A Difficult Position for the Bears

The ancient rivalry between the Bears and the Green Bay Packers is often called the greatest in the National Football League and sometimes called the greatest in all of sports. The Bears dominated for most of the first seven decades--with the notable exception of the 1960s, during which Green Bay won five world championships.  

     By the end of the 1991 season, the Bears held a comfortable advantage in the series, at 80-57-6. But beginning in 1992, just two quarterbacks--Hall of Famer Brett Favre and future Hall of Famer Aaron Rodgers--have started 96 percent of the Packers' games between them. Meanwhile, 33 different quarterbacks have started for the Bears, and only Jay Cutler has started as many as 50 games.

     Not coincidentally, the history of the rivalry has tilted dramatically in Green Bay's favor. The Bears' 23-game margin after 1991 has evaporated and then some. The Packers have won 43 of the 58 meetings since 1992, and their convincing victory over the Bears on Sunday night was their 100th of the series. The overall ledger now stands at 100-95-6 in favor of Green Bay. 

 

JAY CUTLER

 

Below is the complete list of Packers quarterbacks who have started a regular-season game since the beginning of the 1992 season, with each player's number of starts in parentheses.

  1. Don Majkowski, 1992 (3)

  2. Brett Favre, 1992 - 2007 (253)

  3. Aaron Rodgers, 2008 - 2020 (185 through November 2020)

  4. Matt Flynn, 2010 - 2013 (6)

  5. Scott Tolzien, 2013 (2)

  6. Seneca Wallace, 2013 (1)

  7. Brett Hundley, 2017 (7)

 

Below is the complete list of Bears quarterbacks who have started a regular-season game since the beginning of the 1992 season, with each player's number of starts in parentheses.

  1. Jim Harbaugh, 1992 - 1993 (28)

  2. Peter Tom Willis, 1992 - 1993 (3)

  3. Will Furrer, 1992 (1)

  4. Steve Walsh, 1994 (11)

  5. Erik Kramer, 1994 - 1998 (46)

  6. Dave Krieg, 1996 (12)

  7. Rick Mirer, 1997 (3)

  8. Steve Stenstrom, 1998 (7)

  9. Moses Moreno, 1998 (1)

10. Shane Matthews, 1999 - 2001 (15)

11. Cade McNown 1999 - 2000 (15)

12. Jim Miller, 1999 - 2002 (26)

13. Chris Chandler, 2002 - 2003 (13)

14. Henry Burris, 2002 (1)

15. Kordell Stewart, 2003 (7)

16. Rex Grossman, 2003 - 2008 (31)

17. Craig Krenzel, 2004 (5)

18. Chad Hutchinson, 2004 (5)

19. Jonathan Quinn, 2004 (3)

20. Kyle Orton, 2005 - 2008 (33)

21. Brian Griese, 2007 (6)

22. Jay Cutler, 2009 - 2016 (102)

23. Todd Collins, 2010 (1)

24. Caleb Hanie, 2011 (4)

25. Josh McCown, 2011 - 2013 (7)

26. Jason Campbell, 2012 (1)

27. Jimmy Clausen, 2014 - 2015 (2)

28. Matt Barkley, 2016 (6)

29. Brian Hoyer, 2016 (5)

30. Mike Glennon, 2017 (4)

31. Mitchell Trubisky, 2017 - 2020 (45 through November 2020)

32. Chase Daniel, 2018 - 2019 (3)

33. Nick Foles, 2020 (7)

Check out our book Heydays: Great Stories in Chicago Sports on Amazon.    

 

Worth a Thousand Words: Bronko Nagurski and Beattie Feathers

  

     Bronko Nagurski was born in the picturesquely named town of Rainy River, Ontario, and grew up in International Falls, Minnesota. From the time he was very young, he was regarded as a sort of real-life Paul Bunyan.

     Clarence “Doc” Spears, his coach at the University of Minnesota, had a colorful account of how he recruited Nagurski. “I saw this young kid pushing a plow,” Spears said. “There was no horse or anything else, just this kid pushing a plow. I asked directions of him, and he picked up the plow and pointed with it. I decided then and there he should go to Minnesota.” 

     Bronko went on to perform spectacularly at Minnesota, and he joined the Bears in 1930. He weighed about 235 pounds at a time when very few players exceeded 210. A fullback on offense and a tackle and linebacker on defense, Nagurski was the heart and soul of the Bears’ powerhouse teams of the thirties, and he later came out of retirement to lead the Bears to the NFL championship in 1943. 

    

BRONKO NAGURSKI and BEATTIE FEATHERS

 

In 1934, running behind his lead blocker Nagurski, rookie halfback Beattie Feathers became the first player in NFL history to rush for 1,000 yards in a season. Feathers averaged an unbelievable 8.4 yards per carry (Nagurski himself registered an impressive 4.8) as the Bears went 13-0 for the regular season before the New York Giants denied them a third straight world championship in the title game.

     Nagurski was a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s inaugural class in 1963. His plaque calls him “a bulldozing runner on offense and a bone-crushing linebacker on defense.” 

     Has there ever been a more intimidating, bad-ass Bear than Nagurski? It’s hard to say,  because very few people who saw him play are still around to tell about it--and because Dick Butkus also played for the Bears. At the very least, Nagurski certainly fits right in with the likes of Butkus, Doug Atkins, Richard Dent, Dan Hampton, Olin Kreutz, Khalil Mack, Steve McMichael, Ed O’Bradovich, Doug Plank, Brian Urlacher, and anyone else who comes to mind.

     A quote from Green Bay Packers fullback and linebacker Clarke Hinkle, whose career overlapped almost exactly with Nagurski’s, will shed some light on how Bronko was viewed by his contemporaries. “Nagurski was probably the greatest player I ever went up against,” said Hinkle, himself a Hall of Famer. “I thought to myself, ‘You either better start moving and go after him or just get the hell out of the way, because otherwise you are going to get killed.’”

 

 

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Ditka Makes the Play of His Life

 

On November 24, 1963, the Bears went into Pittsburgh for a crucial game against the Steelers. The Bears held a narrow lead in the Western Division over the NFL’s two-time defending champions, the Green Bay Packers, whom they had soundly beaten the week before. At 9-1, they were poised for a run at their first championship in 17 years. What should have been a thrilling time for the Bears and their fans, however, had been marred by a stunning tragedy—the assassination of President John F. Kennedy less than 48 hours before the Bears were scheduled to play Pittsburgh. 

Despite suggestions that he do so, NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle chose not to postpone that weekend’s games. “Everyone has a different way of paying respects,” he said on Sunday. “I went to church today, and I imagine many of the people at the games did, too. I cannot feel that playing the games was disrespectful nor can I feel that I have made a mistake.” Later, though, Rozelle called the decision the worst mistake of his life.

The Bears-Steelers game, like all those in the league that day, would be played in a virtual vacuum, since all television and radio coverage was focused on the nation’s mourning of the late President. The Bears were tuned in along with millions of their fellow citizens when news came that the President’s alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had himself been shot to death in the Dallas police headquarters. In the locker room at Forbes Field, coach George Halas ordered the radio switched off and implored his players to concentrate on the game at hand.

MIKE DITKA

 

The Steelers came into the game 6-3-1, and still had a slim chance to win the Eastern Division and with it a berth in the NFL championship game. It was a must game for both teams, and they played like it. The sellout crowd of 36,465 was treated to a tough, seesaw battle. The teams traded touchdowns in the first half and went into halftime tied 14-14. The third quarter was scoreless, thanks to two missed field-goal attempts by Pittsburgh’s Lou Michaels. Finally, Michaels connected from 11 yards out to give the Steelers a 17-14 lead early in the fourth quarter. Charlie Bivins’s fumble of the ensuing kickoff was recovered by Pittsburgh on the Chicago 12-yard line, apparently dooming the Bears—but the Steelers were called for offsides on the play.

The Bears got another chance. With less than five minutes remaining, though, they found themselves with a second-and-36 from their own 22-yard line. By now they knew that the Packers had beaten the 49ers 28-10 in Milwaukee. A loss would drop the Bears into a first-place tie with the defending champs.

The Bears’ leading ground gainers, Joe Marconi and Willie Galimore, were being shut down; they would combine for fewer than 90 yards all day. Quarterback Bill Wade was thus forced to go to the air, and he had been intercepted three times already. “Throw the ball to me,” Mike Ditka told Wade in the huddle, “and I’ll try to run with it.” The Bears’ tight end ran a hook pattern, and Wade hit him about five yards beyond the line of scrimmage. The first Steeler to hit Ditka, defensive back Clendon Thomas, was also the one who brought him down—63 yards downfield from their initial point of contact. In between, Ditka literally ran over almost every defender on the field. At midfield, three Steelers converged from different angles, all hitting Ditka simultaneously. Only Ditka was on his feet after the collision, still charging toward the goal line. Thomas eventually wrestled him down at the Pittsburgh 15. “I lost my legs,” Ditka said after the game, unhappy that he hadn’t gone all the way. “They were completely dead. I had just run pass patterns on the three previous plays, and suddenly I found myself in the clear with the ball. I kept looking for somebody to lateral to, but nobody showed up.”

Ditka needn’t have apologized. “One of the greatest individual efforts I have seen in 40 years of football,” said Halas. “They had him stopped a half dozen times, but his feet never stopped churning.” The play, which became a staple of NFL Films highlight reels, set up the field goal by Roger Leclerc that gave the Bears a hard-earned 17-17 tie and kept them in first place.

The Bears won two and tied one of their three remaining regular-season games to finish at 11-1-2, an eyelash ahead of Green Bay's 11-2-1 for the Western Division title. On December 29, the Bears defeated the New York Giants for the world championship--which remains to this day one of only two they have captured since 1946.

 

Check out our book Heydays: Great Stories in Chicago Sports on Amazon.