And so, when game day arrived, so did the four high school students.

According to an Associated Press article published in The New York Times on Dec. 24, 1925, the four boys said they told their parents the night before about their involvement in the game. They also said that they were introduced to the other players under their own names and that they even used their Englewood High School signals.

Folz wrote that he distributed Badgers jerseys to the boys, turned them over to McGuirk and “never thought anything more about it.”

“I was somewhat surprised to see there was quite a crowd of spectators at the game,” he added.

Those fans saw a demolition. Chicago, powered by Folz’s four touchdowns, won by 59-0.

“They were creamed,” Pruter said of the Badgers. “It was embarrassing. It was an embarrassing win.”

It got worse, for pretty much everyone involved. Joseph Carr, the league president, was in the hospital at the time, recuperating from appendicitis, according to the biography “The Man Who Built the National Football League: Joe F. Carr” by Chris Willis.

In addition to barring Folz for life, Carr fined the Cardinals $1,000 (about $13,600 in 2015 dollars), put them on probation for one year, fined the Badgers $500 and ordered McGuirk to sell the team within 90 days. (The Badgers ended up folding as a franchise after the 1926 season.)

In his state-of-the-league address the next February, Carr said that the incident “threatened to tear the very foundation from under our league,” according to the biography, which also said Carr’s penalties were “universally praised across the country.”

The high school players were initially barred from athletics for having played against professional players, which represented a violation of amateurism. Perhaps such a young and uncertain league needed Carr’s severe punishment, especially given the nature of the scandal: a professional athlete persuading four young players to join an opposing team, for the sake of pursuing a championship.