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It’s been a regular practice in the long history of the National Football League to crown the “Team of The Decade” for each ten year period of the league’s existence. With it’s celebration of the 100th season this year, there’s no better time to rate those teams than now, as the tenth decade of play closes out soon. We might as well start this feature by crowning the New England Patriots as the team of both the 2000s and the 2010s, the “Team of The New Millenium” if you will. They have dominated pro football for almost 20 years and have won 6 Super Bowls since 2000, 3 in each decade. With coach Bill Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady showing no signs of slowing down, there’s no telling how much further into the millennium they will continue to own the NFL.

Going back to the league’s origins in the 1920s, the NFL actually didn’t stage a championship game at the end of each season, instead just considering whichever team was best in the regular season as the champ. By that standard, the Canton Bulldogs would have to be considered the team of the 1920s. They had the best record, and were therefore crowned champions, in 1922 and 1923. In 1924 the team was purchased by Sam Deutsch, who owned the NFL’s Cleveland Indians franchise. He took the Canton players and their name and they became the Cleveland Bulldogs, and had the best record for a third straight year to claim another title. In 1929, the NFL’s best team was the Green Bay Packers. They would go on to become the “Team of The Decade” for the 1930s, winning 4 more championships in that decade under Curley Lambeau. The Chicago Bears and New York Giants made a case for consideration with a pair of titles each, but the Packers were clearly the dominant franchise. The Bears, under league co-founder George “Papa Bear” Halas, overtook Green Bay in the next decade, winning 4 championships in the 1940s. It was in this dominant decade that the Bears earned their “Monsters of The Midway” nickname.

Halas, 1940s Bears, including a Bear mascot, celebrate a title

The 1950s are the most difficult decade to pick a dominant team from. The Cleveland Browns are generally considered to be the “Team of The Decade” for that era, as they appeared in 7 consecutive title games after being absorbed into the NFL from the All America Football Conference in 1950. Paul Brown’s teams won 3 of those games, behind the quarterback play of the great Otto Graham. However, the Detroit Lions could stake a legitimate claim to the title also. With swashbuckling quarterback Bobby Layne leading the way, they won 3 championships in the decade too, and all 3 wins were over the Browns. The Baltimore Colts, with emerging star John Unitas,  ended the decade with back-to-back championship game wins in 1958 and ’59, with the ’59 sudden death overtime win over the New York Giants being considered “The Greatest Game Ever Played”. There’s no argument over who was the “Team of The Decade” for the 1960s. It was the era of Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers. He transformed the moribund Packer franchise into winners in the late ’50s and they qualified for the title game in 1960, only to lose to the Philadelphia Eagles. He told his team in the locker room afterwards that “this will never happen to us again” and was true to his word. The Packers, with legendary players like Bart Starr, Jim Taylor, Paul Hornung, Herb Adderley, Dave Robinson, Forrest Gregg and Ray Nitschke, won 5 championships over the next 7 years, including wins in the first 2 Super Bowls. Lombardi was such a powerful, dominant figure of the era that when he passed away of cancer in 1970, the Super Bowl trophy was named in his honor.

1960s Packers, from left-Hornung, Taylor, Starr, coach Lombardi (Sports Illustrated photo)

Entering the 1970s, it looked like Don Shula’s Miami Dolphins would dominate the decade as they appeared in 3 straight Super Bowls, winning 2 of them including a perfect 17-0 season in 1972. However, Chuck Noll’s Pittsburgh Steelers stole their thunder the rest of the decade, claiming a total of 4 championships in a 6 year span. Those teams won with their “Steel Curtain” defense, some hard running from Franco Harris and a passing attack engineered by Terry Bradshaw and a pair of Hall of Fame receivers, Lynn Swann and John Stallworth. In the 1980s, the Washington Redskins and the Raiders, playing in Oakland and then relocating to Los Angeles, won a pair of Super Bowls each, but neither could match the mastery of the San Francisco 49ers, easily the “Team of The Decade”. Behind the genius of coach Bill Walsh and the confident play of quarterback Joe Montana, the Niners won 4 titles, the last one with George Siefert as coach. Walsh’s “West Coast” offense was the force that drove those teams, with Montana spreading the ball around to Jerry Rice, Dwight Clark, Roger Craig and others, but their defense was also strong, led by players like Ronnie Lott, Keena Turner and Fred Dean.

The late Bill Walsh, architect of the “Team of The Decade” for the 1980s

Finally, the 1990s brought back into prominence a team that had been a force for over 20 years in the 1960s and ’70s, the Dallas Cowboys. After the man who built the franchise into a powerhouse, Tom Landry, was fired, Jimmy Johnson took the reins and guided the Cowboys to a pair of championships in the ’90s. Johnson left the club but when Barry Switzer led them to a third Super Bowl win in 1995, they became the dominant team of the era and earned the crown as the “Team of The Decade” for the 1990s. The Buffalo Bills accomplished a feat still unmatched when they qualified for four consecutive Super Bowls, but losing all 4 removed them from the conversation as the best of the decade, especially since 2 of the title game losses were to the Cowboys.

He fell to the third round of the NFL draft in 1979 because he didn’t have a very strong arm and his measurables weren’t up to par with other available quarterbacks that year, but it was this player, Joe Montana, who built a resume that makes him a top candidate as the greatest signal caller of all time. “Joe Cool”, as he became known to his San Francisco 49er teammates, is the subject of our NFL 100 post today. During his college career at Notre Dame he showed flashes of his ability to perform well in high pressure situations. He didn’t become the starting quarterback until part way through his junior season, but prior to that had come off the bench to lead the Irish to comeback wins. His final collegiate game should have gotten noticed by NFL scouts, as he led Notre Dame to a win in the Cotton Bowl against Houston. Playing in frigid conditions, Montana developed hypothermia and left the game at halftime with his team trailing 20-12. He stayed in the locker room and the team medical staff gave him intravenous fluids, covered him in blankets and famously fed him chicken soup. When he returned to play, the Irish had fallen behind 34-12. Montana led a furious comeback and won the game 35-34, in what would be dubbed “The Chicken Soup Game”.

Joe Montana at Notre Dame

Despite his heroics at Notre Dame, pro scouts were not impressed with Montana at draft time. He lasted until the end of the third round, with 3 other QBs being picked ahead of him, and with the 82nd choice of the draft, San Francisco’s Bill Walsh finally grabbed him. Walsh and Montana formed a union that would transform the 49er franchise. They became a model organization, winning 4 Super Bowls, (3 under Walsh, 1 under George Siefert) while Montana was the field general. He won multiple league MVP awards, was an eight-time Pro Bowler and became the first player to win the Super Bowl MVP Award 3 times. His heroics in the biggest games were the trademark of his career. Besides having a perfect 4-0 record in Super Bowls, he also threw for 11 touchdowns in those games and was never intercepted. He led the 49ers to some remarkable victories in some of the NFL’s most memorable games, including a late drive in the 1981 NFC Championship game against the Dallas Cowboys when he hit Dwight Clark in the back of the end zone on a play that went down in NFL annals as “The Catch”, and a 92 yard drive in the final 36 seconds in Super Bowl XXIII to defeat the Cincinnati Bengals. Montana’s career heroics earned him a first ballot induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2000, and even though Tom Brady has since surpassed him in Super Bowl wins, “Joe Cool” is still considered by many to be the most clutch NFL player of all time.

Joe Montana in a familiar pose, signaling a touchdown

The New York Jets and Oakland Raiders clash this weekend on the NFL’s schedule, and we’ll travel back to a game played between these 2 former AFL rivals on December 29, 1968 for this week’s Throwback Thursday feature. The headline of this post, “Jets Upset The Champs”, was probably more fitting to be used a couple of weeks later after this game, when the Jets stunned the NFL’s Baltimore Colts in the Super Bowl, but it actually also applies to this game. It was the AFL’s title game between the defending league champion Raiders and the upstart Jets. The Jets actually entered the game as slight favorites, which seemed odd since Oakland was the defending AFL champion and had defeated the Jets six weeks earlier in the regular season in the famous “Heidi” game. One possible reason might have been that the Raiders had finished tied with Kansas City for the Western Division title and had to play a playoff game with the Chiefs a week earlier to decide who played the Jets for the right to go to the Super Bowl. The game on this day was to be played in cold, windy weather at New York’s Shea Stadium. The quarterbacks, Oakland’s Daryle Lamonica and the Jets’ Joe Namath, struggled with the passing game all day. Both completed less than 50% of their passes. Namath opened the scoring by finding his favorite target, flanker Don Maynard, on a 14 yard pass to give the Jets an early 7-0 lead. Lamonica countered with a 29 yard TD strike to Fred Biletnikoff and the teams traded field goals, with a pair each coming from the Raiders’ George Blanda and New York’s Jim Turner, to forge a 13-13 tie in the third quarter. Namath then found his tight end, Pete Lammons, for a score while Blanda added another Oakland three-pointer, so New York had a 20-16 lead at that point. The Raiders intercepted Namath and took advantage of it by driving to a go-ahead touchdown run of 5 yards by Pete Banaszak. Namath rebounded by leading a 68 yard drive culminating in another short scoring pass to Maynard, and the Jet defense kept Oakland off the board the rest of the game, allowing New York to escape with a hard-earned 27-23 victory. Maynard was the star of the day, grabbing 6 passes for 118 yards and the 2 scores, but Namath’s other top receiver, George Sauer, would contribute 70 yards on 7 catches, and the Jets’ rushing attack, a two-headed monster of Matt Snell and Emerson Boozer, chipped in with 122 hard-earned yards on the ground. Biletnikoff stood out in the losing cause for Oakland, with 7 catches for 190 yards and a TD, while speedster Warren Wells notched another 83 yards on 3 grabs. The two teams gained a combined 843 yards of total offense on the day, a pretty amazing accomplishment in the blustery conditions.

Namath (12) throws over Ben Davidson (83 in white) to an awaiting George Sauer (83)

In this year’s celebration of the NFL’s 100th season we’ve highlighted many iconic figures from the league’s history, with many more still to come. Today we showcase the life of an extraordinary man who built, from scratch, the team that became known as “America’s Team”, the Dallas Cowboys. That man is Tom Landry, whose stoic look on the sideline of Cowboy games wearing his trademark fedora was well known from the team’s inception in 1960 until he was unceremoniously dumped by Jerry Jones in 1989. Jones had purchased the franchise and wanted to hire his old college teammate, Jimmy Johnson, as coach. His move turned out to be the right one, as the Cowboys had declined in the 1980s and Johnson wound up leading the team to a pair of Super Bowl wins. Nevertheless, Landry’s legacy was cemented despite the lack of respect he received from Jones. He had built the Cowboys into a model franchise, with an organization that exemplified class and put winning above all else. His team rose from an expansion club in 1960 to a playoff contender by 1966, when they ran off a streak of 7 division titles in an 8 year span. From ’66 until 1985 the Cowboys were a playoff team 18 times, and won 2 Super Bowls in 5 appearances. Landry’s story begins before his Dallas days. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps in World War II in honor of his brother, who had been killed in a plane crash while serving. He became a bomber co-pilot and between November of 1944 and April of 1945 completed a combat tour of 30 missions, which included a crash landing in Belgium when his plane ran out of fuel.

1st Lieutenant Tom Landry, US Army Air Corps

As a player, Landry was with the New York Yankees of the AAFC for a season, then joined the NFL’s New York Giants as a defensive back in 1950. He played until 1955, but also was a player/coach in 1954 and ’55, before becoming a full-time member of the Giants’ coaching staff in 1956, holding the position that today would be considered the defensive coordinator. The Giants’ top offensive coach at the time was Vince Lombardi. It was in the job of lead defensive coach with the Giants that Landry’s reputation as an innovator took root. He is credited with inventing the 4-3 defensive alignment that is prevalent in today’s game, with Hall of Famer Sam Huff playing the critical middle linebacker role. Landry’s Giant defensive units were one of the NFL’s best from ’56 to ’59 when he was coordinator, leading to his being hired as the first head coach in Dallas Cowboy history when they entered the league in 1960. Among his innovations in his 29 seasons in Dallas were the invention of the “Flex” defense, which involved players on the defensive line flexing to different positions depending on where they thought the play was headed. That defense was reliant on “gap control”, in which the players were assigned to cover a gap along the line of scrimmage. That philosophy is widespread in the modern game. Although his background was on the defensive side of the ball, Landry’s teams also were innovative on offense. He dusted off the “shotgun” formation which had been used in earlier years but became dormant as defenses began to learn how to counter it, and also implemented the use of multiple shifting and motion to confuse opponents. He was the first to employ a strength and conditioning coach, and to begin assigning assistant coaches to specific positions. The Cowboys were the first team to use a quality control coach, who specialized in studying upcoming opponents on film and did self-scouting of the Cowboys themselves. Of course, innovations only work if a team is winning, and the Cowboys did plenty of that during Landry’s tenure. He was a winning coach and a tremendous organizer, building the Cowboy brand into the widely-known “America’s Team”, a label they proudly embrace today. Landry was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1990, taking his rightful place among other gridiron giants of the 20th century.

Tom Landry, always dapper on the Cowboys’ sideline