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Just after World War I, pro ranks were filled with the names of men who devoted their lives to American football: Notre Dame's Knute Rockne and Gus Dorais, Pittsburgh's Jock Sutherland, Carlisle's Jim Thorpe and West Virginia Wesleyan's Earle ("Greasy") Neale. In 1925 Harold ("Red") Grange, the Galloping Ghost, suddenly quit the University of Illinois and signed with the Chicago Bears. Newspapers cried havoc: a clean college kid was being "corrupted." After a two-week exhibition tour with the Bears, his share of the gate alone came to $50,000.
Slowly the crowds kept growing. Sammy Baugh and Davey O'Brien came up out of Texas to pitch passes that would help put the league on its feet. Sid Luckman taught the Bears that a kid from the streets of Brooklyn could play with the best of them. In 1946 De Benneville ("Bert") Bell, onetime owner and coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, became pro football commissioner (present salary: $40,000). Under gravel-voiced Bert, pro football finally came of age.
Peace & the FBI. Commissioner Bell runs the league with a firm hand, has prevented warfare between teams except on the field. Today players are scouted at almost every college in the country, and each winter, owners and coaches get together to take their pick. To avoid squabbles, the choice is made in order of the teams' standing in the league: the cellar club picks first.
Bert Bell has kept pro football remarkably honest. He has a sharp eye cocked for any sign that gamblers are getting next to his boys. Let the odds on a game change sharply, and a team of ex-FBI agents investigates any hint that the game might be fixed.
While Bell was reviving the league as a whole, the Lions were having their troubles —mostly with the wrong kind of coaching, from Alvin ("Bo") McMillin, a veteran of the famed "Praying Colonels" of Kentucky's Centre College. Most Lions accused "Bo" of trying to turn them into a bunch of Boy Scouts. In two years (1948-49) they lost 18 games and won six. But with the new Quarterback Bobby Layne and new Coach Buddy Parker, the Lions began to roar with new vigor. By 1952 they took over the top spot in the league and finished the season $114,000 ahead. (Last year they made $108,000.)
How to Run a Team. A tall, stooped, scholarly gentleman, ridden with monumental superstitions, Coach Parker has learned to live with the fact that his team is not composed of unduly sober citizens. If now and then they belt the bottle (or some barroom companions), Buddy will forgive them—so long as they show up sober for practice.
Most of the time, Coach Parker is too busy to bother with such minor sins. When he is not supervising practice sessions, he is studying movies of last week's game, spotting mistakes, scheming for new ways to confound his opponents. Day after day the team pores over minutely detailed analyses of its opponents' tactics. Each week each player gets a mimeographed booklet containing a complete dossier on their Sunday rivals. Every man is warned about the football style he will have to cope with, and thoroughly schooled in his opponents' idiosyncrasies (e.g., "declares himself first," "anxious," or "weak on man to man").