National Football League

Green Bay Packers: Charles Mathys was a trailblazer for pro football

Updated Mar. 4, 2020 9:20 p.m. ET

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Charles Mathys would be pleased with the state of the Green Bay Packers nearly 100 years after the time he played.

With just hours remaining until the start of the Green Bay Packers NFL season, our countdown to the big day continues.

Tomorrow, Sunday, Sept. 11, the day when the Green Bay Packers travel to Jacksonville to take on the upstart Jaguars.

In this countdown to Packers football we take time to focus on the best player to wear #2 …

Recently we looked at #3, Tony Canadeo, the player, coach, announcer (and just about everything else). who spent decades with the organization

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But today we get to move on to number 2, Charles Mathys.

Mathys, in 1922, signed with the Packers, the same year that the franchise became a member of the newly-formed National Football League.

A quarterback who was the epitome of town football, being a home town boy, Mathys played for the Packers from 1922-26, an era whose quarterbacks played the position much differently.

Mathys played in the early years of the game and the franchise, leaving his mark in different ways. He had lifelong ties to the organization and assisted in the team and league’s growth in popularity through difficult times in American history, the 1920s through the 1950s.

He, along with Canadeo, could and should be seen as a trailblazer of professional football.

Let’s learn more about this guy …

The Green Bay Packers of the early 1920s. Courtesy of packershistory.net

Charles Mathys

John Maxymuk, the author of “Packers by the Numbers: Jersey Numbers and the Players Who Wore them,” tells us about the Canadeo and Mathys and their careers with the franchise:

Charles Mathys was emblematic of his team and his time. The Packers evolved from a local town team to join the American Professional Football Association in 1921.

Green Bay was expelled from the league at the end of the year for using college players, and when they rejoined the league under new ownership in 1922 the AFPA had become the NFL. In that same year, Mathys signed on with Green Bay.

He was a local boy like so many of the early Packers and had attended Green Bay’s West High School before starting his college career at nearby Ripon. He transferred to the University of Indiana where he was a star quarterback for the Hoosiers. After graduation in 1921, he joined the Hammond Pros of the AFPA and played against the Packers in a 14-7 loss in November.

Mathys, who only weighed between 150-165 pounds, quarterbacked the Packers for five years through 1926, before retiring and being replaced by Red Dunn.

In his Packers career, he ran for one touchdown, caught four touchdown passes, and threw 11, including a team-high seven in 1925. After his retirement, he remained in his home town for the rest of his life and served on the Packers Board of Directors for many years. He was elected to the Packers Hall of Fame in 1977 and died in 1983.

The Packers at the time ran a variation of the Notre Dame box offense where the quarterback stood about a yard behind the center and then shifted behind the right guard. Mathys would call signals; he often would receive the ball from a center snap and distribute it.

He was inducted into the Green Bay Packers Hall of Fame in 1977; He was inducted alongside Bart Starr.

One of the things he is most remembered for is being the quarterback on the first Packers team to ever beat the Chicago Bears (Sept. 27, 1925). Charlie threw a last-second touchdown pass to win the game 14-10.

Since 1950, there has been one player to wear #2 for the Green Bay Packers, Mason Crosby; Aaron Brooks was drafted by the Packers in 1999 and was distributed #2, but he played all of his career with the Saints.