It’s week 4 of the NFL season and two NFC East rivals, the New York Giants and Washington Redskins, face each other in a battle of teams struggling to establish themselves. We’ll feature a game between these 2 franchises that goes back to October 16, 1960 for this week’s Throwback Thursday post. There’s no historical significance to the game and it didn’t even produce a solid result. It ended in a 24-24 tie, which in this 100th NFL season reminds us of why the league eventually added overtime to decide deadlocked games in 1974. “A tie is like kissing your sister!” That statement has been used regularly to describe how a game that ends in a draw makes you feel. It was first credited to Navy coach Eddie Erdelatz after his team played a scoreless tie against Duke in 1953. In the NFL, the record for most tie games in a single season is held by the 1932 Chicago Bears, who tied 6 times, including 3 in a row, en route to a 7-1-6 season. Lots of sister kissing there, but the Bears wound up winning the league championship that season also.
Anyway, back to the featured throwback game for the week. It was played at Yankee Stadium and the Giants were unbeaten headed into the Eastern Division clash. The Giants looked like they would cruise to the victory for the first three quarters as all of their offense was provided by players who would go on to become football broadcasters after their playing days were over. Frank Gifford, who anchored Monday Night Football for many years, scored a pair of rushing touchdowns. Kyle Rote, who later teamed with Curt Gowdy on AFL broadcasts and coined the term “you can’t stop (insert great player’s name) you can only hope to contain him”, grabbed a 6 yard TD pass from George Shaw. Pat Summerall, who went on to become one of pro football’s most loved play-by-play men teaming with Tom Brookshier and later John Madden, kicked a 48 yard field goal and added the extra points on the touchdowns as the Giants built a 24-10 lead going into the final quarter.
Frank Gifford rushes vs. Redskins
The Redskins hung in there and rallied in the final stanza behind some guys who were not, like the Giants’ stars, household names. Their only first half score was a short TD run by fullback Don Bosseler, and in the fourth they got scores from Johnny Olszewski, affectionately known as “Johnny O” and who wore the number “0” on his jersey, on a short run, and a 21 yard pass from Ralph Guglielmi to Jim Podoley. Neither team had a memorable season that year. The Giants, who had appeared in the previous 2 NFL Championship games, fell to third in the Eastern Division while the Redskins, the last totally segregated NFL team at the time, won only one game.