The game preview of the 1940 season finale between a pair of NFC East rivals

In the early days of the NFL, a player needed to be at least five yards behind the line of scrimmage in order to be eligible to pass.  Beginning in 1933, that rule was eliminated, making a pass legal at any point behind the line of scrimmage.  The next year, a slimmer and more aerodynamic football was introduced to make life easier for passers.

In the 1937 NFL championship game, trailing for much of the game, the Redskins and Sammy Baugh set a single-game record with 40 pass attempts against the great Chicago Bears.  Baugh led the team on a great comeback and secured the title for Washington in a 28-21 victory.

But playoff games have a tendency to make teams move outside of their comfort zone; in the regular season no team even hit the 35-pass attempt mark until 1939.  On October 15th of that season, the Chicago Cardinals were obliterated by the Chicago Bears, 44-7. Playing with a terrible game script, the Cardinals finished 10 of 37 for 162 yards with no touchdowns and 6 interceptions. Hardly a blueprint for future offenses,  it was a record-setting game nonetheless.  The next season, the Detroit Lions also threw 37 times in a loss to the Bears in mid-November. The following week, the Philadelphia Eagles, led by Davey O’Brien, faced that same dominant Bears team and threw a (regular season) record 38 times in a losing effort.  In case you haven’t picked up on it, the Bears were very good in the late ’30s.

By 1940, the passing game began to take off, at least compared to the ground-and-pound days of the 1930s.  In the Eagles opener, the team threw 40 times in a loss to the Packers, setting a new record in the regular season. A month later, as the Rams trailed the Packers, the team threw a record 42 times!  This was a real shootout: Green Bay won by throwing 37 passes of their own, with remarkable success.

Two weeks later, O’Brien’s Eagles matched that number in a loss to Brooklyn.  Another two weeks later, Brooklyn faced Baugh’s Redskins and jumped out to an early lead.  Washington responded with — are you sitting down? — 47 passes in a comeback that fell just short.  It was a historic performance: Baugh set a new record with 23 completions on 44 attempts.

As the 1940 season concluded, the Redskins looked like the best team in the NFL.  They were 9-2 entering the final game of the season, and had just defeated the second-best team (the Bears) two weeks earlier.  The worst team in the NFL?  That would be Davey O’Brien’s Philadelphia Eagles, who began the season 0-9, and then eeked by with a 7-3 victory against the struggling Pittsburgh Steelers. [continue reading…]