Bleacher Report

Editor's note: This is the third installment in Bleacher Report's series on NFL urban legends. Part 1 looked at Bo Jackson's hard-to-believe 40-yard-dash time, Part 2 at Ray Guy's purported helium-aided punts.

A two-sport college superstar whose NFL career was cut short by injuries did something unbelievable, but there were few witnesses, and skeptics think the whole thing might be either a misunderstanding or a hoax from a bygone era.

No, you did not just accidentally click back to the story about Bo Jackson's 40-yard dash. We're going way back to the 1930s for this investigation.

Beattie Feathers may not be a household name now, but he was briefly the NFL's most marketable young star. So marketable, in fact, that the fledgling NFL may have fabricated some rushing statistics in an attempt to market him.

The legend: The first 1,000-yard season in NFL history—Beattie Feathers' in 1934—was either a statistical error or a number-fudging promotional ploy by the NFL.

What we know: Beattie Feathers was a well-known player in his college years. He scored 32 touchdowns for the University of Tennessee from 1931 to 1933 and was known for long touchdown runs for a Volunteers team that went 25-3-2 during his career.

Feathers also played baseball, and he initially chose to play in the minor leagues before signing with George Halas' Bears. Newspapers noted Feathers' movements at the time, as they often did for popular collegiate stars.

There was nothing unusual about Feathers achieving success as soon as he entered the NFL. It's his degree of success that was so unusual and, for many decades, considered suspicious.

Uncredited/Associated Press

Feathers' 1,004-yard rookie season in 1934 looks so outlandish for the standards of the time that it might as well come with 60 home runs and five holes-in-one. Paul "Dr. Z" Zimmerman was a Feathers skeptic who often wrote about that 1934 season, both in his Thinking Man's Guide to Pro Football and his Sports Illustrated columns. Dr. Z believed that kick- or punt-return data got lumped into Feathers' 1,000-yard season by accident in those primitive days of NFL record-keeping.

Other football historians have proposed something more sinister: The NFL may have purposely pumped up Feathers' production to turn him into an easier-to-promote superstar.

Feathers was clearly gaining a lot of yardage, but he missed the final two games of the 1934 season, plus the championship game, with an injury. League officials, so the story goes, figured he was close enough to 1,000 to add a yard here and a yard there to totals no one was keeping track of anyway.

The Feathers record used to be a huge deal among football historians. Back when most football research was done by microfiche and stapled-together newsletter, giants of the field like Bob Carroll, David Neft and Mark Purcell would duke it out in sometimes nasty debates. Few of those battles were ever digitized, and those who peruse old statistics at all generally accept the 119-carry, 1,004-yard, 8.4-yard-per-carry figures that Neft codified during the glory days of ink-and-paper sports encyclopedias.

The pre-Neft numbers were 101-1,004-9.94; it was those numbers Dr. Z felt had to contain some return yardage.

"Like thieves in the night, masked statisticians somewhere found 18 more carries for Beattie," Dr. Z wrote. Actually, researchers like Neft combed the microfilm in libraries across the country to get to the truth about Feathers' 1,000-yard season.

"For years, there had been people questioning those totals," Neft told Bleacher Report. "What I did was conduct research to see if there was any actual evidence that the official stats were incorrect."

Some newspapers, like the Green Bay Press-Gazette, listed full play-by-plays for games, giving Neft detailed information about Feathers' two games against the Packers. Neft found newspaper accounts of six other games that listed Feathers' rushing totals. For three other games, Neft only had newspaper stories that mentioned long runs and touchdown runs.

Imagine if all we knew of DeMarco Murray's 32-carry, 179-yard game against the Bears in Week 14 last season was that he scored a one-yard touchdown and had runs of 40, 27 and 26 yards that a writer chose to describe in detail. We would know Murray carried at least four times for 94 yards and would have to guess about the additional yardage.

That's what Neft was forced to do for three of Feathers' games.

"If I take what I have, I have 85 carries for 852 yards," Neft said. "That leaves 16 carries for 152 yards that have to come from those three games for which I don't have the complete record."

Those three games were against opponents with a combined 6-25 record. More on that in a moment.

Neft was able to isolate Feathers' punt- and kickoff-return yardage in several of those games, and he says the theory that return yardage was lumped with Feathers' rushing yardage was "flat-out wrong."

Anyone who scans 1920s-30s newspaper accounts knows such an accident is unlikely. Punts and kickoffs were considered the most exciting plays of the game back then, and the return exploits of players like Red Grange are usually carefully singled out during newspaper stories.

But might someone have fudged the numbers for promotional purposes? The best argument against that is the fact there is zero evidence it happened. The second-best argument is not as solid: Historians like Dr. Z and Carroll often argued that newspapers of the time cited statistics so infrequently that a 1,000-yard rusher would have no promotional value for a fledgling league trying to get attention during the Great Depression.

But the media did take note of Feathers' 1,000-yard feat. An Associated Press article from Dec. 23, 1934, with the headline "Beattie Feathers Replaces Illinois' Red Grange as Drawing Card in National Pro Football Loop," makes specific mention of Feathers' stats: "He was the first man in history to gain over 1,000 yards against league teams, and his average gain per try so far this year is nine yards plus."

This is exactly the kind of attention the NFL desperately needed in 1934: Move over, one player everyone has heard of (Grange). There's a new superstar, with an all-new statistical milestone!

Associated Press

Of course, that article shows just how rudimentary NFL coverage was. Grange's college had to be specified in the headline to justify his stardom, and the "so far" shows the writer may not have been aware the season had ended three weeks earlier. (The Bears played postseason exhibitions, often against other NFL teams, around Christmas back then.)

So the rushing record was good copy. That doesn't mean it was fudged.

Feathers' precise rushing total varied from source to source, even at the time. An AP story from November 1934 lists Feathers' total at 1,052 yards on 107 attempts. Imagine trying to tabulate rushing yardage by hand on muddy fields from faraway 1930s press boxes in real time with no instant replay or television coverage, and it becomes obvious why football newspaper box scores didn't exist back then and full listings of rushing totals were rare.

Under the circumstances, it wouldn't be hard to clump a few extra yards onto a player's total in the name of public relations.

"Could it have added up to 996 and somebody changed it?" Neft asked. "Yes, and we'll never know."

Thanks to the work of Neft and others, as well as the tireless efforts of the folks at Pro-Football-Reference and its sister sites, we can all access detailed 1930s statistics with a few clicks. One argument in favor of the "fudge" theory was that no other running back cracked 1,000 yards in the NFL after Feathers until Steve Van Buren did it in 1947. In fact, rushing leaders of the 1930s often gained 500-700 yards, making the sudden one-time appearance of a 1,000-yarder stick out like a statistical sore thumb.

NFL Rushing Leaders: 1934 Player Team Rushes Yards TDs Beattie Feathers Bears 119 1,004 8 Swede Hanson Eagles 146 805 7 Dutch Clark Lions 123 763 8 Bronko Nagurski Bears 123 586 7 Ernie Caddel Lions 105 528 4 Warren Heller Steelers 132 528 1 Pro-Football-Reference

As the chart shows, however, Feathers' stats were not far out of line with 1934 rushing totals. Feathers still has a 200-yard edge on Swede Hanson and 241 yards on Hall of Famer Dutch Clark, but he was the hotshot rookie who forced Red Grange into a supporting role and shared the backfield with Bronko Nagurski on an undefeated championship team. He was as likely a first-ever 1,000-yard rusher as anyone, given the circumstances, and he would have blown past the mark by an inarguable margin if he had not gotten hurt.

The real culprit in the Feathers saga was probably not a mixed-up stat compiler or shifty promoter in the league office. It was football's Cincinnati Reds, a team that only existed in 1933 and 1934 and went 0-8 in 1934 before getting suspended for failure to pay league dues. (A barnstorming team called the St. Louis Gunners finished their schedule.)

The Bears played the Reds twice. Feathers had 254 confirmed yards in those games. Clark had 194 yards in his game against the Reds. Hanson had 190 yards in a 64-0 Eagles win. Get the picture? The Reds were skewing 1934 statistics all by themselves.

Feathers got hurt late in the 1934 season and was never the same again. Nagurski became the superstar, Feathers a sidekick. Over the decades, people forgot that Feathers was a famous All-American at Tennessee who played baseball in the Reds (the real Reds) organization before and during his NFL career.

No one at all remembered there was a bankrupt orphan of an NFL team stumbling around in the early 1930s, dishing out 64-0 victories to all comers. The 1,000-yard season became a weird number from a weird era by a player with a weird name that no one remembered. It was ripe for Urban Legend status.

But it really happened. Probably.

Mike Tanier covers the NFL for Bleacher Report. Reports referenced in the series were accessed through NewsLibrary.com, Newspapers.com and NewspaperArchive.com. Links to those sources have been provided where possible.