where the normal 110-yard setup had to be shortened after goal-post removal left dangerous divots in the turf.