Red Grange and the Rise of Professional Football

By 4Football Staff · September 28, 2026 · 9 min read

In 1925 a college star left Illinois for the Chicago Bears and drew crowds pro football had never seen. Here is what Red Grange did, what it changed and what it did not.

In late November 1925, the most famous college football player in the country walked away from his final game and signed a contract to play for money. The news filled sports pages. Within days he was in a Chicago Bears uniform, and within two weeks a crowd of tens of thousands was waiting to see him in New York.

Harold "Red" Grange is often given credit for putting professional football on the map. There is truth in that. His decision to turn professional produced attendance and publicity the league had never had. But the full story is more complicated, and in some ways more instructive. The league did not become stable overnight, and Grange's own pro career was disrupted by a business dispute and by injury.

This article looks at who Grange was, the college game that made him famous, how and why he joined the Bears, what the barnstorming tour of 1925 and 1926 achieved, what went wrong afterward and how historians weigh his impact. It is a companion to the articles on the founding of the NFL and the early NFL, which describe the league he joined.

From Wheaton to Illinois

Grange was born in 1903 in Pennsylvania and grew up in Wheaton, Illinois, a town west of Chicago. He was a talented athlete in high school, and his summer job delivering ice gave rise to one of his nicknames, the "Wheaton Iceman." Stories about how much ice he carried are part of his legend; as with many stories about athletes of the era, they should be treated as folklore.

He went to the University of Illinois and played halfback for the Fighting Illini in 1923, 1924 and 1925. He quickly became a star. His running style, which relied on speed and elusiveness, earned him another nickname, the "Galloping Ghost." The name is attributed to a sportswriter of the day. Whatever its origin, it fit: Grange was not a plodding power runner but a back who slipped past tacklers.

He played in an era when college football was more popular than the professional game. Illinois had a new stadium, crowds were large and newspapers across the country followed the sport closely. A star such as Grange could become a national figure, and he did.

October 18, 1924

If one afternoon made Grange famous, it was October 18, 1924. Illinois was dedicating a new stadium, and its opponent was Michigan, a strong team that had gone about twenty games without a defeat. In the first twelve minutes of the game, Grange scored four touchdowns, on runs that are usually reported as 95, 67, 56 and 44 yards. He added more scoring later, and Illinois won, 39 to 14.

Treat the exact details with the usual caution. The distances of the runs, and the number of touchdowns overall, are widely cited and consistent across sources, which is a sign that they are reliable, but there were no instant replays or official play-by-play databases, so the record rests on newspaper reports and recollections. What no one doubts is the impact. The performance turned a talented back into a celebrity and gave sportswriters a model of what a football hero could look like.

The problem: no future in football?

By 1925, Grange had a problem that many college stars faced. After graduation, there was little money in football. The professional league was small and its teams were in modest towns. Many people in the college game looked down on professionals. Illinois's coach, Bob Zuppke, publicly disapproved of Grange going pro, as did others. At the same time, Grange's fame meant that for the first time a star was in a position to be paid large sums for appearances.

Enter C. C. Pyle, a theater owner and promoter from Champaign, Illinois, who saw an opportunity. He is remembered as Grange's manager and the man who negotiated his deals. Pyle understood that Grange's name could sell tickets, and he wanted Grange to be paid like a star.

Joining the Bears

Within days of Grange's last college game in November 1925, he signed with the Chicago Bears, a team owned by George Halas and Dutch Sternaman. The contract, as the story is usually told, gave Grange a share of the gate receipts rather than a conventional salary, which was an unusual arrangement. The exact dollar figures reported in the press at the time differ, and they were often exaggerated, so they are best treated as approximate.

Grange's debut was on Thanksgiving Day, November 26, 1925, when the Bears faced their city rival, the Chicago Cardinals, at Cubs Park, the baseball stadium that later became Wrigley Field. The game ended in a scoreless tie, but the crowd, about 36,000 according to usual accounts, was far larger than what most NFL teams drew.

The tour

Having signed with the Bears, Grange did not just play the league schedule. The Bears launched a barnstorming tour, a long series of exhibition and league games in cities that rarely saw professional football. The aim was to capitalize on Grange's fame while it was at its peak.

The New York game is the most cited. The Giants' owner, Tim Mara, had been struggling to make his team a success, and the huge crowd is often credited with helping stabilize the franchise's finances. The crowd numbers differ in various sources, which is why a range is better than a single figure. What matters is that it was an extraordinary turnout for a pro game.

The tour was tiring. Teams played in many cities in a short period, with short rosters and little rest. Rosters were small and there was no modern medical or travel support, so the pace was hard on everyone involved. Even so, the Bears reportedly drew crowds that earned a large profit for the franchise and for Grange and Pyle, though the profit figures reported at the time were not audited and should be read with care.

A celebrity before the word was common

Grange's fame extended beyond the field, which was unusual for an athlete of his day. Pyle arranged endorsements and appearances, and Grange appeared in a 1926 film, One Minute to Play, in which he played a football hero. Newspapers followed his travels, his earnings and his business deals as closely as his games. In effect, he was one of the first American athletes to be marketed as a brand.

That dimension of the story matters because it explains why his signing was such a break from the past. Earlier pro stars, such as Thorpe, had been admired within the football world. Grange was famous to people who did not follow football at all. When Pyle negotiated a share of the gate rather than a flat salary, he was applying a promoter's logic: the athlete's name was the product, and the athlete should share in what it earned. That idea is the root of much that you see in sports contracts today.

After his playing days, Grange worked for many years in broadcasting, calling games on radio and television. That second career also kept him in public view and helped make him a familiar voice to later generations of fans.

What Grange did for pro football

Historians usually point to several benefits.

1. Attention. Newspapers that had barely covered pro football gave it front-page space. Many Americans who had never watched a pro game were curious.
2. Legitimacy. A player of Grange's stature turning professional made the pro game look more like a career path. If a college hero could play for pay, the stigma began to fade.
3. Proof of demand. The large crowds suggested that, with the right attraction, pro football could draw serious money.
4. Cash for clubs. Teams that hosted the Bears on tour, and the Bears themselves, earned significant gate receipts.

He also changed how the league thought about players. The owners soon moved to tighten rules on signing college players before they finished school, partly to protect themselves from the criticism Grange's quick jump had triggered. The long-term effect on the college-to-pro pipeline was substantial, and the modern draft grew from a similar effort to manage how young players enter the league. You can see how that process works today on our draft page.

What Grange did not do

It is tempting to say that Grange saved professional football. Most historians are more cautious.

• The league stayed unstable. In the years after 1925, the NFL still lost franchises. By the early 1930s it was down to eight teams, as the article on the early NFL describes.
• Pro football stayed second to college football in popularity for many years.
• One star is not a system. The league's long-term growth depended on structure, such as divisions, a title game and the draft, and on later developments such as television.

A fair summary is that Grange showed the world what pro football could draw, but the league still had to build the structures that would make that success repeatable.

The rival league

After the tour, Pyle and Grange wanted a bigger stake in the sport. They asked for ownership of a team and a share of the franchise. The Bears refused, and Pyle sought a franchise in New York, where Mara controlled the territory and refused. The result was that Pyle and Grange formed a rival league, the American Football League, in 1926. Grange played for a New York team called the Yankees.

That league survived for only a single season. It is one of several attempts to challenge the NFL, discussed in the article on pro football leagues beyond the NFL. Its failure showed how hard it was to compete with an established league. Some of its teams joined the NFL, including the Yankees, who were absorbed for 1927.

Injury and return

In 1927, Grange suffered a severe knee injury during a game against the Bears. The injury is generally regarded as the end of his time as a breakaway runner. He missed a season, and when he returned to the Bears in 1929, he was a different player. Instead of the dazzling open-field runner of his college days, he became a solid back and a valuable defender. He was part of the Bears' championship teams in the early 1930s and retired after the 1934 season.

His later career is a reminder that star power does not guarantee durable performance. Football in the 1920s was physically punishing, with minimal protective equipment, and even the best players could be derailed by a single injury.

How Grange is remembered

Grange's name lives on in the record of the sport. He was a member of the first class of the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1963, and he is a fixture in lists of great college players. His story has been retold in books and documentaries, and many of the retellings repeat the same dramatic details.

A few cautions for readers:

• Statistics are fuzzy. Official statistics were not kept consistently in the 1920s. Records that appear in modern sources were often reconstructed later.
• Dollar amounts are unreliable. Press reports of his earnings were sometimes exaggerated, and figures should be taken as approximate.
• Crowd sizes vary. As noted above, attendance numbers differ by source.
• He was not the first pro star. Jim Thorpe, Fritz Pollard and others preceded him. What made Grange different was the scale of attention.

Why the story still matters

Grange's story is an early example of a pattern that has repeated in sports: a star from college becomes a business phenomenon, creating new opportunities and new disputes about who should profit. Questions about how athletes are paid, when they should be allowed to turn pro and who controls their image remain live issues. If you follow current players on the players page or want to see how the league's teams are organized on the teams page, you are looking at an enterprise whose basic business model was tested in the winter of 1925 to 1926.

What to remember

• Red Grange was an Illinois halfback whose four-touchdown start against Michigan on October 18, 1924, made him a national celebrity.
• He signed with the Chicago Bears in late November 1925, with C. C. Pyle as his manager.
• A barnstorming tour that included a Polo Grounds game against the Giants drew crowds far larger than pro football normally saw, with attendance estimates varying by source.
• The tour gave the league attention, legitimacy and cash, but it did not make the league stable.
• A dispute over ownership led Grange and Pyle to start a rival league in 1926, which lasted one season.
• A knee injury in 1927 ended his days as a breakaway runner, but he returned and was part of Bears title teams in the early 1930s.