Today's Tidbit... Tie Games And The 1932 NFL Championship

Following Sunday's post, which included an image from 1954 showing a list of every NFL champion to date, a subscriber who hails from Down Under sent me a note:

I would be interested to know if there was much contemporary commentary from the 1932 season when a 6-1-6 Bears team played a 6-1-4 Portsmouth team [in the NFL championship game], with a 10-3-1 Packers team left on the sideline.

I appreciated the question and dug into newspaper reporting from November 1932 to January 1933 and can definitively say the answer is both "Yes" and "No." However, before covering the response to the situation, let's review how it came about.

In 1932, the NFL was an eight-team league in cities ranging from Boston in the Northeast, to Chicago and Green Bay in the West, and Portsmouth to the south. (Portsmouth sits on the Ohio River south of Columbus and East of Cincinnati.) Due to transportation challenges and to allow league teams to play local rivals that were not in the NFL, the league did not play a balanced schedule. During the 1932 season, teams played between ten and fourteen regular-season games and planned a championship game only if the league leaders tied at the end of the regular season.