Bears and NFL Finally Get Preseason Right After 93 Years

First year without Bears preseason games since 1926 seems about the right amount to play for future years and it took COVID-19 for them to get it right

Without a preseason game to play this August, the Bears are treading were they've rarely been.

Their last season without first playing a preseason game came in 1926. They didn't play any in 1925 either. 

They should have turned it into a tradition and spared everyone watching those meaningless charades. 

The Bears should have been preparing to play a meaningless preseason game this Saturday but for now live hitting in practice will have to do the trick because COVID-19 has done what even World War II couldn't do and that's wipe out NFL exhibition season.

If there's one mistake George Halas and the guys in the Hupmobile showroom made, it's staging those practice games.

At least in the modern NFL, they play their boring scrimmage against other league teams. This wasn't always the case.

When Halas resumed exhibition play in 1927, it came in0 a tuneup against the LaGrange Suburbans—not quite your New York Giants, Canton Bulldogs or even the Portsmouth Spartans. The Bears eked out a 28-0 win over the Suburbans.

It wasn't uncommon for NFL teams to face non-NFL teams in those early preseason days when Halas was looking for an easy touch to get his team ready for league play.

In 1933 they destroyed another suburban group, the Cicero Boosters, 60-0. And in 1939 the Glen Ellyn All-Stars accepted a similar fate, 55-6.

Although Halas usually beat up on teams in these rehearsals against non-NFL teams, the old Washington Generals routine didn't always work his way.

The Bears lost their preseason opener in consecutive seasons to the Texas All-Stars, 7-6 in 1936 and 6-0 in 1937. Don't mess with Texas.

Those exhibitions against non-NFL teams faded away by 1947, but in 1950 the NFL began a series of exhibitions against Canadian Football League teams. 

The Bears finished the leagues' series by beating the Montreal Alouettes 34-16 to open the 1961 preseason. The CFL teams never beat an actual NFL team in those exhibitions, but the CFL's Hamilton Tiger Cats did play the Buffalo Bills in that final year of 1961 and won. Buffalo was an American Football League team then, in their second year of existence, and years away from being the team they were when they merged with the NFL.

It was just as well that the NFL-CFL series ended there because the Bears-Alouettes game concluded with four players ejected for fighting during a brawl resulting from a late hit by Montreal players on Bears tackle Stan Fanning.

The Bears would have been better off never again venturing outside the NFL in exhibitions, but in 1967 they took on the AFL. The NFL and AFL had agreed in 1966 to a future merger and decided to play a series of exhibitions before the actual realignment would occur in 1970.

The Bears' first AFL experience was traveling to Kansas City to be the first NFL team the Chiefs faced after being drubbed by the Green Bay Packers in Super Bowl I. Hank Stram took that championship game loss out on the Bears by running up the score, 66-24.

As the late, great Doug Buffone recalled in Richard Whittingham's book "We Are the Bears: "They had a horse with an Indian Chief on it that raced up and down the sidelines every time they scored. I played the whole game and I was so tired, but not as bad as that damn horse—his tongue was down by his hooves, he had to race up and down the sidelines so often. Finally, he couldn't go anymore. They almost killed that horse."

Playing no preseason games like this year and in 1925-26 might seem extreme, but the Bears have gone in quite the opposite direction in their past.

From 1969-77 someone decided they had to play six preseason games before it dropped to four. They had actually done the same for a part of the 1950s and 1960s, when the NFL played only 12-game regular season. So at that time they were playing an exhibition game for every two regular-season games.

The NFLPA would have a field day with that now in CBA negotiations.

In 1977 the Bears actually played seven preseason games because they also had to play in the Hall of Fame Game. When they held the old College All-Star Game every year at Soldier Field, the Bears had to play an extra 1964 preseason game, as well. Of course, that one cagainst a group of NFL rookies.

Preseason games are to be scaled back in 2021 to three games, which will still seem like three too many after this summer when they actually play the proper number.

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