Tag Archives: Hall of Famers

Stock market up, concussions down

On the day the NFL announced that concussions were down 25 percent from last season — and helmet-to-helmet or shoulder-to-helmet concussions down 50 percent from two years ago — I thought I’d share this headline from 1966 I just happened upon. It ran atop a column by Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times about Jim Taylor, the Packers’ Hall of Fame fullback.

Some of the highlights:

[Taylor] uses his head for a living. Which is to say he butts it into peoples’ affairs — like linebackers’. His head is like a crew-cut boulder and has been known to rearrange more internal organs than an ulcer clinic. . . .

Jim Taylor’s head was a major part of his arsenal.

“The Goat,” they called him on the old New York Giants, where Sam Huff did more dental work on Jim Taylor than a lifetime of dentists. Once, in Yankee Stadium, when the fans swarmed onto the field, a player is supposed to have hissed at Taylor, “Quick, over here, there’s a door!” and a teammate, baffled, protested, “There’s no door over there!” and the first fellow, gazing in satisfaction after the churning, head-down Taylor, replied, “Well, there soon will be!”

(If you want to read the whole column, click here.)

At any rate, assuming the latest figures are correct, the NFL must be making progress in this area. By that I mean: fewer goats.

Source: pro-football-reference.com

When SI’s Super Bowl prediction was only off by 52 points

Predicting the final score of the Super Bowl is an invitation to make a fool of yourself. Every year, though, media folk — and even more non-media folk — give it a shot, just for “fun.”

The greatest of all NFL title game predictions is the one John Steadman made in the Baltimore News-Post before the sudden-death classic between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants in 1958. Steadman thought long and hard about it, may even have availed himself of a palm reader, and somehow came up with 23-17 — right on the money.

(What’s overlooked about this story is that 23-17 was, at the time, a very unusual score. There had been only four 23-17 games in NFL history before the Sudden Death Game — the first, interestingly enough, being the Packers-Giants championship game in 1938.)

At the opposite end from Steadman’s is the pick Sports Illustrated’s Tex Maule made a decade later when the Colts met the New York Jets in Super Bowl III. This, too turned out to be a historic game, because the Jets, 17-point underdogs, upset the Colts, 16-7, to give the AFL its first win over the established NFL. Anyway, Maule, SI’s pro football writer, miscalculated by just a shade. He had the Colts winning, 43-0.

But, hey, don’t take my word for it. Here’s a story that ran in the Oakland Tribune the week of the game:

MIAMI — Among Super Bowl writers, it’s Baltimore Colts, 49-6, with a lot of coward’s abstentions.

There are a record 367 credentialed working pressmen here covering the [Super Bowl], but a poll finds only 49 picking the Colts and a slim six writers going for the New York Jets. . . . Tex Maule of Sports Illustrated showed his NFL affection with a 43-0 Baltimore pick.

The results of the unscientific poll were no great surprise. The Colts had suffered only one loss all season, to the Browns, and had avenged it in the NFL title game with a blowout 34-0 victory at Cleveland. The Jets, meanwhile, had gone 11-3 in a supposedly inferior league and had barely gotten past the Raiders in the championship game.

But 43-0? The scores of the first two Super Bowls had been 35-10 (Packers over Chiefs) and 33-14 (Packers over Raiders). How on earth did Maule come up with 43-0?

Well, to be blunt about it, Tex was an NFL loyalist whose attachment to the league sometimes clouded his vision. A writer like that would have a hard time functioning today. He’d be crucified on sports talk shows, burned at the stake on Twitter and have his face ripped off on Facebook. But the world was a much different place in January 1969.

Before Maule went to work for SI, you see, he’d been a publicist for not one but two NFL teams. He was an assistant with the Rams from 1949 to ’51 . . .

. . . and he was the head guy for the Dallas Texans in 1952 (after which they folded and the franchise moved to Baltimore).

By the way, did you notice the name above Maule’s in the Rams directory? None other than Tex Schramm, who helped turn the Cowboys into “America’s Team” in the ’60s and ’70s. Frank Finch of the Los Angeles Times thought the Schramm-Maule duo was so hysterical that he’d go around telling people the Rams were the only club in the league with co-Texes.

(It was all so cozy back then. Consider: When Schramm left his sportswriting job at the Austin American in the late ’40s to work for the Rams, it was Maule who replaced him. A couple of years later, Schramm needed help in the PR department and, you guessed it, brought Maule out to L.A. Then Maule returned to Texas to take the job with the Texans, and who did Schramm fill the position with? University of San Francisco SID — and future NFL commissioner — Pete Rozelle.)

But returning to Maule . . . his love for the NFL knew few bounds. And loving the NFL meant looking down on the scrappy, rival league that had sprung up to challenge it in the ’60s. In the issue of SI that was published before the Super Bowl, Tex laid out his worldview:

In evaluations of the two teams, most experts, for unfathomable reasons, have conceded the Jets an edge at quarterback. Both [the Jets’ Joe] Namath and [the Colts’ Earl] Morrall were selected Most Valuable in their leagues, but Namath certainly can claim no clear-cut superiority over Morrall. . . .

As usual, the AFL players base part of their hopes for victory on the rather tenuous claim that since football is a game of emotion, they will outemotion the NFL. But Las Vegas bookmakers, a group not known for emotional display, figure the Colts to be 17 points better than the Jets, which is probably conservative. . . .

Because the AFL had to compete with the NFL for the best of the college seniors during the first five years of its existence a kind of natural selection worked against the new league’s acquisition of players with the self-confidence and desire to excel against the best. . . . The rest of the AFL players in those formative years came over from the NFL. They were mostly athletes who preferred to switch rather than fight for their positions in the NFL.

This situation, of course, no longer applies. With the common draft of the last two years, the AFL is getting its share of the truly competitive, gung-ho athletes and it will soon achieve parity with the NFL. But that parity has not yet been reached, and the Colts should demonstrate this with an authority that may shock Jets fans.

To summarize: In the pre-Super Bowl years, the AFL was essentially populated by gutless losers who either signed with the league out of college because they “lacked the self-confidence and desire to excel against the best” or fled the NFL because the competition was too tough. Maule couldn’t even look at the two quarterbacks — Namath, a future Hall of Famer with a cannon arm, and Morrall, a 34-year-old journeyman who was 30-32-2 as a starter going into that season — and admit, yeah, the Jets might have the advantage there.

And SI actually printed this propaganda. Amazing, huh?

You already know how it turned out. Morrall did the “unfathomable,” throwing three interceptions and getting badly outplayed by Namath. Indeed, the Colts might have been shut out if aging, ailing Johnny Unitas hadn’t came off the bench to drive them to a fourth-quarter touchdown.

Maule’s post-game piece was more complimentary of Namath and the Jets, but you could picture him typing the words with clenched teeth. “Broadway Joe is the folk hero of the new generation,” he began. “He is long hair, a Fu Manchu mustache worth $10,000 to shave off, swinging nights in the live spots of the big city, the dream lover of the stewardi — all that spells insouciant youth in the Jet Age.”

Toward the end there was this: “So the era of John Unitas ended and the day of Broadway Joe and the mod quarterback began. John is crew cut and quiet and Joe has long hair and a big mouth, but haircuts and gab obviously have nothing to do with the efficiency of quarterbacks.”

It was as if, in Tex’s eyes, the final scoreboard read: Hippies 43, Establishment 0.

In the days before diplomacy

Before players became so well behaved — in terms of their public pronouncements, I mean — Super Bowl Week was a lot more entertaining. I was reminded of this the other day when I came across a story that ran after the 1968 AFL title game between the Jets and Raiders.

Joe Namath’s team rallied to win the game, 27-23 – then went off to slay the NFL champion Colts, the biggest upset in pro football history. The visiting Raiders, who thought they were the better club (and may well have been), could only go home and stew for seven months.

In the walk-up to the Super Bowl, Jets cornerback Johnny Sample was doing what he did best: mouthing off. Sample was one of the early trash talkers — not quite as quotable, perhaps, as Fred “The Hammer” Williamson, but heck, Fred was practically Oscar Wilde.

One day Johnny was holding forth about the cornerback position — and about the notebook he kept that had detailed information on every man he covered. The Raiders’ Fred Biletnikoff, a future Hall of Famer, was just “an average receiver,” he’d decided. “You can’t compare him to the great receivers.”

This was a strange statement coming from Sample. Biletnikoff, after all, had torn him up in the AFL title game, catching seven passes for 190 yards and a touchdown. (In fact, Raiders owner Al Davis told The Boston Globe’s Will McDonough, “Fred has eaten him up the last three times he has played against him, and every time he does, Sample says he’s had a cold.”)

An enterprising reporter for the Oakland Tribune called Biletnikoff to get his reaction to Sample’s remarks. Fred was in a Los Angeles hospital at the time recovering from a collarbone injury that Johnny, apparently, had something to do with.

“The way I feel about it,” he said, “[Sample] should write a new book. He was really trying to shake me up in the first quarter, slapping at me and trying to talk me out of my game.

“When I dropped one on the 1-yard line, he said, ‘That’s the way it’s going to be today.’ But after I started beating him he didn’t say much for the rest of the game. I figure the game went 25 percent his way, 75 percent my way.”

I’m saving the best for last. Sample was suggesting at the Super Bowl that he might retire after the game — and it did, indeed, turn out to be his last season. How did Biletnikoff feel about that?

“I hope he doesn’t,” Fred said. “I’d like to play 14 games a season against him. That way I’d know my family is secure for a long time.”

Anyway, that’s what happened one day before Super Bowl III. Anybody say anything interesting today?

Source: pro-football-reference.com

The Jets’ Johnny Sample (24) and the Colts’ Tom Matte (41) go facemask-to-facemask in Super Bowl III.

A hit to remember at the ’65 Pro Bowl

It’s been ages since a Pro Bowl could be called memorable. These days, “perfunctory” is the word that usually comes to mind (with “unwatchable” a close second).

The game had a bit more of an edge to it, though, in the ’50s and ’60s. The financial difference between winning and losing was more meaningful, salaries being what they were, and there was a rivalry between the conferences, Eastern and Western, that was a lot like baseball’s All-Star Game — only nastier, because this was, after all, football.

The Pro Bowl 50 years ago certainly caused a stir — the likes of which hasn’t been seen since and may never be again. In the third quarter, Browns quarterback Frank Ryan suffered a dislocated shoulder when he was slammed to the ground by Colts defensive end Gino Marchetti, and Ryan claimed it was retaliation for something that had happened in the NFL title game two weeks earlier.

The backstory: With 26 seconds left in the championship game — and Cleveland leading favored Baltimore 27-0 — Browns fans stormed the field and took down the goal posts. The officials were all for calling it a day at that point, and so were the badly beaten Colts. But Ryan wouldn’t go along. Cleveland had the ball at the Baltimore 16, and he wanted to score one more touchdown.

Naturally, this didn’t set well with Marchetti and his mates. When the Pro Bowl rolled around, Gino was still steaming about it — and was quoted in various newspapers as saying he wanted “one more shot” at Ryan.

In the second half he got it. On one play, the East’s pass protection completely broke down and the defensive line came pouring through. According to one account, “Ryan dropped back to pass, but before he could get the ball away [Rams tackle Merlin] Olsen grabbed him around the waist. Marchetti, blocked to the outside, swung in from behind and twisted Ryan to the turf with the same motion used to pop a cork out of a champagne bottle.” Here’s the best photo I’ve come across of the hit:

Afterward, Ryan, somewhat groggy, shrugged it off as Just Football. Marchetti, meanwhile, seemed quite proud of the play. “Yes, sir, I was in on the tackle,” he said. “And I’d say it was a pretty good tackle.”

In the days that followed, though, Ryan was more talkative. “I don’t think the Colts had any reason to get upset” when he wanted to score again at the end of the title game, he said. “After all, they didn’t hold back in their 52-0 rout of the Chicago Bears earlier in the season. But no one heard the Bears complaining.

“Sure I wanted to call one [more] play. The object of the game is to score points. We’ve got a slot end named Johnny Brewer. He’s a fine player, but he hasn’t gotten much acclaim. I wanted to give him the opportunity to score in the championship game, but I guess the Colts interpreted it as an attempt to belittle or embarrass them.

“Marchetti . . . is supposed to be a good ballplayer. He didn’t get within breathing distance of me in the championship game. Maybe that had something to do with the way he felt.”

Gino chalked it up as “just one of those things,” adding: “I have never taken a cheap shot at anyone. More from The Associated Press: “Marchetti admitted that he had said before the game he would like to get a shot at Ryan because of the Browns’ 27-to-0 whipping of the Colts in the championship game. But he said this was just a natural feeling after such a defeat and was not meant to imply he wanted to deliberately rough Ryan.”

Ryan had another Pro Bowl season the next year, leading the Browns back to the title game (which they lost to the Packers). So clearly there were no lingering effects from The Hit. As for Marchetti, he retired after the ’65 Pro Bowl and never crossed paths with Ryan again (though he did unretire to play four games two years later).

Still, the Pro Bowl made for great copy for a few days in January 1965. Imagine that.

Sammy Baugh threw deflated footballs

Just dug out the transcript of an interview I did with Redskins Hall of Famer Sammy Baugh back in the ’90s. I remembered him talking at some point about manipulating the air pressure in footballs — which happens, of course, to be one of the topics du jour after Sunday’s AFC title game in New England.

We got off on this tangent when I asked Baugh about an old tale: That when the Steelers were playing at home, they’d use the fat, 1920s footballs instead of the slimmer, modern ones to make it harder for opponents to throw against them. (Those early Pittsburgh teams, you see, never placed much emphasis on the pass — indeed, they stuck with the single wing through the ’51 season — so the size of the ball didn’t really matter to them.)

“The home team supplied the balls back then,” Baugh told me, “and if they didn’t have a good passer you wouldn’t get that slim ball, you’d get the big fat one. The Steelers would do that. I think Goldsmith used to make a ball with 10 laces instead of eight, and it was just fatter than everything. I don’t blame ’em. If I didn’t have a good passer on the team, I’d put that damn fat ball out there, too. You could throw it, but it was a different kind of ball.”

Sammy also volunteered this information, which fits in nicely with Deflate-gate:

“Kelly [Harry “Kelly” Miller], our clubhouse guy, would put the air in the balls we were going to use in the game. One day I asked him, ‘Kelly, how much air do you put in those damn balls?’ He said, ‘Thirteen pounds.’ I said, ‘Put in 11 today.’ So he did. And from then on, every time we played at home, we played with an 11-pound ball instead of 13. I liked the feel of it better. I knew what 13 felt like, and I had played with an 11-pound ball some in college, and it felt better to me.”

This would be fine except that the ball, according to the rules then and now, is supposed to be inflated with between 12.5 and 13.5 pounds of air. Here are the relevant paragraphs from the 1942 Record and Roster Manual:

(I included the supplemental notes for your amusement, specifically the one about the white ball for night games.)

So, by his own admission, Sammy Baugh, one of the greatest passers in pro football history, played with an illegal ball whenever the Redskins were home, a ball he “liked the feel of” better and presumably made him more effective. I’m guessing this more than made up for his annual trips to Pittsburgh, where he’d have to throw that dang Goldsmith ball.

Just thought I’d mention this while the NFL is deciding what, if anything, to do about the Patriots’ situation. Maybe the Pats did deflate the balls, but they certainly aren’t the first to come up with the idea.

Redskins great Sammy Baugh looks to pass -- presumably with a deflated 11-pound ball (since this game was at Griffith Stadium).

Redskins great Sammy Baugh looks to pass — presumably with a deflated 11-pound ball. (This was a home game.)

The NFL’s all-time worst rules

Now it’s the Process Rule that has NFL fans in Mob Mode. Not so long ago it was the Tuck Rule, which was burned at the stake — before a cheering crowd — in 2013.

I won’t attempt to explain the Process Rule, or the league’s rationale for it, because, well, who can understand it? It’s what you’d get if Jibberish had a one-night stand with Claptrap. (I considered Mumbo Jumbo as the second partner, but I thought it would be funnier if “clap” were part of the equation.)

Naturally, the NFL says it correctly enforced this misbegotten rule on the pass to Dez Bryant late in the Packers-Cowboys game. I say: Whatever floats your boat, Roger. I also say — in a futile attempt to calm the masses — there have been far, far worse rules in pro football than the Process Rule (or even the Tuck Rule, which Mike Shanahan called “the worst rule in the history of the game”).

The NFL, after all, has had some real doozies over the decades, especially in the early years. Here, for your entertainment, are 5 Rules That Were Even More Ridiculous Than The Process Rule (for my money, at least):

● If a pass into the end zone — on any down — falls incomplete, it’s a touchback.

There would have been a lot more pressure on Santonio Holmes in the '20s.

If this pass had been incomplete in the ’20s . . .

In the ’20s, before pro football’s founding fathers opened up the game, there were a number of rules that discriminated against passing. This was probably the most egregious. Imagine if Santonio Holmes had dropped that second-and-6 throw in the back-right corner in the last minute of Super Bowl 43. Under the old rule, the Steelers would have lost possession and the Cardinals would have walked away with the Lombardi Trophy.

● The ball carrier can get up after being after being knocked to the ground and try to gain additional yardage as long as his forward progress hasn’t been stopped.

The he-man NFL was trying to distinguish itself from the colleges with this rule, and occasionally a ball carrier would pick himself up and scramble for more yards. But the rule also fostered late hitting, piling on and other forms of carnage. The league finally got rid of it after the Bears brutalized Hugh McElhenny, the 49ers’ Hall of Fame running back, in 1954 and caused him to miss the second half of the season.

● The defense can hit the quarterback until the play is over, even if he’s gotten rid of the ball.

It wasn’t until 1938 that there was a roughing-the-passer penalty. Sammy Baugh: “Coaches told their players, ‘When the passer throws the ball, you put his ass on the ground.’ If you have to

One of the 1938 rule changes.

chase him for 20 yards, put him on the ground.’ Hell, they’d chase me back 25 yards or so. I’d complete a short pass, and the receiver would be running all the way downfield, 75 yards away from me, and I’d still be fighting [defenders] off. It looked so damn silly.”

● If the ball carrier runs out of bounds — or is deposited there by the defense — the ball will be spotted one yard from the sideline.

Before hashmarks were added in 1933, the ball was spotted where the previous play ended. Needless to say, this could put the offense in a real bind. It usually had to waste a down to move the ball back to the middle of the field so it would have more room to operate.

● A player who leaves the game can’t come back in until the next quarter.

Welcome to single-platoon football. During the war years, though, when manpower was scarce, the NFL began to experiment with unlimited substitution. The league permanently adopted it in 1949, paving the way for the highly specialized game we enjoy today.

● Dishonorable mention: A team taking an intentional safety retains possession of the ball.

Talk about a lousy rule. In 1925 the Giants were leading the Providence Steam Roller 13-10 with time running out when they decided to hand Providence two points rather than punt from their end zone. Who can blame them? According to the rule in those days, they didn’t have to free kick from the 20-yard line and sweat out the final seconds. Instead, they were given a new set of downs at their 30. They proceeded to run three more plays, kill the clock and lock up a 13-12 win.

I could go on, but you get the idea. As Jim Mora (the Elder) would put it: Process Rule? You kiddin’ me? Process Rule? There have been much more terrible rules than that.

This pass to the Cowboys’ Dez Bryant was ruled incomplete because . . . oh, forget it.

One way to keep your players warm

The game time forecast for Foxborough on Saturday is a balmy 17 degrees with a 7 mph wind. In Green Bay the next day, we’re looking at snow, 5 degrees and an 18 mph wind. But the games will go on, of course, because the games always go on, barring a natural disaster or some national tragedy. If football is a test of manhood, then football in January — in the northern climes, at least — is the ultimate Final Jeopardy.

While the Patriots, Ravens, Packers and Cowboys are busy stocking up on thermal wear, let me tell you about the time an NFL coach dealt with frigid weather in a most unusual way: by keeping his subs in the heated locker room instead of having them freeze their butts off on the sideline.

Actually, it wasn’t just any old NFL coach. It was Green Bay Hall of Famer Curly Lambeau. That’s right, the franchise that gave us the Ice Bowl also gave us — what should we call this, the Empty Bench Play?

The date was Dec. 6, 1942, a day shy of the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor. The site was State Fair Park in Milwaukee, where the Packers played some of their home games in those days. Jack Sell of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette described the setting thusly:

“Only 5,183 fans braved sub-freezing temperatures to witness what was probably the final league game of pro football for the duration. Snow was swept from the grid in midweek but was piled high near the sidelines and often ball carriers were tossed into it. Most of the players wore basketball shoes.”

At kickoff, the temperature was around 10 degrees, and Lambeau, always looking for an edge, decided if his players weren’t on the field, moving around, they were better off indoors. So he stationed backfield coach Eddie Kotal in the dressing room and communicated with him by phone. Whenever Curly needed a replacement he’d call Kotal, and Eddie would send one running out — with feeling in all four of his extremities. That was better that you could say for the Steelers reserves, who huddled under blankets to try to keep warm.

“The move occasioned a lot of surprise on the part of the fans, who couldn’t figure out, at the start of the game, where the substitutes were,” Don Hickok of the Green Bay Press-Gazette reported. You have to understand, though: The Packers had never played a home game in December before — and wouldn’t play another for almost a decade. Back then, they scheduled their Green Bay/Milwaukee games for the first part of the season, when the weather was more conducive to drawing a decent crowd, and spent the latter part of the season on the road. In 1929, the year they won their first title, they played their first five at home and their last eight away.

Toward the end of the game, won by the Packers, 24-21, Hickok left the press box and went down to the Green Bay locker room to survey the scene. His account:

Kotal sat on a table with his ear against the telephone . . ., his other ear cocked toward the radio [and the play-by-play of WTMJ’s Russ Winnie]. The players were silent except when one of them missed [the] description of the play and asked what it was.

[Quarterback] Cecil Isbell came in with about three minutes to play and lifted his pant-legs to display two badly skinned knees, the result of his smashing [tackle] of [Pittsburgh’s] Bill Dudley after a pass interception down on the Packer[s] 20-yard line, which saved a touchdown. . . . The effort cost the Packer[s] pitcher several square inches of skin when he skidded along the frozen ground on his knees. So far as the effect on the players was concerned, the field might as well have been paved.

There was some concern, as Sell mentioned, that the NFL might shut down after the season because of a manpower shortage. So many able-bodied men were already in the military, and more were on the way. And, indeed, the league had to get creative to keep going in 1943. The Rams, after all, ceased operations that year and dispersed their players — on a lend-lease basis — to other clubs. The Steelers and Eagles, meanwhile, merged, creating a two-headed “Steagles” monster that finished a game out of first place in the East.

As for Curly Lambeau, he went right on thinking. In October of ’43 he coached a game against the Lions not from the sideline but from the press box — just to satisfy his curiosity. “You can see so much more here,” he said afterward. “I’m going to do it again.”

So it was in the 1940s, when pro football was being invented. Coaches would try just about anything.

Player safety in the 1960s

My Internet wanderings recently led me, as they often do, to an unexpected place: a classic 1967 photo of Chiefs cornerback Fred “The Hammer” Williamson. It shows Williamson, famous for bludgeoning receivers with a karate chop to the head, wearing a cast on his feared right forearm — “THE HAMMER” written in big block letters across it. He’d broken the arm in an exhibition game two weeks earlier against the Jets. The New York Times described the collision this way:

In the first quarter [Jets quarterback] Joe Namath completed a 15-yard pass to Don Maynard, who was covered by Fred Williamson. The talkative Williamson tackled Maynard, his right elbow crashing into Maynard’s spine near the neck. Williamson’s right arm was broken on the play. Maynard suffered a slight concussion and was sent to University Hospital [in Birmingham, Ala., where the game was played] for observation.

Williamson’s “Hammer” — “having great velocity and delivered perpendicular to the earth’s latitude,” as he liked to say — usually won these battles. The year before, he’d fractured the cheekbone of the Dolphins’ Howard Twilley. Anyway, here’s the photo of Fred’s arm encased in plaster:

Pro football back then was still fairly cavalier about shots to the cranium. The head slap had become a popular — and legal — weapon of defensive linemen, and high hitting like Williamson’s tended to be tolerated as long as the victim wasn’t decapitated. It was a far cry from the concussion-conscious times we now live in. In the ’60s there was no such thing as “targeting” a “defenseless” player. That was just, well, football.

It wasn’t until 1962 that the NFL made it illegal to grab the ball carrier’s facemask. (Until then, he was the only one exempted from the rule — for some strange reason.) In high school and college ball, grabbing anybody’s face mask had been a personal foul since 1957.

By then, David M. Nelson writes in Anatomy of a Game, “large numbers of players were wearing face guards, and opponents were grasping them legally and putting the wearer at a disadvantage. Citing the injury possibility with grasping and holding, the Rules Committee passed the first 15-yard face mask penalty.”

That happened this very week in 58 years ago (which is why I wanted to post about it). Talk about a red-letter day in football safety. The NFL was still a ways away, though, from giving the ball carrier the same protection. When it finally did, Commissioner Pete Rozelle made some interesting comments.

“It has been against the rule to grab face masks in blocking,” he said, “but you could grab the mask of a ball carrier. But the ball carrier actually is the most defenseless of all, and this new rule could prevent possible serious injury.”

More from Rozelle: “We didn’t have any serious trouble with this in league play. Actually, most of our injuries are of the knee or leg type. However, I did see one ball carrier grabbed by his mask and thrown several yards. It scared me a little.”

As well it might.

(I love this headline that ran in a newspaper the day after the rule was passed — specifically the “for ’62” part. Did people actually think the league might change its mind about rule and repeal it?)

It took defensive players — some of them, at least — a while to adjust to the revised rule, as this 1964 photo shows. That’s Lions’ end Sam Williams trying to yank down Jim Taylor, the Packers’ Hall of Fame fullback:

Just thought, with such a (needed) emphasis on player safety these days, it was a good time to revisit Fred “The Hammer” Williamson and celebrate the 1957 passing of the face mask rule — even if it took the NFL a little longer to wise up.

The Godfather I and II of pro football

Many think the 1958 title game, the overtime thriller between the Colts and Giants, is the greatest game in NFL history. I’ve never quite bought into it. If you’re going to convince me, you need to show me something measurable, not just say, “Well, Pete Rozelle always said . . . .” Put it this way: The league had bigger attendance increases after the ’56 (11.2 percent) and ’57 (6.0) championship games than it did after the ’58 game (4.5). How is that possible – I mean, if it really is the game that had the greatest impact? (It certainly wasn’t the greatest game from an artistic standpoint. There were eight fumbles that afternoon and seven turnovers.)

For me, the Greatest Game discussion actually begins with two games: the 1966 and ’67 title games between the Packers and Cowboys (who, conveniently for this post, meet in the playoffs Sunday in Green Bay for the first time since the famed Ice Bowl). I look at those ’66 and ’67 classics as a matched set, the NFL equivalent of Godfather I and Godfather II.

Packers QB Bart Starr (15) scores for winning TD in the Ice Bowl.

Packers QB Bart Starr (15) scores the winning TD in the Ice Bowl.

For drama, you had both games ending on the goal line — the Packers denying the Cowboys in ’66 to hang on, 34-27, then punching it across in ’67 to pull out a 21-17 win. For star power, you had two Hall of Fame coaches, Green Bay’s Vince Lombardi and Dallas’ Tom Landry, plus 12 Hall of Fame players (though Packers fullback Jim Taylor played in only the first of the two games).

Beyond that, you had — in the Ice Bowl, at least — the granddaddy of all matchups: Man vs. Nature. It wasn’t just cold that day at Lambeau Field, it was inhumanly cold, with the wind chill plunging to minus 50 (depending on your source). And this, mind you, was before all the super-duper, will-keep-you-warm-on-Mars thermal wear they use now.

The games also gave you a glimpse of the more racially diverse NFL of the Future. Both rosters were well-stocked in ’67 not just with black starters (15 in all) but with black stars — defensive end Willie Davis, linebacker Dave Robinson, cornerback Herb Adderley, free safety Willie Wood and running back-return man Travis Williams for the Packers and wide receiver Bob Hayes, running back Don Perkins, cornerback Cornell Green and free safety Mel Renfro for the Cowboys. Most are in Canton. (And I’m not so sure Perkins doesn’t belong, too. He was No. 5 on the NFL’s all-time rushing list when he retired — at 30 — after the ’68 season.)

What’s criminal is that football fans can’t just sit down and watch these games — in their entirety — and judge for themselves how great they were. The league and TV networks really dropped the ball on this one. Does a tape of either game still exist? If so, I haven’t seen (or heard of) it.

Instead, we have often-shown clips of Robinson pressuring the Cowboys’ Don Meredith into a game-ending interception in ’66 (and Landry’s subsequent grimace) and Starr squeezing over from the Dallas 1 in ’67 — assorted bits and pieces that don’t come close to adding up to The Whole.

Clemenza gives Michael some cooking pointers.

Clemenza gives Michael Corleone some cooking pointers.

Imagine having to watch The Godfather like that — just a few memorable scenes rather than the whole glorious epic. (No Clemenza, for instance, showing Michael how to cook meatballs and sausages in tomato gravy.) Think it would alter the viewing experience?

Anyway, that’s my spiel on the ’66 and ’67 NFL title games, the Godfather I and Godfather II of pro football history. We may never see two better title games back to back, never mind between the same teams. (Compare them to the consecutive Super Bowl duds between the Cowboys and Bills or the mostly forgettable string of Lions-Browns championship games in the ’50s.)

It was the beginning of the Super Bowl era, and the Packers and Cowboys set the bar incredibly high. If you want to read more on the subject, here’s a link to Bob O’Donnell’s piece about Starr’s sneak, taken from our 1990 book, The Pro Football Chronicle. It’s one of the best things Bob ever did, and that’s saying a lot.

Marvin Lewis and the perils of January

The Bengals have made the playoffs in six of Marvin Lewis 12 seasons. You’d think congratulations would be in order — first for surviving a dozen years in any coaching job, and second for steering his team to the postseason so often. But Lewis’ 0-6 record in the playoffs has folks wondering, rightfully, whether he’ll be working in Cincinnati much longer. This is, after all, the Not For Long League. It’s not enough to just win, baby. You have to keep on winning, baby, into January and beyond.

Not that he’ll take any comfort in this, but Lewis is hardly the first coach to trip over that final hurdle. Heck, there are guys in the Hall of Fame who tripped over that final hurdle — and several others who rank high on the all-time victories list. Indeed, if there were a Misery Index for coaches, it might look something like this:

100-WIN COACHES WHO HAD A LOSING RECORD IN THE PLAYOFFS

Span	Coach (Titles)	Teams	Regular Season	Playoffs
1986-01	Jim Mora	Saints, Colts	125-106-0, .541	0-6, .000
2003-14	Marvin Lewis	Bengals	100-90-2, .526	0-6, .000
1955-74	Sid Gillman (1)	Rams, Chargers, Oilers	122-99-7, .550	1-5, .167
1931-53	Steve Owen (2)	Giants	151-100-17, .595	2-8, .200
1966-77	George Allen	Rams, Redskins	116-47-5, .705	2-7, .222
1984-06	Marty Schottenheimer	Browns, Chiefs, 2 others	200-116-1, .613	5-13, .278
1973-86	Don Coryell	Cardinals, Chargers	111-83-1, .572	3-6, .333
1992-06	Dennis Green	Vikings, Cardinals	113-94-0, .546	4-8, .333
1973-94	Chuck Knox	Rams, Bills, Seahawks	186-147-1, 558	7-11, .389
1967-85	Bud Grant	Vikings	158-96-5, .620	10-12, .455
1994-14	Jeff Fisher	Oilers/Titans, Rams	162-147-1, 524	5-6, .455
1996-08	Tony Dungy (1)	Bucs, Colts	139-69-0, .688	10-12, .455

(Note: If you want to be technical about it, Grant won the NFL championship in 1969, then lost the Super Bowl to the AFL’s Chiefs. Also: Schottenheimer’s other teams were the Redskins and Chargers.)

That’s 12 coaches with 100 regular-season victories who have lost more playoff games than they’ve won. Four are in Canton (Gillman, Owen, Allen and Grant) and another has been a finalist (Coryell) and may eventually get elected. Clearly, then, a poor postseason record doesn’t have to be a reputation-killer for a coach. (And yes, Gillman’s and Owen’s situations are much different from the others’. All but one of their playoff games was a title game — back when that was the extent of pro football’s postseason.)

The biggest problem for Lewis, obviously, is the goose egg. Aside from Mora, everybody else in the group had at least one notable postseason. Owen, Gillman (AFL) and Dungy won titles; Grant, Allen and Fisher reached the Super Bowl; and Schottenheimer (three times), Coryell (twice), Green (twice) and Knox (four) all made multiple trips to the conference championship game.

As for Lewis and Mora, well, Jim probably said it best:

Source: pro-football-reference.com

PRO FOOTBALL DALY

The whole 100 yards — and sometimes the end zones, too.

Tag Archives: Hall of Famers

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Player safety in the 1960s

The Godfather I and II of pro football

Marvin Lewis and the perils of January

100-WIN COACHES WHO HAD A LOSING RECORD IN THE PLAYOFFS