Grange Gallops into the NFL
(NOTE: This article originally appeared on about.com Nov. 21, 2000.)Red Grange played his last college football game on Nov. 21, 1925. He played his first professional game five days later, on Thanksgiving.
Nicknamed "the Galloping Ghost" by sportswriter Grantland Rice, Grange ended his career at the University of Illinois as the most famous football player of all time, having eclipsed such legends as Jim Thorpe, Walter Eckersall, George Gipp, and Willie Heston.
Then he did the unthinkable. He signed a professional contract, despite the disapproval of many fans, sportswriters, college coaches, and his own father.
College football ruled the roost in those days. While colleges were building enormous stadiums to hold Saturday crowds of anywhere from 60,000 to more than 100,000 fans, NFL teams were lucky to draw 15,000 spectators; a "crowd" of 10,000 was more likely, and 5,000 or so was about the norm for the many teams based in small towns such as Portsmouth, Ohio, Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Although professional baseball had long been accepted by fans and sportswriters, pro football was generally viewed as distasteful, if not downright evil, and its perpetrators were seen as athletic bums taking money to play a sport that was supposed to be pure amateur fun.
So, when Red Grange decided to leave college to go on a post-season barnstorming tour with the Chicago Bears, it was headline news. But most of the headlines were negative.
George Halas, the owner-coach of the Bears, had expected that. Halas operated on the theory that negative headlines were better than no headlines at all. He saw, in Grange, an unprecedented chance to make quite a bit of money in the off-season while winning publicity for his team and for the NFL in general.
The barnstorming tour that Halas arranged was brutal, to say the least. After two games in Chicago, the Bears went on a swing through the east, playing in St. Louis, Philadelphia, New York, Washington, Boston, Pittsburgh, and Detroit, over an eleven-day period, before returning to Chicago for another home game on Dec. 13.
Then they took a break before embarking on a second tour that was a little more leisurely, with nine games in five weeks. That tour began on Christmas Day, 1925, in Coral Gables, Florida, and ended in Seattle on Jan. 31, 1926.
Grange was paid $125,000, about three times the amount that Babe Ruth, baseball's highest-paid player, earned for the 1925 season. The rest of the players got an average of about $15,000 apiece. Halas made an undisclosed but tidy profit, and so did a couple of promoters along the way. Other promoters, though, lost money on the games they arranged.
The Grange tour has often been singled out for making the NFL a popular attraction, because of the many fans who were supposedly converted to the professional game.
That's a gross exaggeration. There were only two big crowds along the way, 65,000 in New York and 75,000 in Los Angeles.
The New York game bailed out Tim Mara, whose Giants had lost $30,000 in their first NFL season. The money Grange brought in for Mara, about $40,000, allowed him to show a profit and encouraged him to stick with it. But the big crowd in Los Angeles hardly mattered at the time, since the NFL didn't have a team on the West Coast until 1946.
Total attendance for the 17 road games was 291,200, an average of just over 17,000 per game. If you knock out those two big crowds, the average for the other 15 games was only about 10,000 fans, not bad by NFL standards of the time but hardly a staggering number.
(Attendance on the Eastern tour was hurt by the fact that Grange actually missed three games entirely and played sparingly in a couple of others because of a torn muscle in his left arm.)
Grange's real impact on professional football was twofold, and has gone pretty much unnoticed.
First, the fact that he didn't perform particularly well was a plus for the NFL. Here was a running back of dazzling ability, who had gained 363 yards on 36 carries against a powerful Pennsylvania team, who had scored touchdowns the first four times he handled the ball against Michigan, being held to only 36 yards by the Chicago Cardinals and only 53 yards by the New York Giants.
Those less than stellar performances against NFL teams won the league some respect among fans who followed the tour only in the newspapers.
Second, Grange's example inspired quite a few future college stars to give pro football a try. From its founding as the American Professional Football Association in 1920 through the 1925 season, the NFL hadn't attracted many All-American players.
Beginning in 1926, though, more and more All-Americans and other top notch college players began to sign up with professional teams. If it was good enough for the greatest player of all time, they reasoned, it was good enough for them.