Now that they’re looking, maybe the Bears can find an offensive coordinator who likes the T-formation.
Nobody’s very familiar with it these days, so maybe the lowly Bears could “T off” on an unsuspecting NFL rival.
Coach George Halas and his men certainly did that in a big game played exactly 60 years ago.
How well did Halas’ “Monsters of the Midway” do? Consider this: In an age of specialization and high-powered offense, this year’s Bears have managed 68 points in their last six games. The 1940 Bears, in a lower-wattage era when men stayed on the field to play offense and defense, scored 73 points in one game.
And it wasn’t just any game. On Dec. 8, 1940, the Bears beat the Washington Redskins 73-0 in the National Professional Football League championship game. It was the Super Bowl of its day and the most lopsided NFL title triumph ever.
To repeat, if only as balm for current Bear fans:
Bears 73, Redskins 0, for the NFL championship.
“Hard to believe,” Harry Clark still marvels. “Everything just seemed to work for us, and nothing worked for them.” Clark, who celebrated his 84th birthday in Morgantown, W.Va., a week ago, scored two of the Bears’ 11 touchdowns. A halfback in the T-formation, Clark also played linebacker and safety on defense.
“I was never in a worse situation,” recalled Sammy Baugh, the Redskins’ Hall of Fame quarterback. Baugh still maintains that some of his teammates “just went through the motions” that day because they were upset at their meager salaries and angry at team owner George Preston Marshall, who goaded the Bears before the game.
Shades of the “Black Sox” throwing the 1919 World Series? Baugh, 86, isn’t suggesting there were any illicit payoffs to the losers. But he said, “You don’t beat a team a couple of weeks before and lose like that.”
The Bears had lost to the Redskins 7-3 three weeks earlier in a regular-season game. To the 36,034 stunned fans in Washington’s Griffith Stadium, the Bears looked like visitors from another planet.
On the second play from scrimmage, Bill Osmanski ran 68 yards for a touchdown. When it seemed two Redskins defenders might stop him, both were taken out by one superhuman block by the Bears’ George Wilson.
Starting from the T-formation–with a fullback and two halfbacks behind the quarterback, parallel to the line of scrimmage, and sometimes sending a man in motion before the snap–the Bears built a 21-0 lead before the first quarter ended. The rout was on. Ten different Bears scored touchdowns, and five players kicked extra points.
When it was over, the Bears had rolled up 501 total yards, including 382 rushing in 57 attempts, an average of 6.7 yards per carry. Washington gained only 22 yards on the ground.
Baugh’s day went from troubled to terrible. On the Redskins’ first possession after the Bears opened the scoring, the crafty quarterback floated a pass to Charley Malone, who was wide open but dropped the ball at the Bears’ 4-yard line.
As the Bears built their lead to 28-0 by halftime and forced the Redskins into desperation passing, Baugh was intercepted twice, and his two backup quarterbacks threw six interceptions. Meanwhile, Halas took Chicago’s Hall of Fame starting quarterback Sid Luckman out of the game at halftime, promising to send him back when Washington scored. That never happened, so Luckman finished with just 88 yards passing, completing 3-of-4 and throwing the game’s only touchdown pass.
“Everybody scored, as I recall,” joked Ken Kavanaugh, who caught the 30-yard touchdown pass.
Kavanaugh saw no signs to confirm Baugh’s contention that Washington players gave less than full effort. “No matter what they did, we would have beaten them,” he said.
“No team has ever played a game with such precise execution and discipline,” said Irv Kupcinet, the Sun-Times columnist who was on the field that day as both a line judge and a newspaper reporter. “It was a tremendous score that stunned the world.
“Everybody understood then and understands now how great that Bears team was. They dominated their era.”
Of Baugh’s suggestion that some of his teammates rolled over, Kupcinet said: “I was on the field and saw nothing untoward. The Bears just rolled over the Redskins.”
As rich as the game and players were in heroic folklore, they were just that paltry in cash and comforts by today’s NFL standards. Each Chicago player’s winning share was $873.99. Each Washington player got $606.25.
Kavanaugh, 84, who played offensive and defensive end, recalled that players bought a lot of their equipment, such as shoes, and “we didn’t get to keep our uniforms.”
He finally got his No. 51 jersey sent to him after he retired.
An equipment shortage on that long ago Dec. 8 even played a minor role in the final score.
It could have been higher than 73-0, but the Bears failed on three extra-point kicks and on one of two passes for extra points. The pass attempts were not for two points as in modern football. Rather, they were at the request of referee Red Friesell, who said the game supply of 10 footballs had been nearly depleted. Fans kept the balls whenever extra-point kicks sailed into the crowd ringing the field.
Some of the balls used late in the game were “practice balls, really scuffed up,” Kavanaugh recalled.
Played before TV brought its cameras and wealth into professional football, the 1940 title game was the first NFL game broadcast nationally on radio. WGN and 128 other Mutual System radio stations carried it.
As well as Baugh remembers the game, he wishes it had been captured on videotape.
“If I had one game of all those I played in, that’s the one I’d like to see film of,” Baugh said from his home in Snyder, Texas. Apparently he didn’t see enough when he, Luckman and Kupcinet appeared years ago on “The Way It Was,” a retrospective on the game complete with film highlights. That show still airs occasionally on ESPN Classic.
“I’d like to see what happened, who was just going through the motions,” Baugh said. “It doesn’t take a whole team to kill your chances. It only takes about five guys to ruin a game for you . . . especially if they’re playing both sides of the ball.”
The Bears’ Clark didn’t recall any opponent slacking off. “You just showed up, played hard and accepted what happened,” he said.
Baugh, who played safety on defense, got a measure of revenge in the 1942 championship game, again in Griffith Stadium against the Bears. In Washington’s 14-6 victory, Baugh threw a touchdown pass and stopped a Bears threat on defense with an end-zone interception.
In yet another Bears-Redskins title game, which the Bears won 41-21 in Wrigley Field in 1943, Clark caught two touchdown passes from Luckman. “I remember Sid Luckman was a great one,” Clark said.
Death has taken some of the cast who wrought the Dec. 8, 1940 Tribune headline, “Bears Win World Football Title, 73 to 0,” such as Halas and Luckman. Time and distance has mellowed others such as Baugh and Clark.
But like the score, some of what the players said after a rivalry-turned-rout still echoes.
For Halas, who fired up his players with press clippings of Redskins owner Marshall calling the Bears’ “crybabies” and “front-runners” after the 7-3 loss three weeks earlier, 73-0 was still imperfect.
“Looking at films,” Halas said, “I saw where we could have scored another touchdown.”
For Baugh, the dropped pass that could have been a Redskins touchdown held scant consequence. He was asked after the game if things would have been different if Malone had made the catch. “Yeah,” he said, “the score would have been 73-7.”
