Posts from When Football Was Football podcast.
As we celebrate our first anniversary of “When Football Was Football” on the Sports History Network, we can look back at a wide variety of episodes from the golden days of football in the Chicago area. While we’ve covered topics such as the first-ever indoor football games held in Chicago, the individual heroics of players … Read more
One of the most important innovations in the history of the National Football League occurred in February of 1936 when the NFL initiated its very first draft of collegiate players. It was a revolutionary concept; each team, beginning with the one having the worst record to the best from the previous season, would be able … Read more
a trio of players from the Chicago Bears that you may have never heard about. After all, they played nearly a century ago and except for one, never received much public–or lasting-acclaim. Throughout the years, the National Football League has seen its share of rogues, complainers, whiners, and personality problems among its players…but we’ll just … Read more
There have been very few Olympic medalists that are also in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. In fact, we can think of only two: Jim Thorpe and Ollie Matson. Thorpe grabbed the gold medal in both the decathlon and the pentathlon in 1912 at the Stockholm games, while Matson won both a silver and … Read more
In the long, long history of the National Football League, one rivalry usually grabs your interest immediately: the Bears and the Packers! Some even think that it is the oldest rivalry in the league and we’ll talk about that in a moment as well. The Bears vs. Packer history runs deep. However, the focus of … Read more