Two bad snaps, one safety, 88 years: the NFL's last 2–0 game

At City Stadium in Green Bay on September 18, 1938, the Chicago Bears beat the Green Bay Packers 2–0. Every point in the game came from one safety, two points awarded to Chicago when the ball went dead in the Green Bay end zone on the second play of the fourth quarter. 1

Professional football has produced a 2–0 final five times, and this was the fifth. 2 Nothing in the NFL, or in the leagues that ran alongside it, has ended that way since. The score is 88 years old today.

It rained in Green Bay from Saturday until Sunday morning, and 15,172 people sat through the afternoon at City Stadium. 3 The Packers were the reigning power of the Western Division, with Arnie Herber throwing to Don Hutson, and the game had been billed as an aerial show. A field turned to mud by two days of rain made it a fight between two lines.

Green Bay began the fourth quarter with the ball on its own 32-yard line. Herber, the back who did the Packers' punting, walked back into punt formation and turned for the toss from center Darrell Lester. The ball sailed over his head. Herber chased it down and dropped on it at the Packers' 5-yard line, a step ahead of Chicago's left end, Dick Plasman. 3

Herber went behind his own goal line for the next punt. He tried to shovel the ball back onto the field, Plasman came up groping for it, and the ball went into the end zone with both of them after it. Packers guard Tom Jones fell on it there. 3

The two accounts of the afternoon disagree about the last link in that chain. The box score credits the safety to Plasman, who is recorded as having tackled Herber in the end zone, and that is the version in the record book. 1 The Press-Gazette, the next morning, gave the recovery to Jones. Both agree on the frame around it: a bad snap, a loose ball in the end zone, two points for Chicago, and a game decided by them. The New York Times counted two Green Bay punts that afternoon and reported that the toss from center Darrell Lester was bad each time. 4

A safety is the smallest score in the sport: two points to the defense when the offense is stopped with the ball dead in its own end zone. 5 It is also the least common way to score in American football — one arrives roughly every 14 NFL games. Safeties are therefore routine. A game in which a safety is the whole of the scoring has happened five times in the sport's history.

To win 2–0, a team has to score a safety and add nothing else, while keeping the opponent off the board for sixty minutes. Every other way of scoring sits above it: a field goal is worth three, a touchdown six. A single kick from either side, at any point in the afternoon, ends the possibility.

Scores just above it have lasted into the modern game. The NFL has played 73 scoreless ties, the last of them on November 7, 1943, between the Giants and the Lions. In the Super Bowl era, the floor is 3–0, which has happened seven times, most recently on December 10, 2023, when the Minnesota Vikings beat the Las Vegas Raiders. 6 The 2–0 is the one score that has been missing for 88 years.

All five of them came in the NFL:

Green Bay appears in three of the five, more than any other club.

Chicago gained 66 yards from scrimmage all afternoon. 3 Green Bay's line outplayed the Bears' for most of the game, and the Packers' best drive reached the Chicago 6-yard line in the third quarter before it ran out of downs. Three field goals were attempted in the wet and all three missed: Chicago's Jack Manders from the 35-yard line in the second quarter, Green Bay's Clarke Hinkle from 16 yards in the third, and Hinkle again from 37 yards with three plays left in the game. A successful kick from Hinkle would have made the final 3–2. 3

Six years before, on October 16, 1932, these two clubs had produced the same score with the winner reversed: Green Bay 2, Chicago 0 at Wrigley Field, before 18,000 people. Those two points came in the second quarter, when Chicago back Dick Nesbitt's punt was blocked out of the end zone by Tom Nash. 7

Each club won one of the two games, each on the other's home field, and in both games the side that lost had the better of the play.

Chicago's own account of the 1938 afternoon conceded the point. Afterward, in a hotel room, Paddy Driscoll, the Marquette University coach, told Bears owner-coach George Halas twice that he did not know how lucky he had been. "Oh, yes, I do," Halas said. "Last night I figured that 14 to 6 — in the Packers' favor — would just about represent the difference in strength between the two clubs." 3

Halas said afterward, "I thought we were licked each time Hinkle went back to placekick. That second attempt was almost too much for me." 3 His wife offered a different reading of the day. "In 1932 you beat us by 2 to 0 after we had shoved you all around the field," she said. "This was our turn to get the breaks." 3

The season settled nothing between them. Green Bay finished 8–3 and won the Western Division, then lost the NFL Championship to the Giants 23–17 at the Polo Grounds in December. Chicago finished 6–5 and third in the West, and Green Bay won the rematch at Wrigley Field on November 6, 24–17. 8 The last 2–0 in professional football is still that afternoon in the rain at City Stadium.