NFL History | Wrigley Field, Chicago — Fifty Years on a Handshake

The first championship game the NFL arranged on purpose was played in a baseball park, on a field that did not really fit. On 17 December 1933 the Chicago Bears beat the New York Giants 23–21 here, in the first title game produced by the league's new two-division structure. Both that structure and the rules the game was played under came out of the improvised indoor playoff at Chicago Stadium twelve months earlier. The Bears were tenants at Wrigley Field from 1921 through 1970. The club counts fifty years; the Hall of Fame counts fifty-one seasons. George Halas renewed the arrangement annually on a handshake with the Cubs' owners, and by his own account in his autobiography the baseball club took fifteen per cent of the ticket profits in return. There was no lease to renegotiate and no stadium to finance, which is a large part of why a professional football club could survive as the second tenant of somebody else's ballpark. A baseball park is the wrong shape for it. The gridiron ran across the infield with the end zones pressed up against the walls, and photographs of Wrigley set up for football show the same compromise now that they did then. What ended the arrangement was arithmetic rather than sentiment. After the 1970 merger the league set a minimum of fifty thousand seats for a home stadium. Wrigley was below it and had no lights. The Bears played their last game here on 13 December 1970, beating Green Bay 35–17, spent an unsettled season looking for somewhere else, and moved to Soldier Field in 1971. Hold on to that seating rule, because it appears again. It is the same requirement that made Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington obsolete a decade later. Two historic stadiums were emptied of professional football by a number written into a merger agreement rather than by anything that happened on the field. Wrigley Field is still standing and still hosts football, though not the Bears. Coordinate: Wrigley Field. Wikidata and OpenStreetMap agree to within about 15 m. Precision ±30 m. Cover: Wrigley Field laid out for football, photographed from above in November 2024. This is a Northwestern University college game, not the Bears. It is here because it shows the geometry the Bears played inside for fifty seasons: the gridiron crossing the infield, the end zones hard against the stands. Photo: rabesphoto, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.