A Brief History
On December 18, 1932, the first NFL Championship game was played between the Chicago Bears and the Portsmouth (Ohio) Spartans. Due to the snow and cold weather, the game was played indoors at the Chicago Stadium, on a reduced size “field.” The Bears won, 9-0, and in 1934 the Spartans moved to Detroit and became the Lions.
Digging Deeper
Portsmouth now has a population of only 18,000, but in 1930 boasted over 42,000 people. Some other small cities that hosted major league teams include:
Troy, New York, Trojans, of MLB’s National League, played from 1879 to 1882 in a city of 56,000 people.
Canton, Ohio Bulldogs of the NFL, a team that won the league championship in 1922 and 1923 in a city of under 100,000 people.
And the Green Bay, Wisconsin, Packers, an NFL team located in a city of 107,000 that only had 30,000 folks when the team was founded in 1919.
Question for students (and subscribers) to ponder: What is your favorite Big League team?
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Crepeau, Richard. NFL Football: A History of America’s New National Pastime. University of Illinois Press, 2020.
Flynn, Brendan. The Mlb Encyclopedia. Encyclopedias, 2021.
The featured image in this article, a photograph of the interior of Chicago Stadium in February 1930, prior to a Blackhawks/Bruins game, is in the public domain in the United States because it was published in the United States between 1928 and 1977, inclusive, without a copyright notice. For further explanation, see Commons:Hirtle chart as well as a detailed definition of “publication” for public art.
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