NFL History | Chicago Stadium, 1800 West Madison — The Arena That Redrew the Field

The football field has inbound marks on it because one championship had to fit inside a hockey arena.

The 1932 season ended with the Chicago Bears and the Portsmouth Spartans level at the top of a single-division league that had never needed a playoff. One extra game was arranged for 18 December at Wrigley Field. Snow and cold moved it indoors to Chicago Stadium, three years old, on West Madison Street.

The field that could be laid inside was 80 yards long and ten yards narrower than regulation. The touchlines ran up against the seating. Goalposts came forward from the end line to the goal line. Every time a team crossed the halfway line the ball went back to the 20. Field goals and drop kicks were set aside. And for the first time the ball was brought in from the wall to a fixed mark before every snap, so that play did not begin with a man's shoulder against the boards.

Bears 9, Spartans 0, before 11,198 people at a quarter past eight in the evening. The only touchdown came from a Bronko Nagurski pass to Red Grange. Portsmouth protested that Nagurski had thrown from closer to the line of scrimmage than the rules of the time permitted. The officials allowed it, the accounts have never converged, and the participants' versions shifted over the years, so it belongs in the record as a disputed play rather than a settled one.

Then the league kept the improvisations. On 25 February 1933 it stopped using the collegiate rule book and wrote its own: the ball spotted on the inbound marks after every play, the goalposts on the goal line, the forward pass legal from anywhere behind the line of scrimmage. In July the ten clubs were split into two divisions. On 17 December 1933 the Bears beat the Giants 23–21 at Wrigley Field in the first championship game the league staged on purpose.

One footnote worth keeping. The indoor game counted in the regular-season standings, so the Bears finished 7–1–6, the Packers came second at 10–3–1, and Portsmouth — the team that played in the title game — finished third.

Chicago Stadium came down in 1995. The United Center stands opposite, on the south side of Madison.

Coordinate: the arena site at 1800 West Madison Street. Wikidata's P625 and the OpenStreetMap feature are separately maintained entities; they differ by about 120 m and both fall inside the former block. The US Census TIGER geocoder for 1800 West Madison Street returns 41.881447, -87.671829, about 200 m east of the published pin, at the mailing-address point on the block frontage — the offset this vertical documents at Wrigley, the Hall of Fame and elsewhere. Three sources, agreeing at block scale. Precision ±150 m.

Cover: Chicago Stadium, 1800 West Madison Street, on a Curt Teich postcard held by the Newberry Library. Unknown photographer; public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The card shows the building as it stood in the 1930s, not the game.