The year the Packers didn't play

[lastcat3]

Wasn't there a season where the Packers were suspended from the league due to rules violations? I am just going off of the top of my head right now so don't know for certain but does anybody know the details of this? Were the Packers pretty close to just becoming another small town early nfl team that came and then folded after a few years?

[sheajets]

The whole Green Bay "small town" thing gets overblown. In recent history I mean. There's 100,000+ people there plus it's less than two hours from Milwaukee which is a metro area of 1.5 million. So it's not like they're out in Cheyenne or something

Maybe you're thinking of Hornung. But the franchise itself was never suspended

Which begs the question, what exactly has to transpire for the league to suspend a franchises operations for a whole calendar year? Saints bountygate...pretty bad. Patriots cheating and numerous other ethical issues...still suspending them for a year never came up. This would have to be one hell of a black eye for the league for a team to simply be put in mothballs for an entire season

[BD Sullivan]

The whole Green Bay "small town" thing gets overblown. In recent history I mean. There's 100,000+ people there plus it's less than two hours from Milwaukee which is a metro area of 1.5 million. So it's not like they're out in Cheyenne or something

Maybe you're thinking of Hornung. But the franchise itself was never suspended

Which begs the question, what exactly has to transpire for the league to suspend a franchises operations for a whole calendar year? Saints bountygate...pretty bad. Patriots cheating and numerous other ethical issues...still suspending them for a year never came up. This would have to be one hell of a black eye for the league for a team to simply be put in mothballs for an entire season

The Rams suspended operations in April 1943 because both owners were in the service, which was obviously a unique situation. At the time, the move was supposed to be for the remainder of the war, but by the end of the year, they announced plans to return in 1944.

[Rupert Patrick]

The whole Green Bay "small town" thing gets overblown. In recent history I mean. There's 100,000+ people there plus it's less than two hours from Milwaukee which is a metro area of 1.5 million. So it's not like they're out in Cheyenne or something

In terms of TV market size, Green Bay-Appleton has a population just under 900K, which puts them at number 67, which is very small by major sport team standards. Having visited Green Bay, I can tell you it is a small town. As a comparison, I live in TV market number 38, which is Greenville-Spartanburg-Asheville-Anderson, which has a total population just under two million people, but they are spread out over a 40 mile radius around Greenville (SC), which is where I live. Greenville is a little bit larger than Green Bay, we do have buildings here that are taller than the football stadium, but there is no way this area could possibly support an NFL team, despite the fact this is the 12th largest TV market that does not have an NFL team, and a bigger TV market than New Orleans, Buffalo, Jacksonville, and of course, Green Bay, not to mention Las Vegas.

Green Bay doesn't fill their seats because of everybody from Milwaukee driving there every game, it's the local Green Bay people who support the team (and always have) in the way people fervently support college football teams, having had season tickets their entire lives, and it's a rite of passage to go to the Packers game on Sundays. And it's been that way for the past 98 years.

[lastcat3]

I was always under the impression that there have been two incarnations of the Green Bay team. And that there also was a team that got in trouble for paying players back in the very early days of the NFL when it was still trying to be a purely amateur league.

[JuggernautJ]

One of the real Green Bay experts will have a fuller answer but in the interim this should suffice:

On August 27, 1921, the Packers were granted a franchise in the new national pro football league that had been formed the previous year. Financial troubles plagued the team and the franchise was forfeited within the year before Lambeau found new financial backers and regained the franchise the next year. These backers, known as "The Hungry Five", formed the Green Bay Football Corporation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Bay_Packers

Or this:

Green Bay was kicked out of the league following that season for using three University of Notre Dame players under assumed names – all had college eligibility remaining – in a non-league game, played in Milwaukee on Dec. 4, against the Racine Legion. At a time when many viewed pro football as an evil threat to the college game, the incident erupted into a national scandal.

https://www.packers.com/news/george-hal ... to-a-point

In both instances these issues were resolved without the Packers missing a season hence, to the best of my knowledge, there was no "Year the Packers Didn't Play."

[TanksAndSpartans]

I'm not a Green Bay expert, but I've read up a good deal on Portsmouth. Going from memory, I think the community ownership thing really helped the Packers, but interestingly Portsmouth tried the same thing and it didn't work for them. I actually once found an academic paper, may have been s dissertation about the Packers and while I only skimmed it, one thing that comes to mind is they had some backers with deep pockets. I think they mentioned businessmen who made their money in the paper industry.