1932 NFL Playoff Game
The indoor field at Chicago Stadium
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| Date | December 18, 1932 | ||||||||||||||||||
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| Stadium | Chicago Stadium, Chicago, Illinois | ||||||||||||||||||
| Referee | Bobby Cahn | ||||||||||||||||||
| Attendance | 11,198 | ||||||||||||||||||
The 1932 NFL Playoff Game was an extra game held to break a tie in the 1932 season's final standings in the National Football League. It matched the host Chicago Bears and the Portsmouth Spartans. Because of snowfall and anticipated extremely cold temperatures in Chicago, Illinois, it was moved indoors and played at the three-year-old Chicago Stadium on December 18 on a reduced-size field on Sunday night.
Since the NFL's first season in 1920, the league title had been awarded to the team with the best regular season record based on winning percentage with ties excluded. Four of the first six championships were disputed, but only in 1921 did two teams ever finish tied atop the standings: the two teams disputing the title had played each other, splitting a two-game series, but league officials used a tiebreaker to controversially give the Bears (then known as the Staleys) the title over the Buffalo All-Americans.
In 1932, the Spartans and the Bears tied for first place with 6-1 records. Under the rules at the time, standings were based on winning percentage with ties excluded from the calculation, meaning that the Spartans and Bears each finished the regular season with identical .857 winning percentages, ahead of the defending champion Green Bay Packers' .769 (10 wins, 3 losses) winning percentage.
Had pure win-loss differential or the post-1972 method of calculating winning percentage (counting ties as half-a-win, half-a-loss) been used at that time, the Packers' record 10–3–1 (.750, +7) would have won them a fourth consecutive championship, ahead of the Spartans' 6–1–4 (.727, +5) and the Bears' 6–1–6 (.692, +5). The Packers controlled their own destiny at the end of the 1932 season, but lost their final two games to the Spartans and Bears.
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