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The scheduled game from the NFL for week seven that will be the Throwback Thursday feature for this week is between two old AFC East rivals, the Buffalo Bills and Miami Dolphins. There are many games to choose from over the years in this storied rivalry that were unforgettable – the first game ever played between the teams, in Miami’s first year in the AFL in 1966, the Bills’ first win over the Dolphins after going 0-for-the 1970s, in the first year of the Chuck Knox era, Joe Ferguson’s epic game in the Orange Bowl when he outdueled Dan Marino in his rookie year, Jim Kelly’s end zone dive to secure a win in 1989, or any of the many Bills’ wins in the Marv Levy era. Since the 2 teams meet twice a year every season, there will be other opportunities to feature those games.

Instead, I decided to feature a game from 1975 that included one of the most bizarre officiating calls in NFL history. The Bills, with O.J. Simpson leading the way, were a good team in the 1970s, but could never get over the hump when it came to competing with Don Shula’s Dolphin teams. Miami dominated the series, but that domination bordered on the ridiculous as Buffalo was completely swept for the entire decade, losing twice a year to the Fish every year from 1970 through 1979. But on December 8, 1975, the Dolphins got some unexpected help on their way to a 31-21 win over the Bills in the Orange Bowl. That old stadium was a house of horrors for Buffalo, but they left south Florida that day incensed over a call that left them out in the cold as far as having a chance to win the game, and put a major crimp in their playoff hopes. Considering the way they totally dominated the Bills for the whole decade, Miami didn’t need any help, but got some in a major way in this game. The Bills had staged a major comeback, from a 21-0 deficit, led by some stellar play from Simpson and Ferguson, and trailed by a mere field goal, 24-21, when Miami running back Mercury Morris fumbled the ball, and Bills’ lineman Pat Toomay ran over to attempt to recover the ball. He did, which appeared to give the Bills possession and a chance to take the lead. However, head linesman Jerry Bergman ruled that Morris had not fumbled, and Toomay was assessed a personal foul penalty for “roughing the official”, a call not heard of in the league before (or since), giving the ball back to the Dolphins with a first down. They proceeded to drive for a touchdown that sealed the win, a victory that the Bills felt was tainted. Bills’ owner Ralph Wilson may have been the most angry of anyone in the organization, as he called for Bergman to be fired and threatened to not send his team on the field for any future games that Bergman officiated. Wilson’s quote: “Anyone that incompetent should not be allowed to officiate and should be barred from football.”

Bergman became one of Buffalo sports fans’ most hated villains, and he received over 1,500 critical letters from fans. His wife said that one letter, addressed only to “Blind as a Bat Bergman, Allegheny County” managed to find its’ way to their mailbox. It didn’t help the situation that at the time, Dolphin coach Shula was head of the league’s competition committee, and the general assumption around the NFL was that he “owned” the officials.

Don Shula

One of the games on this week’s NFL schedule is expected to be one of the most lopsided games in league history, matching the undefeated and seemingly unstoppable Denver Broncos, led by Peyton Manning, and the hapless Jacksonville Jaguars, who are winless and going nowhere. The point spread on the game has reached as high as 28 points. The Throwback Thursday game I’m highlighting this week was also played between these two franchises, and wound up being featured by NFL Films as one of the top ten in their “Greatest Games” series. They dubbed it the “Ambush at Mile High”, and going into the game the expected result was pretty much what the experts are counting on this week – a one-sided Bronco victory. The year was 1996 and the Broncos were the AFC’s top seed going into the playoffs, and behind star quarterback John Elway, were expected to breeze through the competition into the Super Bowl. When the first team they would face turned out to be the Jaguars, that path looked to be extremely easy. The Jaguars were a second year expansion team that finished the year with a 9-7 win/loss record, barely squeaking into the playoffs as a wild card team. They pulled what appeared to be a major surprise in the wild card round the previous week when they overcame an early 14-0 deficit to upset the Buffalo Bills 30-27. It wasn’t clear at the time, but it turned out the Bills were in decline at that point. In fact, the game turned out to be Jim Kelly’s final appearance, as he left the field with a head injury and wound up retiring in the off-season. Against the 13-3 Broncos, the Jaguars, under coach Tom Coughlin, were supposed to be an easy mark, especially at Mile High Stadium, where the team had a major home field advantage. The game followed the same pattern as the Jags’ wild card win the previous week, with Denver jumping out to a 12-0 lead in the first quarter. However, just as in the Buffalo game, Jacksonville stormed back behind the pinpoint passing of Mark Brunell, who played the game of his life, and the hard running of Natrone Means, who ground out 140 rushing yards. Jacksonville hung on for the win, again by a 30-27 score, but unfortunately they were eliminated the next week in the AFC Championship game by coach Bill Parcells’ New England Patriots. The upset may have lit a fire under Elway and the Broncos, however, as they went on to win back-to-back Super Bowls following the 1997 and ’98 seasons.

Natrone Means (photo courtesy of Bleacherreport.com)

One of the matchups on this week’s NFL schedule is an NFC East clash between two long-time rivals, the New York Giants and Philadelphia Eagles. This week’s Thursday Throwback features a famous game played between these 2 rivals on November 20, 1960, at Yankee Stadium, when a play that became known as “the hit heard ’round the world” took place involving a pair of future Hall of Famers, Eagle linebacker Chuck Bednarik and Giant running back Frank Gifford. The game was a must-win situation for the Eagles, who were enjoying a rare season where they had a shot at dethroning the 2 dominant teams in the NFL’s Eastern Division, the Giants and Cleveland Browns. They were hanging onto a 17-10 lead late in the game and the Giants were beginning to mount a comeback when Bednarik laid out Gifford with a hard, clean hit as the Giant back was attempting to catch a pass over the middle. The hit was so hard it knocked Gifford unconscious, and he had to be carried off the field on a stretcher. He suffered a concussion, with symptoms so bad that he was out of football for 18 months, and wound up retiring.

The two players involved were polar opposites of each other. Bednarik, whose nickname was “Concrete Charlie”, was a hard-nosed intimidating player who took pride in the fact that he was the last of the NFL’s two-way players, playing both linebacker on defense and center on offense. Gifford was a “golden boy” back who played his college career at USC and became a media darling there on the West Coast, then moved onto the pro stage on the other coast, under the bright lights of New York City, where he garnered endorsement deals and, after winning the NFL MVP Award in 1956 while helping the Giants win the league championship, became a player the league tried to push as the face of the NFL. There’s no question that at the time, Bednarik relished in the fact that he knocked the “golden boy” out cold, but as time passed, grew to respect Gifford, especially after the Giant star defended the hit as clean when Bednarik began to get a reputation for being a dirty player.

The iconic photo pictured below of the hit appears to show Bednarik celebrating over Gifford’s prone body, but the Eagle Hall of Famer always insisted that in that moment, he wasn’t even aware of the injury, and was actually celebrating the fact that the hit forced Gifford to fumble, and the Eagles had recovered to basically put the must-win game away. It turned out to be a huge win for Philadelphia, as they went on to win an improbable NFL title, handing Green Bay a 17-13 loss in what turned out to be Vince Lombardi’s only postseason defeat. Gifford’s retirement turned out to be temporary, as he came back in 1962 and switched positions to flanker. As the pro game began evolving the third running back into a second wide receiver, other star runners of that era, like Bobby Mitchell and Paul Warfield, were doing the same. Gifford became an All Pro at that position also, then retired again following the ’63 season to go into broadcasting.

Chuck Bednarik celebrates over the prone Frank Gifford

This week’s “Throwback Thursday” matchup from the NFL’s week 4 schedule is between the Cleveland Browns and Cincinnati Bengals, two franchises with close ties that go beyond their proximity in the state of Ohio. They face each other this Sunday in the first of their two annual meetings as AFC North rivals, and those meetings have become routine over the years. Their first meeting, however, was anything but routine. It came on October 11, 1970, in Cleveland, and was a “homecoming” for Bengals founder and head coach Paul Brown. Brown had also founded the Browns franchise, in the old All America Conference in 1946, and coached the team through its’ most successful era from ’46 in the AAFC, through its’ entry into the NFL in 1950, until he was unceremoniously relieved of his coaching duties by owner Art Modell following the 1963 season. Brown’s iron-fisted approach with the Cleveland team had grown tiresome among the players, who revolted against him, and went to Modell, led by star Jim Brown, to try to get rid of him. Modell complied with their wishes, and the decision looked like a good one when the Browns won the NFL championship in 1964 under Brown’s replacement, Blanton Collier. The legendary coach resurfaced a couple of years later when the American Football League decided to award an expansion franchise to Cincinnati, as the new team’s ownership group recruited him to come on board as part owner, general manager and coach to help build the new team. Brown, a staunch NFL guy, had little use for the AFL, which was ridiculed by the old-line NFLers as a “Mickey Mouse” league, and would only agree to join the Cincinnati group after the NFL/AFL merger agreement was completed, assuring the Bengals would be an NFL team. In a move many believe was done just to “tweak” Modell, Brown chose the exact shade of orange for the Bengals’ uniforms as he had for the Browns in Cleveland, with black as the primary color instead of brown. As a football executive, Brown proved he hadn’t lost his touch – he built the Bengals into a playoff team by their second year of existence. The club boasted the AFL’s Rookie of the Year in their first 2 years also – running back Paul Robinson in 1968 and quarterback Greg Cook in 1969. The two leagues finally merged into one starting with the 1970 season, and the Browns and Bengals were put together in the same division of the AFC, which meant they would regularly meet twice a year.

Paul Brown with one of his Bengal assistants, Bill Walsh

As for that first meeting, Brown’s Bengals fought mightily but in the end the Browns pulled out a 30-27 victory, with Bill Nelsen throwing a pair of touchdown passes and future Hall of Fame running back Leroy Kelly supplying 163 combined rushing and receiving yards and scoring twice. The Browns were still a formidable club in 1970 but were on the decline, and in their second meeting, in Cincinnati, Paul Brown got his revenge as the Bengals won a defensive struggle, 14-10. With those two hard-fought games, the annual “Battle of Ohio” was on.

Leroy Kelly (photo courtesy of Bleacherreport.com)

This week’s NFL matchup that I decided to highlight a past game of on “Throwback Thursday” is between the San Diego Chargers and Tennessee Titans. The classic matchup between these 2 franchises took place on New Year’s Day in 1961, when both were located in different cities. The Chargers, playing in Los Angeles, won the Western Division title, while the Titans’ descendants, the Houston Oilers, won the Eastern crown. This game, played in Houston’s Jeppesen Stadium, would decide who would be champion of the inaugural season of the fledgling American Football League. The AFL was founded to rival the National Football League, by eight men, some of which had been spurned by the NFL in bids to acquire franchises in that league, and that group became known as “The Foolish Club”, a nickname they all wore proudly after the new league became popular and eventually forced a merger with the NFL. Owner Bud Adams’ Oilers would win this game, 24-16, to be crowned the first AFL champs. Adams had pulled a major coup by luring Heisman Trophy-winning back Billy Cannon from LSU to sign with the new Oiler franchise instead of the NFL, and the move paid off as Cannon was a major factor in helping win the title game. In the fourth quarter, he snared a short pass from QB George Blanda and scampered 88 yards to a touchdown which put the game away. The same 2 clubs would meet again the next season for the new league’s second championship, and the Oilers won again, 10-3, in a defensive struggle. Cannon was again the hero, scoring the game’s only touchdown on a 35 yard pass from Blanda. Things were a lot different for both teams in the second title matchup, with the Chargers now located in San Diego, and the Oilers being coached by Wally Lemm, who took over for Lou Rymkus after Rymkus was fired early in the year, despite the fact he had led the team to the ’60 championship.

“The Foolish Club” – original AFL owners