The Pittsburgh Steelers and Oakland Raiders match up on this week’s NFL schedule, and although in 2013 both teams have struggled to start the season, a game played between them that is known as one of the most famous in NFL history was an easy choice as this week’s edition of the Thursday Throwback. It took place on December 23, 1972 at Pittsburgh’s old Three Rivers Stadium, and was that season’s AFC Divisional playoff game. The game itself was a defensive struggle between the Raiders, who had been a league regular season powerhouse going back to their days in the old AFL, and the young Steelers, who were rebuilding under coach Chuck Noll and looking for their first playoff win ever, a fact that’s hard to believe considering the franchise’s success since then. At the time, the Steelers were only a couple of years removed from being one of the worst teams in the NFL over a period of at least two decades. When owner Art Rooney hired Noll, it was the first move in a total transformation of the team, as they brought in future star players like Franco Harris, Terry Bradshaw, Joe Greene, L.C. Greenwood, Jack Ham and Mel Blount and had become a team clearly on the rise. The Raiders had been one of the AFL’s strongest teams, even making an appearance in the second Super Bowl, and their success continued after the leagues merged and they became part of the American Conference. However, they were in a period when they were starting to gain a reputation for not being able to “win the big one”, as they suffered continual playoff failures. With 5 seconds left in this particular game, it looked like the Raiders were on their way to the AFC Championship game, as they held a razor-thin 7-6 lead with only a last ditch Terry Bradshaw Hail Mary pass left for the young Steelers to attempt. The play didn’t start out particularly well for Pittsburgh, and Bradshaw wound up flinging a wounded duck pass into the middle of the field. The pass headed toward John “Frenchy” Fuqua just as Raider safety Jack “The Assassin” Tatum arrived on the scene and delivered a hard blow to the Steeler running back in an attempt to break up the play. Tatum’s hit succeeded, but the ball popped out and flew directly to Harris, who barely plucked it out of the air before it hit the ground and continued untouched to the end zone to give his team a nearly impossible to believe 13-7 win. At the time, league rules stated that if a pass caromed off an offensive player, only that player was eligible to catch it. The Raiders argued vehemently that the ball had bounced off Fuqua, therefore making Franco an ineligible receiver on the play, but the game officials ruled the ball had hit Tatum. John Madden, Raider head coach at the time, to this day has never accepted the official’s ruling on the play. NFL Films chose the game’s final play as the greatest of all time, and also its’ most controversial.
The win helped catapult the Steelers into their golden age in the decade of the 1970s, when they won four Super Bowls, but in ’72 they weren’t quite ready for prime time, as they went on to lose the following week in the AFC Championship game to the year’s eventual Super Bowl champions, Don Shula’s undefeated Miami Dolphins. The Raiders would hang on to the “can’t win the big one” stigma for a few more years until they finally broke through with a Super Bowl win over the Vikings following the 1976 season.
Franco Harris completes the Immaculate Reception TD to the delight of Pittsburgh fans….
Raider coach John Madden had a different reaction.