Through the years there have been numerous standout performances on Thanksgiving Day — no-name Clint Longley's effort for Dallas in 1974, O.J. Simpson's 273-yard record day for Buffalo in 1976 — but none of those is more memorable than what the Chicago Cardinals' Ernie Nevers accomplished against the crosstown-rival Bears in 1929.

The golden-haired fullback, who cemented his football legend against Knute Rockne's Four Horsemen in the 1925 Rose Bowl, was the pride of a Cardinals team that struggled to a 6-6-1 record that season. His league-leading 85 points (11 games) came mostly from his 12 touchdowns — six of which came in that Thanksgiving game against George Halas' Bears.

That season was Nevers' second stint in pro football. During the 1926 NFL season, while with Duluth, Nevers was the featured spectacle of a 29-game barnstorming trip that took the team 17,000 miles during a 117-day journey (in one eight-day period the Eskimos played five games). Paid $15,000 and a percentage of the ticket sales, Nevers played all but 29 minutes for the Eskimos that season, some 1,740 minutes in all. After that he decided to try his arm in Major League Baseball with the St. Louis Browns, but it never took. By 1929 he was ready to rule the gridiron again.

The Bears entered the Thanksgiving contest riding a five-game losing streak, while Dewey Scanlon's Cardinals had won three of their last four after a horrible start. The rivalry between the two teams was growing in the Windy City, and up to this point in the young history of the NFL, the Bears had gotten the better half; in the three years prior to the 1929 season, the Cardinals had beaten the Bears just once in the teams' last seven meetings.
Thanksgiving Day 1929 would provide a much different result.

The Cardinals' backfield had its way with the Bears' defense all afternoon, but not without help. As Wilfrid Smith wrote in the Chicago Tribune, "… the Cardinal line was the foundation on which these ballcarriers built their successes. There was no question of its superiority."

Nevers' scoring runs of 20 and four yards gave the Cardinals a 13-0 first quarter lead; he added a six-yard run before the break.

The second half was more of the same, a pair of one-yard plunges for the Cardinals' outstanding fullback, capped by a 10-yard run in the fourth quarter. Nevers made 4-of-6 point-after attempts for a final of 40 points — a single-game pro football record to this day. Nevers had also accounted for all of his team's points in the win, which, in some respects, was nothing new; he had scored all 19 of the Cardinals' points in the previous Sunday's win over the Dayton Triangles.

The only Bears score of the day came on a 60-yard Walt Holmer pass to Garland Grange, the younger brother of Red Grange. Ironically, the first meeting between the two Chicago squads that season ended in a 0-0 tie.
Afterward, according to Smith's account of the game, the Cardinals fans cheered on Nevers, but more so for beating the Bears than for his record.

Wrote Smith, "Forty points plus nineteen points against Dayton last Sunday gave him fifty-nine in a row. Which is some kind of record, but the south side didn't care. For the Cardinals had defeated the Bears."

Not only is Nevers' point tally a record, but no other pro player has again scored six rushing touchdowns in a single game (Dub Jones and Gale Sayers each scored six, but through multiple facets of the game).

Even though Nevers is often credited for being one of the game's first true superstars, and one of its toughest ballcarriers, his career was brief, just 54 games over five seasons — all of them earning him a spot on the first team All-Pro squad. Nevers was inducted into both the College and Pro Football Halls of Fame, and in 2003 was one of four football pioneers featured on a U.S. Postage stamp. But it's the 40 points he scored against the Bears that has kept his name in the books, a record that probably will never be touched.