Much of ancient pro football history is Chicago Bears history. And much of Chicago Bears history is ancient pro football history.
George Halas was a founding member of the league. His franchise won an NFL championship before the league was even called the NFL. He professionalized football in ways that cannot be summarized in a few paragraphs.
The NFL, from the 1920s through World War II, essentially existed so the Bears would have some semi-competitive opponents to face. For many franchises, the most significant pre-1945 event in history was that time they beat the Bears. We saw that last week in the Washington segment. We could have seen it in the Giants segment with The Sneakers Game, but I didn’t want to do that much archeology for a franchise that was incredibly successful from 1986 though 2011.
The Bears … have not been very successful in the last 35 years. So a little archeology is appropriate.
5. Sweet Revenge: the 1940 NFL Championship
Date: December 8th, 1940.
The Chicago Bears, exhibiting one of the most relentless attacks ever seen on any football field, today crushed the Washington Redskins under an avalanche of eleven touchdowns and won the world’s professional championship by the most unbelievable score of 73 to 0.
From the first minute of play until the final gun, the Bears rammed, ripped and rampaged over and through the Redskins in an astounding display of modern football which left a home-town crowd of 36,034 pop-eyed. They could not believe that this was the same team which lost to the Redskins three weeks ago on this Griffith Stadium field by a 7-to-3 score. It wasn’t.
The Bears, thirsting for revenge for that defeat and for a setback at the hands of the Redskins in the 1937 playoff, were riding the crest of an emotional wave today that converted them into a super football machine.
The huge white-shirted Bears turned on the heat in the first 45 seconds of play and continued until the game became almost a comical rout.
Toward the end the Washington fans derisively applauded every time the Redskins made a first down.
It became so bad in the final period that George Marshall, owner of the Redskins, couldn’t stand it any longer. He walked out on his own club. But it was never funny to the Redskin players who took an unmerciful physical beating. – Excerpted from the UPI Story, December 9, 1940.
This moment in history reaches up from the NFL’s primordial era like the ruins of some ancient temple from dense underbrush. It’s the game that made Halas’ re-engineered version of the T-formation the NFL’s standard offensive strategy for the next 40 years or so. It made Sid Luckman a star, giving the world our first true under-center quarterback. It marked an evolutionary leap in the way the sport is played.
It was also a grudge match: Washington’s owner George Preston Marshall called the Bears “crybabies” after the 7-3 victory mentioned above (the Bears wanted a flag on a game-ending pass from Sid Luckman to Bill Osmanski in the end zone), and Halas pinned newspaper articles featuring Marshall’s remarks to the bulletin board in the locker room. Literal “bulletin-board material” gave the game a hook which surely activated some sports fans who still held the NFL of that era in suspicion.
I think the lopsided score also captured the imagination of many skeptical sports fans of the era. If the Indiana Fever starting putting 200 points up on opponents, it would certainly spark further interest in the WNBA. If the Philadelphia Union won a championship 15-0, it would spark more fan interest in MLS soccer. Parity is great for the long-term health of a sports league – a whole season of 15-0 or 73-0 wins would destroy a league – but if you are vying for the attention of a new set of potential fans, it can’t hurt to show them something they didn’t think was possible. And in pro football, which was just crawling out from the Depression-era mud, dropping 73 points on a team that beat you 7-3 three weeks earlier surely seemed impossible.
Grainy footage of the 1940 Championship Game gives you a sense of the offensive tactical differences at play. Sammy Baugh is operating out of a “shotgun” in the A-formation, with blockers in front of him. Luckman is under center with three backs behind him, one of whom often motions to flanker before the snap. The Bears’ formation is more versatile, but that doesn’t seem to matter much when watching the game play out. What matters is that the Bears were just much, much better on that December day.
4. Bears Draft Dick Butkus and Gale Sayers
Date: November 28th, 1964.
Another of the National Football League’s annual draft marathons was rolling toward a tedious conclusion early this morning, and it mattered not a whit that everything was being handled by telephone this year.
At 10 o’clock [Chicago time] last night, some 14 hours after Commissioner Pete Rozelle called the meeting to order by the magic of electronics in a New York hotel, only two rounds of a contemplated 20 had been completed by weary league owners and coaches across the country.
Meanwhile, the rival American Football League, also drafting by telephone from the eastern metropolis, moved briskly thru a drafting session which N.F.L. officials charged was rigged two weeks in advance, in violation of an agreement with the nation’s colleges. At 9 p.m. the A.F.L. had completed 10 rounds.
It didn’t take the Chicago Bears long to stake claim to Dick Butkus, rugged Illinois linebacker and the toast of the midlands. The Bears, with three of the first six selections in the opening round, quickly tossed Butkus’ name into the telephonic hopper, then followed by acquiring negotiating rights to Gale Sayers, flashy Kansas halfback, and Steve DeLong, sturdy Tennessee lineman.
All three are yet to be signed, but Coach George Halas indicated confidence that the mission would soon be accomplished. – Cooper Rollow, Chicago Tribune, November 29th, 1964.
Some context for the excerpt above: 1964 was the height of the NFL-AFL war. The 1965 draft took place in 1964 because both leagues were using “babysitting” tactics – benign kidnapping, essentially – to grab prospects the moment the NCAA season ended, lock them away in hotel rooms and make them offers they couldn’t refuse. Neither league could afford to give the other a head start.
Seeking a head start, the AFL (as mentioned by Rollow) almost certainly held their draft in secret two weeks in advance, allowing teams to get their babysitters in place before the official announcements, which were held on the same day as the NFL’s announcements to appease the NCAA.
The logistics of a remote phone draft, which also involved a teletype machine, were made worse by the fact that the NFL didn’t impose time limits on the teams for the first two rounds. Football operations weren’t what they are now, with a GM and a full personnel department operating separately from the coaching staff. Vince Lombardi conducted the Packers draft from a Ramada Inn outside Dallas, where the Packers would play the Cowboys that Sunday. "Lombardi and his bleary-eyed assistants gulped a pot of coffee and then headed for the Cotton Bowl," after the draft finally ended.
The Bears possessed three first-round picks because weaker/cheaper franchises traded themselves out of the NFL-AFL bidding war. The Steelers acquired the Bears’ second and fourth-round picks in the 1964 draft for their first-rounder in 1965. Washington traded the Bears their first-round pick for 34-year old lineman Fred Williams and middling receiver Fred Coia. The math of those trades made sense because the Steelers and Washington knew Al Davis, Ralph Wilson or Lamar Hunt could easily outflank/outspend them and whisk away their top draft picks. (The AFL owners who could not outspend the NFL on their own were sometimes subsidized by Wilson, Hunt or television rights-holding NBC.)
I misremembered the events of early-1960s pro football at the start of this project. I thought the Bears drafted a pair of Hall of Famers in Butkus and Sayers, added them to a roster which already featured All-Pro Mike Ditka, and won one of the last NFL Championships of the pre-Super Bowl era. In fact, the Bears won the 1963 NFL Championship with Ditka, Bill George, Billy Wade and others, then added Butkus and Sayers in one of history’s greatest draft coups, then did … pretty much nothing. No playoff appearances. A 9-5 rookie season for Butkus and Sayers in 1965, then some years around .500 (after Ditka was traded away), then a collapse.
We saw Halas at the height of his powers in 1940 in the last segment. Now we see him in decline. Yes, the Bears had the money and mystique to compete with the AFL in a bidding war, but as inter-league peace broke out and the playing field leveled, the Bears’ way of doing business became antiquated. Halas remained the Bears owner-operator, but he turned coaching over to Jim Dooley, a clever tactician (he pioneered nickel defense) but a quiet, professorial fellow who was the wrong man for the wrong team at the wrong time. Halas, who hadn’t been fully satisfied with a quarterback since Luckman, all but stopped seriously looking for one. By the late 1960s, the Bears were bringing linebackers and running backs to what was rapidly turning into a quarterback fight.
So when the Super Bowl era dawned, the Bears fielded some of the most dynamic players in pro football history, individuals who are still held up as exemplars of the grace and grit of their positions. But the Bears were barely relevant, because they were too tied to the legacy of their founding father to embrace change and utterly incapable of finding a decent quarterback.
Which brings us to today.
#3 Tie: Jay Cutler Injury; Mitch Trubisky “Misses” Trey Burton
Dates: January 23rd, 2011; September 9th, 2018.
In the biggest game of his career and arguably the most anticipated meeting in the NFL’s oldest rivalry, Jay Cutler disappeared.
Knocked out with a knee injury.
With their starting quarterback gone at the most inopportune time, the Chicago Bears were knocked out too. Although Caleb Hanie, a former Colorado State star, almost became an unlikely hero, the No. 3 emergency quarterback also made some predictable mistakes.
The Bears lost to the Green Bay Packers 21-14 in the NFC championship game on a chilly Sunday at Soldier Field.
Cutler said he was hit on the outside of his knee on the next-to-last series of the first half. He didn’t know who hit him, but cornerback Sam Shields, who also had two interceptions, sacked him just after the two-minute mark. With his Bears down 14-0, Cutler had the knee taped at halftime, but after a three-and-out series to start the second half, it was mutually decided by Cutler, the training staff and head coach Lovie Smith that Cutler could no longer continue playing.
“Couldn’t really plant to throw, so they kind of pulled me,” Cutler said. “You go through training camp and everything else, and it’s disappointing to have this when you have an opportunity to get in the Super Bowl.”
It looks bad when a player leaves such an important game because of injury. Former Chargers running back LaDainian Tomlinson had his image tarnished when he left early in the 2007 AFC title game against New England because of a knee injury.
But for all of Cutler’s flaws, his toughness has almost never been questioned. He never missed a start in two-plus seasons with the Broncos or his two seasons with the Bears.
“Jay’s one of the toughest guys I know,” said Bears receiver Earl Bennett, a teammate of Cutler’s at Vanderbilt. “I know it has to be something serious.”
Cutler will have an MRI on his knee today. And to those who say if he was able to stand he should have played?
No one flashed a look of disgust quite like Jay Cutler. Which was part of his problem. We discussed this infamous moment during Cutler’s Bears segment in the All-Time Top 5 QBs series. Twitter erupted. Players chimed in. We would never question Josh Allen or Joe Burrow’s toughness, but neither Allen nor Burrow could possibly replicate Cutler’s body language if you force-fed them half a fifth of cheap bourbon and told them they were about to get a tax audit from a jilted ex-girlfriend.
If you are active on Bears’ Twitter, you know all about “the screen shot.” It may go down in social media lore at this point. If you aren’t up to speed, here you go.
After the Bears lost to the Green Bay Packers in painful fashion on national television, plenty of armchair quarterbacks starting going after Mitch Trubisky. Some of the criticism was fair, after all. Trubisky didn’t look great with the game on the line while Aaron Rodgers was otherworldly.
As the criticism continued on the national scale, the local media also starting jumping in with their takes on Trubisky’s performance.
That’s when The Athletic’s Dan Durkin jumped into the conversation with this screenshot:
Screenshot by Dan Durkin, widely circulated on Twitter in 2018.
The screenshot looks awful for Trubisky. There’s no doubt about it. It looks like he’s looking right at him and it doesn’t seem like anyone is near Burton. But the photo is deceiving. When you watch the play in real-time, the moment he was that open was actually a minuscule amount of time. – Bill Zimmerman, FanSided, September 13th, 2018.
Zimmerman was half right. Both the Trubisky “miss” and Cutler’s injury have gone down in social media lore. The 2010s were the Decade of NFL Twitter. The great era of football debate on that social network began with folks ripping Cutler for not hobbling back into the NFC Championship Game and reached its zenith during those magical months when it appeared that half of the NFL Internet was doing everything in its power to pump Trubisky up while the other half was dedicated to tearing him down. Yes: very bright people were Trubisky Truthers; most have since scrubbed their histories and killed those brain cells.
