Playoff Bowl
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The Playoff Bowl (officially, the Bert Bell Benefit Bowl) was a post-season game for third place in the National Football League, played following the 1960-1969 seasons. Bell, a co-founder of the Philadelphia Eagles franchise, was the commissioner of the NFL from 1946 until his death in October 1959, which occurred while attending an Eagles game.
All ten games in the series were contested at the Orange Bowl in Miami. The games were played in January, the week after the NFL championship game (and the collegiate Orange Bowl game on New Year's Day). The NFL Pro Bowl (all-star game) was played after the Playoff Bowl.
When the Playoff Bowl was initiated for the 1960 season, the NFL had just added its 13th team (the Dallas Cowboys), and its competitor the American Football League was struggling through its first year. The game matched the second-place teams from the NFL's two conferences (Eastern and Western). From 1933 through 1959, the NFL's only scheduled post-season game had been the NFL Championship. The Playoff Bowl was a second post-season game for the NFL to showcase its superior professional football product on television.
The 1966 season added another game following the NFL Championship Game, the first Super Bowl against the champions of the AFL for the undisputed championship of professional football. The establishment of the Super Bowl (not its official name until Super Bowl III) was the first phase of the AFL-NFL merger of June 1966. This new mega-game between the rival leagues was played in mid-January at a warm weather location, two weeks after the championship games for each league. The NFL's Playoff Bowl was played during the idle week and due to the increasing quality of the AFL, interest was beginning to wane.
In the 1967 season, the NFL grew to 16 teams with the addition of the expansion New Orleans Saints. The NFL sub-divided its two conferences (now 8 teams each) into two divisions of four teams each. It was now the Capitol and Century divisions in the Eastern conference, and the Central & Coastal divisions in the Western conference.
The four division winners advanced to the post-season, competing for their conference titles in the first round of the NFL playoffs. The winners (conference champions) advanced to the NFL championship game, the losers (conference runners-up) retreated to the Playoff Bowl to vie for third place. For the three seasons (1967, 1968 ,1969) preceding the 1970 merger with the AFL, the loser of the NFL's third place game ended up with a peculiar record of 0-2 for that post-season.
When the merger was completed for the 1970 season, there was discussion about continuing the Playoff Bowl, with the losers of the AFC and NFC Championship Games playing each other during the idle week before the Super Bowl. But there were now seven post-season games in the NFL (three for each conference, plus the Super Bowl), and the Pro Bowl all-star game. A "loser's game" was not necessarily attractive for the league, and the Playoff Bowl came to an end. The NFL currently classifies the ten Playoff Bowls as exhibition games, and does not include them in the official results or statistics for the post-season.
Legendary coach Vince Lombardi disliked the Playoff Bowl, coaching in the game following the 1963 and 1964 seasons, after winning NFL titles in 1961 and 1962. To his players, Lombardi called the Playoff Bowl "the 'Shit Bowl', ...a losers' bowl for losers." This lack of motivation may explain his Packers' rare post-season loss in the 1964 game (January 1965) to the St. Louis Cardinals. After he lost that Playoff Bowl, he detested it. He fumed about "a hinky-dink football game, held in a hinky-dink town, played by hinky-dink players. That's all second place is—hinky dink." Lombardi said that he would never come back and had no intention of ever finishing second again.
Using the Playoff Bowl (and loss) as motivation in 1965, the Packers won the first of three consecutive NFL championships (1965, 1966, 1967). As of 2006, the Packers are the only NFL team ever to achieve this "three-peat" in the post-season era (since 1933). During this successful run, the Packers also won the first two Super Bowls in convincing fashion. In an ironic twist, Lombardi's final game (and victory) as head coach of the Packers was Super Bowl II, played in "hinky-dink" Miami's Orange Bowl in January 1968.
One vestige of the Playoff Bowl remains, in that the head coaches of the two losing teams from the AFC and NFC championship games are the head coaches of their respective conferences' Pro Bowl teams. This all-star game is played the Sunday following the Super Bowl. (Since January 1980, this game has been played at Aloha Stadium in Honolulu, Hawaii.)
Playoff Bowl results
All ten games played at the Orange Bowl in Miami, Florida.
- January 7, 1961 - Detroit Lions 17, Cleveland Browns 16
- January 6, 1962 - Detroit Lions 38, Philadelphia Eagles 10
- January 6, 1963 - Detroit Lions 17, Pittsburgh Steelers 10
- January 9, 1964 - Green Bay Packers 40, Cleveland Browns 23
- January 8, 1965 - St. Louis Cardinals 24, Green Bay Packers 17
- January 9, 1966 - Baltimore Colts 35, Dallas Cowboys 3
- January 8, 1967 - Baltimore Colts 20, Philadelphia Eagles 14
- January 7, 1968 - Los Angeles Rams 30, Cleveland Browns 6
- January 5, 1969 - Dallas Cowboys 17, Minnesota Vikings 13
- January 3, 1970 - Los Angeles Rams 31, Dallas Cowboys 0
References
- NFL Record and Fact Book (ISBN 193299436X)
- When Pride Still Mattered, A Life of Vince Lombardi, by David Maraniss, 1999, p.362 (ISBN 0-684-84418-4)
- http://www.pro-football-reference.com - Large online database of NFL data and statistics
- ProLog/The National Football League Annual 1970-71, by Bob Oates, Jr., NFL Properties, 1971, (ISBN 0-695-80261-5)
External links
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