Each week, VICE Sports takes a look back at an important event from this week in sports history for Throwback Thursday, or #TBT for all you cool kids. You can read previous installments here.
It began with an insult, in the way most great beat-downs do. It was November 1940. Franklin Roosevelt had just won re-election over Wendell Wilkie, and the Washington Redskins had just defeated the visiting Chicago Bears, 7-3.
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The game had ended in controversy, with Bears quarterback Sid Luckman throwing into the end zone to fullback Bill Osmanski, who was knocked around by a pair of defenders and couldn’t quite bring in the game-winner. Bears coach George Halas complained that there should have been a pass interference call, but there wasn’t one. Redskins owner George Preston Marshall decided to run his mouth the way Redskins owners still do all these years later. “The Bears are a bunch of crybabies,” he told the press. “They’re frontrunners. They can’t take defeat…The Bears are quitters.”
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Three weeks later, on December 8, 1940, the Bears and the Redskins met again for the NFL Championship. Seventy-five years after the fact, it remains the most lopsided contest in pro football history. And the thing about it is, it could have been even worse.
The Bears returned to Washington for the championship game, checked into the Mayflower Hotel, and saw that Marshall’s trash talking had carried over into the press: “Gutless Bears Hit Capitol” read the headline, Bears halfback Bob Snyder told the Chicago Tribune over half a century later. And Marshall continued to talk, telling the press that teams from the West were “definitely inferior to our brand of football.” Back then—before braggadocio became an acceptable meme in sports, before professional football embraced television and ascended to new heights of popularity—the Redskins owner set the standard for provocative bulletin-board material.
Marshall giving President Roosevelt a gold pass to his team’s games. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by Harris & Ewing,LC-DIG-hec-47421
The game was sold out, all 36,034 seats at Griffith Stadium occupied; there was no television broadcast, but the $102,280 in net gate receipts broke records for a pro football game. The Bears came in pissed off, and Halas utilized that anger, posting newspaper clippings with Marshall’s comments all over the locker room walls; in a speech before the game, according to Snyder, the typically stoic Halas may have actually teared up.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “this is what Mr. Marshall thinks of you. I know you are the greatest football team in America. I know it and you know it. I want you to prove that to Mr. Marshall, the Redskins, and, above all, the nation.”
“We made about five doors in the walls coming out of the dressing room,” Snyder said.
And then they blew the game wide open. Within 55 seconds, Osmanski had scored on a 68-yard touchdown run. The Redskins, who ran a single-wing formation, had no clue how to stop the Bears’ then-revolutionary use of the T formation, which had mostly been abandoned since its use in the early 1900s. The Redskins’ Charley Malone dropped a pass near the goal line, and the Bears came back and utilized motion and misdirection to score again on an 80-yard drive. They scored once more before the end of the first quarter, on a Joe Maniaci 42-yard run.
“The Bears’ ball carriers were under way at full speed before they had their hands on the ball and at the rate they were galloping when they hit something, it didn’t make a difference whether there was a hole in the Redskins’ line or not,” wrote Washington Post sportswriter Shirley Povich the next day.
By halftime, it was 28-0, and Halas insisted his team not let up. They didn’t. Eight times they intercepted Redskins’ passes, many of those by tailback Sammy Baugh, who could muster virtually no offense. The Redskins rushed for a total of three yards, according to the Post‘s account of the game (the historical box score has it at five yards); they lost their best defensive back and best rusher, Dick Todd, to an injury, and would lose several more players along the way. The Redskins switched from a six-man to a five-man line, but nothing worked. The Bears utilized all 33 players on their roster.
Poor Sammy Baugh. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by Harris & Ewing, LC-DIG-hec-28997
On their ninth touchdown, the Bears brilliantly executed a double reverse. Around that time, amid the existential angst at Griffith Stadium, a more concrete problem arose: the Redskins were running out of footballs, as the fans who ringed the stands were catching extra points and holding on to them as souvenirs. Redskins business manager Sid Carroll went into the stands trying to buy them back from fans, but no one bit. “They offered 30-40 bucks for each,” Carroll’s son John told Tribune News Service, “but got no takers.”
The Bears scored a tenth touchdown to go up 66-0, and backup quarterback Sollie Sherman came on to hold for the extra point.
“What are you doing?” referee Red Friesell said.
“We’re kicking,” Sherman said.
“Oh no you’re not,” Friesell replied. “That’s the last football we’ve got.”
By the end, Sherman told the New York Times, they might not have even been playing with regulation footballs; the balls they did have felt more like overinflated beach balls.
Said the Bears’ Snyder, years later, “They didn’t change the ball every play like they do now for (today’s) dandies.”
The Bears scored once more. The final was 73-0.
“It reminds us of our first breathless visit to Grand Canyon,” Povich wrote. “All we could say is, ‘There she is, and ain’t she a beaut.’ When they hung up that final score at Griffith Stadium yesterday, all we could utter was, ‘There it is and wasn’t it awful.’”
In the Bears locker room, someone shouted, “Who are the crybabies now?”
In the Redskins locker room, according to Povich, players broke down in tears, ashamed at the way they’d let down a city that had treated them so well since the franchise had moved from Boston.
“They were trying to play football,” Povich wrote, though years later Baugh would at least partially dispute that statement, claiming that many of his teammates had tried to lose the game to spite their loudmouthed owner.
“I think it happened because of what the owner did for two weeks,” Baugh said in a 1999 interview with the Associated Press. “He put things in the paper running the Bears down. You don’t want to help the other team. You shouldn’t say things like that. It made us so mad.”
Given the accounts of the game, this feels like a dubious claim. Either way, it was an early milestone for professional football: a record-breaking gate, an unmistakable (if lopsided) advertisement for a sport that was still gaining a footing among mainstream sports fans, and a game that stands out even now as one of the great blowouts in 20th-century sports history.
As for Baugh’s claims? For corroboration, the AP went to one of his teammates, lineman Clyde Shugart:
“Was he drunk when he said that?”
