A short while ago, we featured the 1966 American Football League championship game between the Buffalo Bills and Kansas City Chiefs as a Throwback Thursday post – a game that decided which AFL team would represent the league in the very first Super Bowl. This week, we’ll remember the same season’s title game for the NFL, played between two clubs who meet on this week’s schedule, the Dallas Cowboys and Green Bay Packers. The most famous game played between these two teams was the championship game played the following year, forever known as the “Ice Bowl”. Since we featured that game already in the past, we’ll go with this game instead. which was just as exciting and had as much drama as that “Ice Bowl” contest.
This game pitted two head coaches who had worked together as assistants in the 1950s with the New York Giants, Green Bay’s Vince Lombardi and Dallas’ Tom Landry. They would both go on to become NFL coaching legends, but were at different stages of their success at this point. Lombardi’s Packers had already appeared in 4 championship games, winning 3 of them, while Landry, who had taken over an expansion team in 1960, was just beginning to enjoy the fruits of his labor, this being the Cowboys’ first postseason venture. The Cowboys’ inexperience showed up early in the game, as Green Bay drove for an early touchdown using misdirection runs by Elijah Pitts to churn out yardage. Lombardi had figured Landry would have his team prepared to stop the vaunted Packer power sweep, so he installed those misdirection runs playing off of fake sweep plays. Bart Starr finished the drive by tossing a 17 yard scoring throw to Pitts, and when a jittery Dallas club fumbled the ensuing kickoff, the Packers’ Jim Grabowski scooped it up and ran it in for another score to up Green Bay’s lead to 14-0. It looked like the defending champions were going to coast to victory after they took advantage of Dallas’ early nervousness, but to their credit the Cowboys settled down and put together a pair of scoring drives to tie the game. The clubs traded scores after that but Starr fired three TD passes to three different receivers, while the Cowboys settled for field goals, so the Pack widened their lead to 34-20. Dallas QB Don Meredith rallied his troops to stay in the game, however. With his top target, Bob Hayes, being blanketed all day by Green Bay’s defense (he had 1 catch for 1 yard), Meredith hooked up with his other top flight receiver, Frank Clarke, on a 68 yard touchdown pass to pull the Cowboys to within 34-27. When the Cowboy defense held late in the game and got the ball back, Meredith again led a drive which reached the Packer 2 yard line with a chance to tie the game. They failed to score on consecutive plays until it was fourth down, giving them one last chance at the tying touchdown. Meredith rolled out and Packer linebacker Dave Robinson, who was supposed to drop into coverage, rushed Meredith instead and harassed him into a hurried throw into the end zone that Tom Brown intercepted to seal Green Bay’s win. In typical Lombardi style, after the game he congratulated Robinson for the play, then criticized him for being out of position. Green Bay went on to defeat Kansas City in the first Super Bowl, then called the AFL-NFL Championship game, 35-10, following the victory over Dallas.
Dave Robinson pursues Dallas QB Don Meredith