Only one former Loyola Wolfpack quarterback has ever played the Chicago Bears and the Green Bay Packers in back-to-back games. He won both times, too.

It was late 1929, the first months of the Great Depression. Quarterback William “Bucky” Moore, who was inducted into the Loyola Hall of Fame 45 years ago this month, had just finished an immortal career with the Wolfpack and was at the end of his first season with the semi-professional Memphis Tigers.

Moore was then best known for his 10-0 sophomore season at Loyola, when he gave our school and the city of New Orleans its first-ever unbeaten and untied pigskin squad.

He set the single-season yardage record in eight games that year — the previous holder, football Hall of Famer and Chicago Bear legend, Harold “Red” Grange, set it in nine games.

But Moore had never faced a team quite like the 14-0 Green Bay Packers, who had won the 1928 National Football League championship and stormed onto Memphis’ Hodges Field Dec. 15, 1929.

 For the first three quarters, he wrapped himself in a blanket and watched both teams work their way to a 6-6 deadlock from the bench.

On his first play that day, Moore snagged a 15-yard pass. He evaded tacklers 20 more yards down the field for an electrifying touchdown and an improbable Memphis lead.
On Green Bay’s next possession, former Loyola teammate, Raymond “Tiny” Drouilhet, intercepted a trick pass and ran it back for a touchdown.

Memphis won 20-6, and the football world came to terms with two howling wolves from tiny Loyola upending America’s most feared football team.

Things got no easier when Bucky took the field against Grange and the Chicago Bears, who had already bombed them 39-19 in a previous match-up that season.

For more than half the game, the Bears kept the Dixie Flyer grounded.

But one play, Moore freed himself of his defender and caught a 19-yard pass. Fifty yards later, he glided past the goal-line. Chicago was broken. 

Memphis scored another touchdown on their way to a 16-6 win. Moore not only blew the game open for his team, but he once again bested Grange, the man he stole the collegiate single-season rushing yardage record from in 1926.

History has had nearly 80 years to dull the luster of that two-week stretch. Like the Packers and Bears, it has failed.