The NFL season is winding down, with only 2 more weeks of games to be played. On this week’s schedule, the Green Bay Packers and Arizona Cardinals meet, which takes this week’s Throwback Thursday post back to January of 1965, when these two franchises met in what was then a postseason game played annually known as the “Playoff Bowl”. Officially, the game was called the Bert Bell Benefit Bowl, named in honor of the league’s late commissioner, with proceeds benefitting the players’ pension fund. The game, held in Miami’s Orange Bowl, was played between the two teams who finished second in their respective divisions, and was essentially a game to decide who finished in third place, or a “consolation” game as it’s called in the NCAA basketball tournament. It was also known to some as the “Runnerup Bowl”.
The Packers finished second behind the Baltimore Colts in the 1964 season, while St. Louis (where the Cardinals were located then) wound up behind the Cleveland Browns. Cardinal quarterback Charley Johnson had a pretty good game, throwing a pair of touchdown passes to split end Billy Gambrell, who had the game of his life. Gambrell’s season total for receiving yards was 398, but on this day he grabbed 6 catches for 184 yards and both TD receptions from Johnson, one from 10 yards out and the second from 80. St. Louis built a 17-3 lead, but Green Bay’s Jim Taylor scored on a short run to cut the lead to 17-10. When Jerry Stovall intercepted a Bart Starr pass and returned it 30 yards for a touchdown, the Cards pretty much sealed the victory, winding up winning by a 24-17 count. (Taylor scored again late in the game for the Packers but it wasn’t enough). Green Bay coach Vince Lombardi is said to have lost only one postseason game in his coaching career, the 1960 NFL championship game, but this would have been his second one, except that the NFL made the decision to count the “Playoff Bowl” results as exhibition games, which was pretty much what they were.
Lombardi, who hated losing, detested the third place game. After losing this one, he called the game “the Shit Bowl…a loser’s bowl for losers. A hinky dink football game, played in a hinky dink town, by hinky dink players. That’s all third place is. Hinky dink.” That was probably a bit extreme. The game did have some value, raising over a million dollars for the pension fund over the years. The game was discontinued in 1970 after the NFL merged with the AFL and the playoffs were expanded to add divisional round games.
Packers and Cardinals battle in Miami in the “Playoff Bowl”