Caleb Williams has thrown eight touchdown passes this season, a total that has led some reporters, writers and Bears fans to ask a great question: what is the franchise record for touchdown passes through the first four weeks of the season?
To answer that question, many Bears media members will turn to Pro Football Reference (PFR) and its search tool Stathead, which offers this answer:
10 touchdowns — Jay Cutler, 2014
9 touchdowns — Sid Luckman, 1943; Jim McMahon, 1985
8 touchdowns — Eight seasons, including Williams
That nine-touchdown start for Luckman in 1943 was his record-setting season, a then franchise-record 28 touchdowns. Yet a curious thing happens if you check the Bears game page on PFR for Oct. 10, 1943: you see what seems to be a 29th Luckman touchdown pass.
The scoring log shows that in the 20-0 win over the crosstown Cardinals, Luckman threw two touchdowns: 40 yards to Bill Geyer and 21 yards to Connie Mack Berry.
In the box score though, Luckman is credited with only one touchdown pass. Same as on his 1943 gamelog. Though the newspaper reporting initially credited Luckman with two TDs, that was a snafu, quickly corrected, and for the rest of the season, the Geyer play did not count for Luckman, giving him an NFL-record 28, but not 29, touchdown passes. The 1944 Chicago Bears media guide showed the same: 28 for Luckman.
The source of the confusion — perhaps in the initial reporting in 1943 and definitely for me in 2025 — was the nature of the Geyer touchdown itself, a gimmick today that was a staple of football in the 1940s: the lateral.
The lateral, and the trickiness of 1940s NFL stats
The Geyer touchdown is listed on PFR as a 40-yard touchdown pass from Luckman, but the play began as a pass from Luckman to John Siegal. Siegal gained seven yards, and as described by the Tribune, pitched to Geyer as he was being tackled. Geyer then went 40 yards for the score:
While we still see players lateral while being tackled today, it’s rare compared to the 1940s, especially on offense. The lateral was a regular part of football back then; as NFL historian Timothy Brown details, teams designed double- or even triple-lateral plays.
With the heavy use of the lateral and the still burgeoning forward pass, the NFL’s early stat days included a “lateral pass” yardage category that was separate from regular passes. Here, for instance, is the yardage from the 1933 NFL championship game, in which the Bears scored the winning touchdown on a halfback pass turned hook-and-lateral, with the final ball carrier catching the lateral at the 19 and running it in for the touchdown.
“Yards gained on lateral passes” shows the Bears with 19:
Okay, back to Luckman.
If the Geyer play happened today, Luckman would be credited with a passing touchdown. Picture the famous Dolphins walkoff lateral play that beat the Patriots in 2018: Ryan Tannehill passed to Kenny Stills, who gained 14 yards and lateraled to DeVante Parker, who gained three yards and lateraled to Kenyan Drake, who ran 52 yards for the touchdown.
On that play, Tannehill got credit for everything that happened on the pass: the completion, all the yardage, and the touchdown. Stills got one reception for 14 yards; Parker got zero receptions for three yards; Drake got zero receptions for 52 yards and a touchdown.
But that was not how these plays were scored in 1943.
The question of whether Luckman should have been credited with the Geyer touchdown, and hence a 29th touchdown to tie him retroactively with Erik Kramer, was initially a question in 1943, too, though perhaps only accidentally. Sports fans who opened their Tribune the next day read that against the Cardinals, Luckman threw his 6th and 7th touchdown passes of the season. Luckman was now chasing Packers great Cecil Isbell’s single-season record of 24 touchdowns.
Later that week, however, the AP and UPI credited Luckman with just six on the year, removing the Geyer touchdown. For the rest of the season, as Luckman gunned for Isbell’s record, his count excluded the Geyer touchdown. He ended the year with a new NFL record of 28, instead of 29.
I wondered if perhaps that change was a mistake, and my outreach to a number of great NFL historians brought me to Eric Goska, a longtime historian who has worked with Packers and NFL statistics for more than 35 years. Goska collaborates with Packers team historian Cliff Christl, one of the best in the business, who called Goska “the authority on Packers stats, and how the league compiled such things.”
Over email, Goska explained to me how all of this worked.
“Lateral passes were a separate category that was finally (thankfully) eliminated after the 1949 season,” he wrote. “The lateral portion of the play was not scored as a passing or receiving TD and the lateral yardage was not included in the passer or receiver’s stats.”
Incredibly, when an offensive player scored off of a lateral, they were credited not with a receiving touchdown but a rushing touchdown. Here is Goska with the final breakdown:
“Back to the Luckman-to-Siegal-to-Geyer play in question. Under Lateral Passes on page 105 of the 1944 Record and Rules Manual, Siegal is credited with completing one of one laterals for 40 yards, and Geyer is credited with one lateral reception for 40 yards. In its 1943 TD log, PFR credits Geyer with three receiving touchdowns and one rushing touchdown. But the 1944 Record and Rules Manual (page 96) gets it right when it has Geyer with two rushing touchdowns and two receiving touchdowns. That 40-yard lateral from Siegal was counted as a rushing touchdown.”
In 1950, the NFL changed its stat-keeping, finally counting hook-and-lateral passes as a touchdown pass for the passer and a touchdown reception for the scorer. The NFL also eliminated the “lateral passes” category that year. Goska sent me the language used in the 1949 Record and Rules Manual, under “Scoring Rules” on page 138:
“Forward-lateral plays shall be scored as two distinct actions, crediting the forward passer and the forward pass receiver only up to the point where the lateral pass is made.”
That language was not included in the 1950 Record and Rules Manual.
“So it appears that,” Goska wrote, “according to the rules of the day, Luckman threw 28 touchdown passes in 1943.”
The challenge of “fixing” old stats
This whole story began in 2018, when I was writing about Luckman’s legendary 1943 season. In order to be able to write in that story how many touchdown passes Luckman had at any point in the season, I made a spreadsheet listing all of his touchdown passes, using his touchdown passes log from PFR. To my surprise there was, it seemed, a 29th touchdown pass.
By cross-checking it against his gamelog, and then original reporting, I identified the Geyer touchdown as the problem. I went hunting for an explanation.
That hunt brought me to everything I’ve written so far. But it also brought me to this:
These are two different descriptions of a 66-yard touchdown for Bears back Ray “Scooter” McLean, on Nov. 7, 1943. PFR credits it as one of Luckman’s 28 touchdown passes, and the Tribune called it “a pass in the flat.” But the Associated Press said Luckman “completed a lateral to Ray McLean,” while a third account, from the Green Bay Press-Gazette, said Luckman “threw a lateral pass to McLean on the right flank.”
The great NFL historian John Turney and I were sorting all of this out together, and we reached out to Chris Willis, archivist of NFL Films. Chris was able to find footage of the McLean touchdown, but fittingly, at the exact moment where we would see if Luckman’s pass was an overhead lateral or a forward pass, the footage skipped, making it impossible to tell.
This would have been a problem for anyone in that stadium, too; with no television and no visual replay system, a spectator’s perspective on whether an overhead pass from Luckman to McLean was a lateral or a forward pass would depend on where that person was sitting. Think of all of the replays of the Music City Miracle: from some angles, Frank Wycheck appeared to be throwing an illegal forward pass, while from other angles, he appeared to be throwing the ball backwards, or at least literally laterally.
Even with the help of cameras surrounding the action, the announcers that day weren’t 100% sure that Wycheck’s heave to Kevin Dyson was legal. So you can understand the challenge for anyone sitting in an NFL stadium in 1943, trying to see if a play was a lateral or a pass to the flat.
When the WCG crew raised the question of the missing records of Charlie O’Rourke, the legwork I did that led the Bears to correct their record book was extensive. Yet that was a fairly black-and-white case: Charlie O’Rourke existed, he threw 11 touchdown passes his rookie year, and he wasn’t in the record book. Once you identified him, making the case to include him was simple.
On the matter of whether Sid Luckman should have been credited with one more touchdown pass 82 years ago, if you look at that one, you have to look at basically all of them. There are simply too many plays, with too many questions, to definitively change a record book. For every Bill Geyer touchdown you might think you can add, there’s a Scooter McLean touchdown you might think you should remove.
And that’s only for 1943. Luckman played all but one year before the NFL made the scoring change around laterals.
So my birthday brother Erik Kramer retains solo ownership of his single-season franchise record 29 touchdown passes, and my mother’s birthday brother Sid Luckman remains in second place, tied with Jay Cutler from 2014. Cutty got off to a hot start in 2014 — 10 TDs in his first four games, 12 in his first five. Here’s hoping Caleb Williams leaves them all in the dust.
Jack M Silverstein is Chicago’s Sports Historian. His book, “WHY WE ROOT: Mad Obsessions of a Chicago Sports Fan,”is available now!
History is a team sport. Thank you to these invaluable NFL historians for pitching in on this piece, all of whom I am fortunate to know: Eric Goska, Timothy Brown, John Turney, Chris Willis, Ken Crippen, Joe Ziemba and Kevin Gallagher. Thank you to the great Cliff Christl for introducing me to Eric Goska. And thank you to Pro Football Reference, Stathead and Newspapers.com.
POST-SCRIPT: Bears touchdown records through five games
Passing touchdowns:
12 – Cutler, 2014
11 – Fields, 2023; Kramer, 1995; Luckman, 1947; Luckman, 1943; Trubisky, 2018
10 – Cutler, 2013; Cutler, 2009; Grossman, 2006; Miller, 2002; Wade, 1964; Blanda, 1954
9 – Bukich, 1965; Wade, 1963
Receiving touchdowns:
7 – Dikta, 1963
6 – McKinnon, 1985; Gault, 1983; Morris, 1964
5 – Six players, including Rome Odunze this year
Rushing touchdowns:
9 – Casares, 1956
7 – Anderson, 1989
6 – Jones, 2005; Galimore, 1958; Lujack, 1950; Famiglietti, 1942
Total touchdowns:
10 – Casares, 1956
9 – Galimore, 1958
8 – Anderson, 1989; Sayers, 1965
7 – Ditka, 1963
6 – Nine players, most recently Thomas Jones in 2005