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                                             Pro Football HOF Super Bowl III Display

The Games That Changed The Game is the title of a book written by Ron Jaworski, chronicling games over the years in which creative, innovative coaches like Sid Gillman and Bill Walsh introduced wrinkles that changed the way the game was played. I haven’t read the book so I don’t know which specific games Jaworski mentions, but without a doubt Super Bowl III was a game that definitely changed the landscape of the entire sport. The third NFL-AFL World Championship game, which was the first to actually be called the “Super Bowl”, didn’t have any amazing strategic developments that drastically changed the way the sport was played, although the methodical way Joe Namath and the New York Jets’ offense attacked the vaunted Baltimore Colts’ defense was pretty amazing. Most sports fans know the general storyline of the game. The Jets, representing the young, upstart American Football League, entered the game against the Colts as 18-20 point underdogs. The NFL’s Green Bay Packers had won the first 2 title games between the leagues, dispatching Kansas City and Oakland in games that were mostly one-sided. In this matchup, the Colts were considered a juggernaut, coached by young genius Don Shula, with an overpowering defense, generally thought to be even better than Vince Lombardi’s Packer teams. At the same time, the Jets were a long shot to even get through the playoffs in their own league, and even though they advanced to the Super Bowl, were not considered the overall best team in the AFL. According to all the football experts at the time, this game was going to be a monumental blowout. Shockingly, at a pre-game event at the Miami Touchdown Club (the game was played at the Orange Bowl), Namath, in response to a heckling Colt supporter, boldly proclaimed,”We’re gonna win the game. I guarantee it.” He then went out and backed up his words, engineering a conservative, ball-control game plan that resulted in a 16-7 win for the Jets, and for the entire AFL. Namath, in the 1968 regular season leading up to this game, didn’t have a spectacular year, throwing only 15 touchdown passes compared to 17 interceptions, with only a 49% completion percentage. Also, he didn’t have an outstanding statistical passing day in the Super Bowl. He mostly did what modern day coaches would call “manage the game”, beating the Colts’ blitzing defense with quick, short passes to his backs and tight end to keep drives alive. The Jets scored only one touchdown, on a short run by Matt Snell, and amazingly, Namath didn’t complete a pass in the fourth quarter of the game.

At the time of the game, nobody, except for the Jets themselves, believed the mighty Colts could lose. After they blew out the Cleveland Browns 34-0 in the NFL championship game, they were being touted as “the greatest team in pro football history”.  Looking back now, it was a classic case of a team being over-hyped. The Colts’ roster was actually full of aging players near the end of their careers – like Earl Morrall, Tom Matte, Jimmy Orr, Bobby Boyd and Lou Michaels. Their 34-0 thrashing of the Browns was revenge for the 27-0 pasting the Browns had put on the Colts in the 1964 title game, but that was misleading. By 1968, Jim Brown had moved onto an acting career, and QB Frank Ryan had been replaced by journeyman Bill Nelsen. The Browns were in the beginning stages of a downward fall, and that hammering by the Colts in the title game made the Colts look more dominating than they really were. The Colts’ defense overwhelmed the NFL that year using a blitzing zone scheme that confused the rest of the teams in the league. What was overlooked prior to the Super Bowl was the fact that the Jets faced a lot of zone defenses in the AFL, and were well-equipped and confident that they could beat the Colts’ defense. The result of the game was a shocking Jets’ victory that changed the perception of the AFL as a second tier league. In the early 1960s some NFL owners laughed them off as a “Mickey Mouse” league, but this game established the AFL as equals to the older league, and a year later the Kansas City Chiefs added an exclamation point by upsetting the heavily favored Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl IV. Again, the pundits overlooked the fact that the Vikings were led by an old recycled QB from the Canadian League, Joe Kapp, and had a roster peppered with aging players like Mick Tinglehoff, Karl Kassulke, Roy Winston and Bill Brown. At the same time, the Chiefs were led by dynamic young players like Mike Garrett, Otis Taylor, Willie Lanier and Buck Buchanan. The problem was the AFL was very much underpublicized at the time compared to the older NFL. That changed completely going into the 1970s.

                                                                 Dallas LB Chuck Howley

Super Bowl V may have been the strangest of all of the 44 NFL title games played since the Super Bowl began. It was played following the 1970 season, the first year the NFL and AFL merged into one league with 2 conferences, after Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Baltimore were transferred from the old NFL into the American Conference of the new NFL. After the AFL had established itself as the NFL’s equal with 2 consecutive stunning Super Bowl wins, by the Jets and Chiefs, suddenly the game wound up with 2 old NFL teams playing each other, which took some of the competitiveness out of the game which existed when the young AFL was trying to make a name for itself in earlier years. Both teams entered this game with issues – the Cowboys had gained a reputation for being a good team that “couldn’t win the big one” after failing in the playoffs every year since the early ’60s. The Colts returned to the game where they had suffered the “embarrassment” of being upset by the upstart AFL Jets 2 years earlier, only this time were representing that upstart league as AFC champions. Nonetheless, both teams entered the contest needing to win badly to erase a losing stigma, despite being successful, winning franchises.

The game was an artistic mess, and it looked as if neither team was going to be able to erase that losing stigma, or if either was even capable. The game, which became known as the “Blunder Bowl”, featured 11 combined turnovers, including 7 by the winning team (a record that still stands today), 14 total penalties and a boatload of punts. The Cowboys finished with 113 passing yards, the Colts had 69 yards rushing. All 3 quarterbacks who played in the game, John Unitas and Earl Morrall for Baltimore and Craig Morton for Dallas, completed less than 50% of their pass attempts. A rookie kicker, Jim O’Brien, won the game by kicking a field goal with 5 seconds left, but only after Cowboy RB Dan Reeves let a pass slip through his hands that LB Mike Curtis intercepted, to set it up. Baltimore’s Don McCafferty became the first rookie head coach to win a Super Bowl, but obviously his coaching genius wasn’t much of a factor in the win. For the first and only time in Super Bowl history, a player from the losing team – linebacker Chuck Howley of the Cowboys (pictured above) – was named the game’s MVP. Howley refused to accept the award, saying it was meaningless to him after his team lost. So the Colts, ultimately, erased the stigma of being embarrassed by the Jets in Super Bowl III, but, instead of winning back the glory for the old guard NFL, their win gave the upstart AFL, now the AFC, a 3-2 lead in title games between the leagues. The Cowboys’ story finally got a happy ending also, as they returned to the Super Bowl the next season and soundly defeated Don Shula’s young up-and-coming Miami Dolphin squad in Super Bowl VI to finally give Tom Landry his long-awaited championship. One thing this game accomplished – it firmly established the fact that the old battleground days of the NFL and AFL were over, and that the NFL was now just one big happy family. From this point, the game grew immensely in the 1970s and beyond into the monster it is today.

When the careers of head coaches and quarterbacks in the NFL are ultimately judged, winning – or at least reaching – Super Bowls is one of the important measuring sticks that is used. For some reason, though, perceptions of those players and coaches vary. Joe Montana and Terry Bradshaw both won four Super Bowls, and both receive accolades for this accomplishment, including induction into the Hall of Fame. But when the discussion of the greatest QBs of all time begins, Montana is usually at or near the top of the list, while Bradshaw rarely gets mentioned. The perception of Montana is that he was a football surgeon, slicing and dicing opposing defenses like no other before or after him. To me that perception is right on the money. I feel “Joe Cool” is the best quarterback of all time. But the perception of Bradshaw is that he was a bumbling knucklehead who rode on the coattails of  the Steel Curtain defense to those 4 titles. Bradshaw wasn’t an instant success in the NFL, struggling early in his career and even getting benched a few times, but ultimately he developed into a top-notch passer – in fact it was Bradshaw’s arm that won a couple of the 4 Super Bowls the Steelers garnered in the 1970s. Bradshaw probably doesn’t rank with Montana at the top of the list, but he certainly should be in the conversation ahead of Dan Marino, who was a great passer but never won anything, yet is always mentioned in the argument over who is the best of all time. John Elway is another QB who, after winning 2 titles, moved up into the discussion. Yet it can be argued that Elway never managed to win anything until the Broncos added Terrell Davis and started running the ball to complement Elway’s passing. The argument over the top QBs is usually made using the narrow range of the Super Bowl era, only including players who played from 1967 and beyond. Unfortunately, using that range cheats players like Bart Starr, who won 2 Super Bowls but also won 3 NFL championships in the early 1960s before the Super Bowl began, which puts him ahead of both Montana and Bradshaw. Then there is Otto Graham, who quarterbacked the Cleveland Browns to the title game 10 times and won 7 times, although some of those titles were won in the old All- America Football Conference, before the Browns joined the NFL.  Jim Plunkett was an overall first round draft choice who entered the NFL with much fanfare, but failed in early opportunities in New England and San Francisco and was considered a major bust. Then he joined the Raiders and resurrected his career, winning a pair of Super Bowls. Yet Plunkett gets no love at all when it comes to rating the top QBs, or even when it comes to being considered for Canton. His early perception as a bust still haunts him. Raider owner Al Davis has always claimed that there is an anti-Raider bias around the league because of all his lawsuits and battles with former commissioner Pete Rozelle, and he has a point, not only when you consider Plunkett but also his old coach, Tom Flores. Flores won 2 titles and is never mentioned among the top coaches. He won as many championships as Bill Parcells, yet gets no attention at all while Parcells is generally always tagged with the “genius” label. Parcells was a great football coach, but it took a field goal attempt sailing wide right by a couple of feet to get him his second title, so is he really a better coach than Flores was? Don Shula is always considered one of the best, if not THE best, head coach of all time. He won more games than any other coach, and had only 2 losing seasons in his 32 year run as a head coach. But Shula also only won 2 Super Bowls, and his overall record in the Super Bowl was 2-4. Tom Landry was one of the NFL’s most innovative and creative coaches, and his career includes some remarkable accomplishments, including guiding his Dallas Cowboy team to 20 consecutive winning seasons, and winning more post-season games (20) than any other coach. Yet his Super Bowl record is sub-.500 (2-3), and early in his career was considered a coach who “couldn’t win the big one”. Chuck Noll was 4-0 in the game, the late Bill Walsh 3-0. Walsh gets the “genius” tag also, deservedly so. But Noll, who was a low-key no-nonsense coach, rarely is thought of in the argument over the top coaches of all time.  

Reaching the Super Bowl was a shining moment for QBs like Mark Rypien, Trent Dilfer and Jeff Hostetler, but it didn’t push any of them into the argument on top signal-callers of all time. Yet not winning titles has kept players like Sonny Jurgenson, John Brodie and Dan Fouts out of the conversation. The same can be said for some coaches who’ve reached the pinnacle. Brian Billick won in Baltimore and George Siefert won 2 following Walsh in San Francisco, raising their status above where it probably belongs, while long-time successful coaches like Don Coryell and Chuck Knox, who never won a championship, are considered “second tier” coaches on the all-time list.

Since this is Super Bowl week, the annual week of megahype leading up to the National Football League’s championship game, Rayonsports.com will feature  posts having to do with the big game. I’ve always felt that the game has become such a circus-like event, with the stands full of corporate sponsors and the over-the-top halftime shows, that the last REAL football games of every season were the conference title games. That could be just a biased opinion of a Buffalo Bills’ fan though. I have a tradition of staying up all night the Saturday night before the game and watching ESPN’s all-night marathon of Super Bowl highlight videos. Two years ago I only made it until around 3 AM, then fell asleep on the couch, with my last recollection of  being awake and watching being Scott Norwood’s field goal in the Super Bowl XXV video sailing wide right. I dozed off with a slight tear in my eye, from being overtired I’m sure. Last year, my grandsons joined in on the tradition but I couldn’t find any ESPN channels carrying the highlights. Thankfully, I stumbled across Hulu.com and found a library of every game right up to the last one, and we were able to watch on a laptop. My oldest grandson only lasted until around midnight, but the younger one stayed up with me until after 1 AM. I’m looking forward to having them both over again this year.

The Super Bowl has become the premier sporting event in the U.S. , and that has spawned lots of books about it over the years. You can find a book chronicling  just about every year’s winner and their journey to reach the pinnacle, etc., and there are some other interesting books about the game also. The Billion Dollar Game: Behind-The-Scenes of The Greatest Day In American Sport – Super Bowl Sunday by Allen St. John has a long title, and is pretty short on information about the actual sport of football. If you’re interested in reading about all the fanfare surrounding the game, the book has lots of interesting facts, from stories of partying celebrities to details of how the Playboy Super Bowl party is set up. There’s The Super Bowl: An Official Retrospective by Rare Air, Ltd., Ken Leiker and Craig Ellenport and Super Bowl Trivia: 75 Quizzes from A to Z by J.M. Colbert, which I haven’t read but is supposed to be fun to have for Super Bowl parties. One interesting book is a Kindle edition eBook, available for $.99, called  200+ Ultimate Football Super Bowl Recipes eBook Cookbook by eBook Ventures. I haven’t read it but it makes me hungry just thinking about it. If you’re a true football fan and you want to read about the history of the Super Bowl, from the beginning right up until Super Bowl 43, I recommend The Ultimate Super Bowl Book by Bob McGinn. It’s subtitle is A Complete Reference To The Stats, Stars and Stories Behind Football’s Biggest Game – And Why The Best Team Won, and that’s exactly what it is. It covers each and every game and has lots of fascinating back stories about the teams, coaches and players involved. I’m not an avid reader but this was a book I couldn’t put down, being a person who loves the history of the sport.

I love this year’s matchup between two of the NFL’s most storied franchises, Green Bay and Pittsburgh, and am really excited about the game. Both teams earned their way into the Super Bowl by winning tough games in cold weather, the first time I remember that happening in awhile. So, I’ll join in with the NFL’s hype machine and post things having to do with the Super Bowl this week. Hopefully it’s a great game!

Today – Thursday, January 27th, 2011, is the 20th anniversary of a game that lives on in Buffalo sports history as “Wide Right”, the Buffalo Bills’ first-ever appearance in the NFL’s Super Bowl following the 1990 season, that ended in heart-breaking fashion with kicker Scott Norwood missing a 47 yard field goal that would’ve won the game. It is still the only game in Super Bowl history in which the ultimate title match winner was decided on the game’s final play.  There was a story on the sports segment of the local news today showing video of the game’s final play and its’ immediate aftermath, showing the agony on the faces of the Bills’ players and especially, coach Marv Levy. The reporter doing the story included a telephone interview he had done recently with Levy, recalling the Hall of Fame coach’s memories of the post-game locker room scene. He recalled that one by one, all the Bills’ players stopped to personally console Norwood, and many of them reminded the forlorn kicker of moments in the game when mistakes they had made had contributed to the loss, and that it was a total team defeat, not his fault. Buffalo fans obviously saw the game’s outcome a similar way, as they repeatedly chanted for Norwood at a rally the following week in downtown Buffalo to honor the team, then heartily cheered him when he relunctantly came to the podium to face the crowd (see link below).

When I watched the video of the end of the game on the sports tonight, a couple of thoughts crossed my mind – first, how young the players all looked, and secondly, how over the years these players have not only come to grips with the crushing loss, and three more Super Bowl losses to follow, but also how they’ve grown closer to each other as a family over the years, and come to appreciate each other as friends and “teammates” for life.  Jim Kelly will always be remembered as the quarterback whose team lost 4 straight Super Bowls, but I’ve always felt that those losses prepared Kelly to deal with the battle his son Hunter faced in his short life. Four losses in football games, no matter how big the stage, tend to pale in importance when compared to dealing with what Kelly and his wife did with their young son’s illness, and when the big Hall of Fame quarterback had to face that battle, those football game losses left him armed with a large dose of proper perspective.

The game itself has faded into football lore, taking its’ rightful place as one of the greatest of all time, and over the years football insiders have come to appreciate how special it was for one team to “climb the mountain” four years in succession, even if the end result was four straight disappointments, as team members continue to be honored with inductions into the game’s shrine in Canton. Their accomplishments are the ultimate example of the old saying that’s been attributed to a lot of football’s past greats, including Vince Lombardi and Mike Ditka, that “it’s not how many times you get knocked down that’s important, but how many times you get back up and try again”.  After all, nobody circles the wagons like the Buffalo Bills.

Niagara Square Rally 1991

It’s a shame that a lot of younger football fans don’t even remember Don Meredith, who passed away on Monday of a stroke, as an original member of the Monday Night Football broadcast team, yet alone his playing career as a quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys. Meredith backed up Eddie LeBaron at QB in Dallas in the franchise’s first 2 years of existence in 1960 and ’61, split time with LeBaron in ’62, then became the full-time starter for coach Tom Landry’s team in 1963. He then proceeded to guide the ‘Boys into their first winning era, on their way to becoming “America’s Team”. It’s unfortunate that Meredith never won a championship in his career. He played 9 seasons and was retired by the time Dallas won their first Super Bowl in 1971. During Meredith’s era, the Cowboys gained a reputation as being one of those teams that “can’t win the big one”, and in Meredith’s two title game encounters with Green Bay, in 1966 and ’67, he didn’t play particularly well. In ’66, the game was played in Dallas’ home stadium, the Cotton Bowl, and Green Bay jumped out to an early 14-0 lead. Meredith led a comeback and made a game of it, even driving the Cowboys to Green Bay’s 2 yard line with a chance to tie the game late in what was a shootout style of game. Meredith threw an interception that sealed the win, 34-27, for the Packers. The next year, the same 2 teams played for the NFL title again, this time in Green Bay’s Lambeau Field in what would turn out to be one of the most memorable games in league history, the “Ice Bowl”. Played in horrid, frigid conditions, neither team mounted much offense in the game. However, Packer signal-caller Bart Starr is remembered for scoring the winning TD on a quarterback sneak, while Meredith totaled 59 yards passing for the afternoon.

What I remember about Meredith is that he was a gamer. He took vicious hits and kept bouncing back. He was a real leader of his football team, and the Cowboys’ reputation of not being able to win the big one had nothing to do with Meredith’s desire to win. His teammates always respected him and his inner drive to win. Following his retirement, he became an analyst on NFL telecasts, eventually joining the  ground-breaking MNF crew. Teaming with Howard Cosell as analysts,  he carved out his “Dandy Don” personna by playing off Cosell’s arrogance with his witty, country charm, as Keith Jackson, and then Frank Gifford as play-by-play announcers, played the straight man. It was really the first time a football announcing team brought entertainment to the booth, and became part of the story as much as the game was. Those early Monday Night Football telecasts, and the humor and entertainment Meredith and Cosell provided, were huge in helping to grow the NFL into the monster it is today – the real national pastime.  So now, to quote “Dandy Don” himself, “turn out the lights, the party’s over”, for Meredith on this earth. His legacy as both a player and analyst deserves to be mentioned, because it was a big part of the game. Rest in peace, Dandy Don.