Staley to Grange
A. E. Staley, the owner of the Staley Starch Works in Decatur, Illinois, believed in sports both for publicizing his company and for building employee morale. The company had begun sponsoring a baseball team in 1917, with future Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher "Iron Man" Joe McGinnity as its manager. Basketball and football teams were added in 1919.
In 1920, Staley hired George Halas to learn the starch business, play for the baseball team, and coach the football team. Halas had played football for the University of Illinois, the Great Lakes Naval Training Station, and the Hammond Pros. He'd also had a cup of coffee as an outfielder with the New York Yankees in 1919, and he held an engineering degree, so he was an ideal fit for the position.
While still playing for the Decatur Staleys baseball team, Halas went to work rebuilding the football team. He kept three holdovers from the 1919 squad and added 15 other players. Three of them, Guy Chamberlin, Paddy Driscoll, and George Trafton, are now in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, along with Halas. (One of the holdovers, Charlie Dressen, was to become better known as a major league manager.)
In the process of trying to schedule games for his team, Halas spoke with Ralph Hay, manager of the Canton Bulldogs. Hay invited him to a meeting of team owners and managers to talk about forming some sort of organization. That meeting, in Hays' automobile showroom on August 20, led to the September 17 meeting at which the American Professional Football Association was founded.
The Staleys won two non-league games at home, but played only one league game at Staley Field in Decatur. In early December, the Akron Pros were the league leaders with a 6-0-2 record, while Decatur was 5-1-1. Halas challenged Akron to a game in Chicago, which ended in a 0-0 tie. Akron was awarded the league championship on the basis of its undefeated record.
The company lost more than $14,000 on the venture and, in 1921, it faced financial problems because of a national economic downturn. To save money, Staley decided to drop the company baseball and basketball teams. It's possible that he also wanted to get rid of the football and was talked out of it by Halas, though that's not on the record.
What is on the record is a letter in which Staley agreed to let Halas operate the team in Chicago and gave him $5,000 to keep the Staley name during the 1921 season. In their three Decatur games, the Staleys had drawn crowds of about 2,000, while their three games in Chicago (two against the Cardinals and one against Akron) had averaged more than 10,000 spectators, so the move made sense.
After opening with a non-league game in Decatur, the Chicago Staleys played the rest of their home games in Wrigley Field, the home park of the Chicago Cubs. Halas added even more talent, most notably two All-Americans, halfback Chic Harley from Ohio State and tackle Ralph Scott from Wisconsin. The team went 11-1-1 and won the APFA championship.
Halas said in his autobiography, "we paid all our bills and still had $7 left in the bank." Football historians ever since have assumed that meant the team turned a seven-dollar profit, which was probably what Halas wanted them to assume. But Dan Daly and Bob O'Donnell, authors of The Pro Football Chronicle, found court records revealing that the Chicago Staleys made a profit of $21,600 in 1921, and that $7.70 remained in the team's bank account after Halas and his partner, Dutch Sternaman, withdrew the rest, undoubtedly to share the proceeds.
The 1921 APFA franchise was held by the Staley company. But in 1922, Halas and Sternaman applied for a franchise in their own names. That was also the year in which the APFA became the National Football League and the Staleys were renamed the Bears.
The Bears ran off seven straight winning seasons, but finished no higher than second place during that period. More important than any of those seasons, though, was the Bears' 1925 post-season tour, which brought the National Football League its first true nationwide publicity. Halas signed Red Grange as soon as the University of Illinois football season ended and immediately began lining up games. It was a two-part tour. The first part was made up of eight games, five of them against NFL teams, in 12 days. After 12 days off, Grange and the Bears played nine more games, including five on the West Coast, from Christmas Day, 1925, to January 31, 1926.
The tour wasn't a complete success. Grange missed several games because of injuries and he and his teammates were below par much of the time because of the grueling schedule. However, the game in New York may have saved the Giants' franchise. Tim Mara claimed to have lost more than $30,000 in the team's first season in the NFL, but the crowd of 65,000 for the post-season game at the Polo Grounds put him in the black. Then as now, New York was a major media center and the publicity generated by Grange's visit carried over into ensuing seasons, for the Giants as a team and the NFL as a whole.
Tinkering with the T
Like many of the early NFL player-coaches, Halas didn't have a broad knowledge of football. At Green Bay, Curly Lambeau used the Notre Dame shift and the box formation, because that's what he had learned in his one year playing for Knute Rockne. Similarly, Halas used the T formation, which is what Bob Zuppke's Illinois teams used when Halas played there.
That T formation was very different from the modern formation. The quarterback didn't take a direct hand-to-hand snap from the center; he was located a half-yard to a yard back and usually somewhat to one side or the other of the center, to allow a direct snap to go past him to a deeper back on some plays. The ball was usually snapped to the quarterback, but it had to travel a short distance through the air, at a rather sharp angle, to get to him.
It seems that Halas's partner, Dutch Sternaman, may have been a co-coach of the team. Or maybe, as the Bears failed to win another championship from 1922 through 1929, Sternaman tried to take on a larger role in the coaching. One player commented that the Bears had two different offenses during the late 1920s, Halas's and Sternaman's. Since Sternaman had played at Illinois with Halas, he probably offered no alternative to the T formation, but they may have had serious differences about the play calling.
In 1929, the Bears had their first losing season, finishing ninth in the league with a 4-9-2 record, and the struggle between the partners reached a climax. They eventually agreed to hire a new head coach, Ralph Jones. Jones had been an assistant at Illinois when Halas and Sternaman played there, and had then become the coach at Lake Forest Academy, where he reshaped the T formation. He brought the revamped formation to the Bears. The biggest change that Jones made was sending a man in motion before the snap, usually a halfback but occasionally the fullback. He often split one or both ends, and he also moved the quarterback under center to take a hand-to-hand snap, meaning that every play started with the quarterback.
Jones promised Halas a championship within three years, and he delivered right on time, though in a rather odd way. In 1932, Jones's third season, the Bears and Portsmouth Spartans for first place, each with 6 wins and 1 loss. The Bears had 6 ties, the Spartans 4, but that was irrelevant, because ties simply didn't count. The teams agreed to play a season-ending game to decide the championship on December 18 at Comiskey Park in Chicago. But cold and heavy snow forced the game indoors, to Chicago Stadium. Because the field was only 60 yards long, from goal line to goal line, and 45 yards wide, several special rules were in effect.
The game was scoreless after three quarters, but an interception set the Bears up at the Portsmouth 10 early in the final period. Facing fourth down at the 2-yard line, fullback Bronko Nagurski took a handoff and headed toward the line. Then he stopped, took a step or two back, and threw a touchdown pass to Red Grange. The Spartans protested that he hadn't been 5 yards behind the line of scrimmage, as required at the time, but their argument went nowhere. A bit later, the Bears got a safety to make the final score 9-0. (You'll find a full account of the game and its impact on the NFL in the History Bits section.)
Having delivered the championship he'd promised, Ralph Jones went back to Lake Forest Academy and Halas took over as the team's head coach. Halas also bought out Sternaman and became the sole owner of the Bears.
Jones's version of the T formation has often been cited as the reason for the Bears' resurgence after their dismal 1929 season. The statistics say otherwise, though. It was defense that brought more victories and that 1932 championship. In 1929, the Bears scored 119 points, just under 8 a game, and gave up 227, more than 15 a game. During Jones's three years, the offense improved somewhat, averaging 11.6 points a game, but the defense improved much more dramatically, giving up only 5 points a game. In fact, during those three seasons the Bears gave up a total of only 207 points combined, fewer than in 1929.
Not surprisingly, better players had more to do with the Bears' improvement than Jones's offensive innovations. Nagurski, a hard-running fullback who was even more valuable on defense, where he played both tackle and linebacker, was the most important addition. Another was tackle Link Lyman, who's now in the Pro Football Hall of Fame with Nagurski.
With Halas back in charge, the Bears didn't miss a beat. In 1933, they went 10-2-1 to win the first Western Conference title and they beat the Giants, 23-21, in the NFL's first post-season championship game. The following season, they became the first team to go undefeated and untied, winning all 13 of their regular season games. With Nagurski used mainly as a blocker, speedy rookie Beattie Feathers became the first runner to gain more than 1,000 yards. Remarkably, he did it on just 101 carries, averaging 9.9 yards per attempt.
Once again, the Bears played the Giants for the championship, this time on an icy field at the Polo Grounds in what became known as the "Sneakers Game." After falling behind, 10-3, at the end of the first half, the Giants traded their cleats for sneakers to get better traction. The Bears got another field goal to take a 13-3 lead, but New York scored 27 fourth-quarter points to win the championship.
The Bears got to the championship game again in 1937, losing to the Washington Redskins, 28-21. After the team slipped to 6-5-0 and a third-place finish in 1938, Halas began tinkering with the T formation once again, with considerable help from Clark Shaughnessy, then the coach at the University of Chicago. In the new version of the T, the linemen were split wider, forcing the defensive line to open up accordingly and creating ready-made holes for backs to run through on quick-hitting plays. The quarterback became a pocket passer, often throwing off play action. In Jones's system, the quarterback usually threw off a pass-run option after faking handoffs, and the halfbacks and fullback were also frequently used as passers.
Shaughnessy, who introduced the T formation at Stanford in 1940, expected his quarterback to focus on ball handling and passing, while the other backs did the running and little, if any, of the passing.
The improvements show up in the statistics. The Bears scored 194 points in 1938. That leaped to 298 in 1939. Although the total dropped to 238 in 1940, it increased to a whopping 396 in 1941. Of the Bears' 197 passes in 1938, 24 were attempted by halfbacks or fullbacks. In 1939, all but three of their 221 passes were thrown by the quarterback.
As always, better personnel accounted for much of the improvement. Sid Luckman, a single-wing tailback at Columbia, was drafted in 1939 as the quarterback of the future and took over as the starter before the end of the season. Another rookie was Bill Osmanski from Holy Cross, who led the league in rushing as the Bears improved to 8-3-0. In 1940, the Bears added two more outstanding rookies, halfback George McAfee, who returned a kickoff 93 yards for a touchdown in the Bears' opener, and Clyde "Bulldog" Turner, who had immediate impact as the team's starting center and linebacker. Luckman, after a year of apprenticeship, took over as the starting quarterback.
The Bears won six of their first seven games in 1940 and then lost two in a row. The second loss was to the Washington Redskins, whose owner, George Preston Marshall, castigated the Bears as "quitters" and "crybabies" after the game. After winning their final two contests to take the Western Conference championship, the Bears met the Redskins in the NFL title game for the second time. Osmanski ran 68 yards for a touchdown on the second play from scrimmage and the Bears just kept on scoring. The final was 73-0, the most lopsided score in NFL history, including regular season games.
That outcome may have owed more to Marshall's ill-advised remarks than to the Bears' offense, but the rout, combined with Stanford's undefeated season, created a virtual stampede toward the T formation by college and professional coaches. Within 10 years, all the NFL teams except the Pittsburgh Steelers and almost every major college was using some version of T.
The Bears won three Western Conference titles and two NFL championships in the next three years. Their 1942 team won all 11 regular-season games but, as in 1934, they lost the championship game, this time to the Redskins. Halas coached that team for the first five games and then went into the Navy. Hunk Anderson and Luke Johnsos took over as co-coaches until Halas returned for the last two games of the 1945 season, when the team was only 3-7. Halas promptly took them to another conference title and NFL championship in 1946.
Post-War, Post-Halas
It was 17 years before the next championship, though the Bears usually had winning records over that span. Halas retired temporarily after the 1955 season and Paddy Driscoll guided them to the conference title in 1956, but they lost the championship game. After the Bears slipped to 5-7 in 1957, Halas took the reins once more. He won his final NFL championship as a head coach in 1963, when the Bears went 11-1-2 and beat the Giants, 14-10, in the title game at New York.
Halas retired permanently after the 1967 season as the all-time NFL leader with 324 coaching victories. His son, George "Mugs" Halas Jr., had become president of the Bears in 1963, but the older Halas remained pretty much in charge of the team's football operations until 1974, when Jim Finks was hired as general manager.
The Bears had four head coaches and only two winning seasons from 1968 through 1981, and they lost both their playoff games during that span. In 1982, Finks hired Mike Ditka as head coach. A former tight end who had been an assistant to Tom Landry with the Dallas Cowboys, Ditka resembled Halas more than Landry in his ferocious sideline demeanor. He frequently railed at players, officials, and assistant coaches. He also turned the team into a consistent winner. In his 10 years, the Bears won six NFC Central Division titles and played in the NFC championship game four times. The 1985 team went 15-1, shut out both the New York Giants and the Los Angeles Rams in the NFC playoffs, and then walloped the New England Patriots, 46-10, in the Super Bowl.
Although they had one of the all-time great running backs in Walter Payton, the Bears' success during Ditka's tenure was built mainly on a defense built and coached by defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan and led on the field by defensive end Richard Dent and middle linebacker Mike Singletary.
The Bears went 14-2 during the 1986 season despite repeatedly losing quarterbacks to injuries. They finished one game using the shotgun formation, with halfback Walter Payton taking the snaps, because they didn't have any healthy quarterbacks. The problem caught up with them in the playoffs, where they used late-season acquisition Doug Flutie in a 27-13 first-round loss to the Washington Redskins.
The Bears also won the NFC Central the next two seasons and again in 1990, but they were 2-3 in the playoffs during that period, and they lost the wildcard game in 1991. Ditka left after the Bears went 5-11 in 1992 and mediocrity returned. In Dave Wannstedt's six years, the team had two winning seasons, going only 9-7 each time. The Bears did have what seemed like a breakout year under Dick Jauron in 2001, when they were 13-3, but they were blown out in the first round of the playoffs and followed that with two more losing season.
"Mugs" Halas died of a heart attack in 1979. Jim Finks resigned as general manager in 1983 and George Halas Sr. died later the same year. Michael McCaskey, the oldest son of Ed and Virginia Halas McCaskey and grandson of George Halas, then became the team's third president. In 1999, McCaskey moved up to chairman of the board and Ted Phillips took over as president, the first from outside the Halas family.