1921 NFL Championship controversy The 1921 NFL Championship controversy , known among Buffalo sports historians and fans as the Staley Swindle , is a dispute in which the Buffalo All - Americans unintentionally surrendered the 1921 APFA Championship title to the Chicago Staleys ( later renamed the Chicago Bears ) . The controversy began at the conclusion of the 1921 season , when the All - Americans finished the season with the best record in the American Professional Football Association ( renamed the National Football League in 1922 ) . However , after losing what the All - Americans owner had intended to be an exhibition game to the Staleys on December 4 , 1921 , the All - Americans lost their title to Chicago on a tiebreaker . Background . The Buffalo All - Americans finished 1921 with a 9 - 0 - 2 record , meanwhile Chicago captured second - place with their only loss coming against Buffalo on Thanksgiving . The Staleys refused to play any road games that season except for their Thanksgiving game against the then - undefeated All - Americans , who also had played all of their games at home . Chicago owner George Halas then challenged the All - Americans to a rematch . Buffalo owner , Frank McNeil , having already scheduled the team ' s last game for December 3 against the Akron Pros , agreed on the condition that it be considered only a " post - season exhibition match " and not be counted in the standings . McNeil also made a point of telling the Buffalo media that the two games were exhibitions and would have no bearing on the team ' s claim to the AFPA title . He then scheduled the game against the Staleys the day after the team ' s final game against Akron . Therefore after a game , scheduled for December 3 against the tough Akron Pros , McNeil ' s team would take an all - night train to Chicago to play the Staleys the next day . The All - Americans defeated the Pros . They then boarded a train for Chicago , worn out and in no real condition to play the Staleys . The All - Americans then lost to the Staleys , 10 - 7 . Meanwhile McNeil still believed his team was the AFPA ' s 1921 champion , and even invested in tiny gold footballs for his players to commemorate the achievement . After all , even with the loss , Buffalo was still 9 - 1 - 2 , and Chicago was at the time still 8 - 1 - - a half - game behind Buffalo in the standings ( Buffalo played more games earlier in the season ) . If the season ended that day , Buffalo would still have won the league title . Chicago , however , saw their opportunity , and swiftly scheduled two games in December : one against the Canton Bulldogs , and the other against their crosstown rivals , the Chicago Cardinals . Winning both would have propelled Chicago to 10 - 1 , a half - game ahead of Buffalo and assuring the team of the championship . The Staleys defeated Canton , 10 - 0 , on December 11 , but managed only to reach a scoreless tie with the Cardinals on December 18 . Thus , the two teams were now tied at 9 - 1 ( ties did not count in the APFA standings at the time ) . Halas decided to declare that the title belonged to Chicago and began to persuade the other owners in the league to give his Staleys the title . Halas based his claim for the championship on his belief that the second game of the Buffalo - Chicago series mattered more than the first . He also pointed out that the aggregate score of the two games was 16 - 14 in favor of the Staleys . McNeil insisted that the Buffalo was the champions and maintained that the last two games his team played were merely exhibitions . ( Notably , both the All - Americans and the Staleys disputed the previous year ' s title , but were both overruled and the Brunswick - Balke Collender Cup went to the Akron Pros . ) The league then instituted the first - ever tiebreaker for the championship . The new rule stated that a rematch counts more than a first matchup , which handed the championship to Chicago . This tiebreaker has since been discontinued by the NFL in favor of a more complicated set . In their decision , based on a generally accepted ( but now obsolete ) rule that if two teams play each other more than once in a season , the second game counts more than the first , the executive committee followed established tradition . Had Buffalo not played the last game ( or if it had not been counted as per Buffalo ' s wishes ) , they would have had an undefeated season and won the title . Meanwhile McNeil eventually went to his grave trying to get the league ' s decision overturned . Buffalo never again reached the level of success they did in the 1918 - 1921 period ; the franchise barely stayed over . 500 for the next three seasons , after which the team fell to the bottom of the league in the standings for most of the rest of the decade , suspending operations in 1927 and folding in 1929 . Long - term impact . The league was also forced to place a finite end to the season after the incident . In , when Chicago attempted to do the same thing with a post - season match against the Cleveland Bulldogs , the league disallowed it , allowed the Bulldogs to keep their title , and banned the use of postseason championship games . Incidentally , this rule would have to be overturned in , when two teams finished atop the standings and the tiebreaker did not apply . Instead , the league scheduled a " playoff game " to settle the dispute . The NFL Championship Game would become permanent in when the NFL would divide into Eastern and Western divisions and standardize its schedule ; at the same time , the " greater weight to a later game " tiebreaker was formally abolished .