The Week Ahead

Bears at Redskins. Fifty years ago, on Dec. 8,1940, one of the NFL's most storied championship games was played in Washington, D.C. Bears 73, Redskins 0. How bad was it? Well, Washington had beaten Chicago 7-3 just three weeks earlier in the regular season. But on this day, in the first championship game carried on network radio, George Halas's Bears outrushed the Redskins 372 yards to three. Also, Chicago stopped kicking extra points in the second half because Washington, which as the home team supplied the balls, was afraid it would run out of them. (In those days, balls kicked into the stands were kept by the fans.) "Some of my players were yellow, yellow in the sense that they quit and did not give their best effort after we got behind," Redskins owner George Preston Marshall said after the game. The payoff to the league champions was $873.99 per man. The loser's share was $606.25.

Cardinals at Falcons. A sentimental matchup for two guys who traveled a long road to become NFL head coaches. In 1967, when Joe Bugel and Jerry Glanville were assistant coaches at Western Kentucky, they were so broke that they lived in a log cabin without electricity just off campus. They were two football freaks who diagrammed plays on empty pizza boxes. "All Jerry ever thought about was football," says Bugel, who in his first year with Phoenix is 4-8. "I used to kid him that if you cut his head open, little footballs would jump out." The cabin had only one bed, which Bugel took for himself. Glanville, the former Oiler coach who so far this year has guided Atlanta to a 3-9 mark, slept on layers of old newspapers. "We tried to make them as soft as possible," says Bugel. "He'd either sleep on the funnies or on the sports section."