1935 NFL season

• 1. Introduction

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  The 1935 NFL season almost made history before it even ended. Had a single game between the Boston Redskins and the Philadelphia Eagles not been washed out by heavy rain and snow on the 17th of November, every team in the nine-team league would have played exactly 12 games. It would have been the first time in the league's existence that all franchises shared an identical schedule. Instead, a storm erased that milestone, and the standardization the league had been edging toward would have to wait one more year.

  What the season delivered instead was a Western Division race so tight it came down to a single December Sunday, a championship played in Detroit, and a glimpse of how fragile a young league still was. Nine teams, two unequal divisions, and a sport still figuring out its own rules. The questions that run through this season are simple: who ran the tightest race, who held their nerve when it mattered, and what did it mean for a city like Detroit to lift the championship trophy?

• 2. A League of Nine

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  Nine teams is a small number for a professional sports league, but that is exactly what the NFL fielded in 1935. The loss of the Cincinnati franchise and its St. Louis successor at the end of the 1934 season left the league with an awkward imbalance. The two divisions were unequal in size, which made scheduling a persistent headache.

  The nine franchises stretched across the industrial Northeast and Midwest: the Boston Redskins at Fenway Park, the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field, the Chicago Bears at Wrigley Field, the Chicago Cardinals at Comiskey Park, the Detroit Lions at University of Detroit Stadium, the Green Bay Packers splitting home games between City Stadium and Wisconsin State Fair Park, the New York Giants at the Polo Grounds, the Philadelphia Eagles at Phillies Park, and the Pittsburgh Pirates at Forbes Field. Each of those stadiums was a baseball facility borrowed by a football tenant, a fact that shaped how the game was played and watched. Four of the nine teams had changed coaches from the previous year, with Eddie Casey taking over in Boston, Paul J. Schissler moving from Brooklyn to Chicago before Milan Creighton replaced him with the Cardinals, and Joe Bach stepping in for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

• 3. Redrawing the Lines

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  Before the first kickoff of the season, the NFL made a quiet but consequential adjustment to the field itself. The inbounds lines, known as hashmarks, were moved closer to the center of the field. Two years earlier those marks had been placed 10 yards from the sidelines. For 1935 they shifted to 15 yards from the sidelines, placing them 70 feet apart.

  The change sounds technical, but it affected where every play began. A runner tackled near the sideline meant the next snap started at the hash rather than the boundary, giving offenses more room to operate on both sides. That spacing of 70 feet would hold for ten seasons. The hashmarks would later move to 20 yards from the sidelines, a configuration that lasted 27 seasons before eventually settling at the width of the goalposts at 18 and a half feet. The 1935 adjustment was one step in a long, gradual process of making the field more hospitable to open play, and its effects ran quietly through every game of the season.

• 4. Thanksgiving Decides It

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  Thanksgiving Day 1935 shaped both division races in a single afternoon. In the Eastern Division, the Brooklyn Dodgers hosted the New York Giants at Ebbets Field. Brooklyn carried a 5-4 record and needed a win to stay close. New York won 21-0, a margin that left no room for interpretation. The Giants then won their final two games to take the Eastern Division at 9-3.

  Out West, the Lions and the Cardinals each played on the same holiday. Detroit beat the Bears 14-2 while the Cardinals edged the Packers 9-7, leaving the Lions at 6-3-2 and the Cardinals at 6-3-1. Three days later on the 1st of December, Detroit defeated Brooklyn 28-0 while the Cardinals and Bears played to a 7-7 tie. Detroit closed its season at 7-3-2. The Cardinals, sitting at 6-3-2, still had one game left against the Bears on the 8th of December. A win would force a playoff for the division title. Chicago won that game 13-0, and Detroit became the Western Division champions without taking the field that day. The Packers, who finished at 8-4 under the counting method used at the time, would have tied Detroit for the division title under the post-1972 system of counting ties as half a win and half a loss. Under those modern rules, both teams would have finished at .667 and required a playoff. Under 1935 rules, Detroit won outright.

• 5. The Championship at Detroit

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  On the 15th of December, the Detroit Lions met the New York Giants at University of Detroit Stadium in Detroit, Michigan. The Lions won 26-7. It was the 16th year of NFL regular season play, and Detroit claimed the title comfortably.

  The statistical leaders from that season give a sense of who carried their teams. Ed Danowski of the New York Giants led all passers with 794 yards. Arnie "Flash" Herber of the Green Bay Packers finished second at 729 yards, ahead of Johnny Gildea of the Pittsburgh Pirates at 529. On the ground, Doug Russell of the Chicago Cardinals led with 499 rushing yards, with Detroit's Ernie Caddel at 450 and Kink Richards of the Giants at 449. In receiving, Charley Malone of the Boston Redskins topped the list at 433 yards, barely ahead of Tod Goodwin of the Giants at 432 and Don Hutson of the Packers at 420. Hutson also led the league in touchdowns with 7, while five players tied for second with 6 each: Dale Burnett of the Giants, Ernie Caddel and Dutch Clark of the Lions, and Bill Karr of the Bears. The 1935 season was only the fourth year in which the NFL officially tracked and retained statistics. Interceptions, punting averages, kickoff return yardage, and field goal percentages were among the categories not yet being maintained, gaps that make comparison across eras complicated.

• 6. What Almost Was

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  The Western Division's sweep of winning records in 1935 would not be matched by any single division until 2023. That gap of nearly nine decades says something about how rare the alignment of competitive parity can be, even in a small league where every team plays almost every other team.

  The rained-out Redskins-Eagles game in November left the scheduling standardization just out of reach. The league formalized equal schedules the following year, a change that has persisted ever since, with the game count rising from 12 to 14 by 1961 and to 16 some years later. The next time any team played a different number of regular-season games than its peers would be when a Bills-Bengals game on the 2nd of January was declared a no contest following the in-game collapse of Damar Hamlin. Don Hutson, who finished third in receiving yards in 1935 with 420, would become one of the defining players of the era in the seasons that followed.