The NFL, regardless of who is running the show as commissioner, has never stood still.
Rules, playoff formats, team alignments, salary structure and standards for player safety have evolved over the years, although the player safety issues were addressed at a slower pace until measures in the past decade regarding concussions began to get serious in 2011.
The current NFL, with 32 teams, eight divisions, 14 playoff qualifiers and 12 postseason games leading to the Super Bowl, is hardly recognizable from the pre-merger era, with two conferences, 14 teams and one championship game.
Except some years there were playoff games to settle ties within a conference. There was one 10-year period where the two runner-up teams played. And for fans who think
three preseason games are too many, there was a time when teams played double that number.
Here are some features of the NFL that are in the past. But all went into making the product what it is today.
One league, two conferences
From 1933 until 1966, the NFL had two conferences, the Eastern and Western. There was one playoff game, the NFL Championship, between the two winners, always played in late December.
For anyone who thinks college football expansion ignored geography to ridiculous extremes (Stanford and Cal in the ACC? USC and UCLA in the Big Ten?), the NFL was first in line to create its own maps. Dallas and St. Louis were in the Eastern Conference. Green Bay and Baltimore were in the West.
Really, how much sense did it make for Washington and Baltimore, whose stadiums were 39 miles apart, to be in separate conferences?
The NFL Championship game was played at the home field of conference champions on a rotating basis. The East was the home team in even-numbered years and the West in odd-numbered years.
If there was a tie in the win-loss record, the tie-breaker procedure was simple: The NFL just played another game, with the home field determined by a coin flip. Head-to-head didn't matter. In 1965, the Packers and Colts tied in the West at 10-3-1 and the Packers swept the Colts during the season. They still had to play another game, which the Packers won 13-10 in overtime.
Nine times during that era, teams had to play an extra game to determine a conference champion and in 1950, Cleveland and the New York Giants tied for first in the East at 10-2 and the Los Angeles Rams and Chicago Bears tied in the West at 9-3.
The Browns beat the Giants 8-3 (for you Scorigami fans, that remains the only NFL game decided by that score) and the Rams beat the Bears 24-14. Cleveland won the NFL title over the Rams 30-28.
Howard Cosell's halftime highlights
Before SportsCenter, NFL Red Zone, streaming packages and social media clips, there was only one way for an NFL fan to see highlights of games on a weekly basis: Watch ABC's Monday Night Football and Howard Cosell's halftime highlights.
Cosell, the bombastic, egocentric analyst, was the primary reason Monday Night Football took off when it began in 1970 and part of the evening's entertainment was Cosell narrating the highlights from the previous day. He only had time for about a half-dozen games and fans of NFL teams were always up in arms because of their perception that Cosell gravitated to showing highlights from the Joe Namath New York Jets or the O.J. Simpson Buffalo Bills, leaving their team out.
Truth be told, Cosell's only agenda was an ABC one: the teams playing in the following week's Monday night game made the cut for halftime highlights, unless one of them was blown out, in which case their game was ignored. But the criticism got so fierce that Cosell would offer his own disclaimer, introducing the halftime highlights, "as selected by our producers."
Cosell's flair for the dramatic, starting in a low, somber voice to set the stage, then rising in urgency for the big plays, was his style ("Lambeau Stadium … the frozen tundra … Packers … Bears … The Pack with an early 10-0 lead … BUT THERE GOES WALTER PAYTON! LOOK AT HIM GO! TOUCHDOWN! BEARS!").
And if you're wondering where ESPN's Chris Berman got half of his repertoire, it was from Cosell, who Berman credited in the past for some of his stock comments such as "He … could … go … all … the … way!"
The Playoff Bowl
The concept would be nearly unbelievable in this day and age when the fans of 31 NFL teams each year come away from the season disappointed when their team doesn't win the Super Bowl.
But there used to be a postseason NFL game between two non-playoff teams. It went by several names — the Playoff Bowl, the Runner-Up Bowl and officially, the Bert Bell Benefit Bowl, for the former co-owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers and the NFL Commissioner from 1946 to 1959.
The format was pretty simple. From 1960 to 1969, before the NFL-AFL merger, the two second-place teams from each conference would travel to Miami to play a game the Sunday after the Orange Bowl, nationally televised by CBS.
Let's examine one absurdity of the game: Two runner-up teams got to go to Miami 10 years in a row and play a postseason game, while the two conference champions played in the following cold-weather sites in December during that period: New York and Cleveland twice, Philadelphia, Chicago, Green Bay and Minneapolis.
Indeed, the Miami fans embraced the game so much that the NFL saw the value in taking the Super Bowl to Miami early in its history (three times in the first five years) and in putting an NFL franchise in the city. The average Playoff Bowl attendance was 42,288, with a peak of 65,569 on Jan. 3, 1965, to watch the Colts thrash Dallas 35-3 with Tom Matte at quarterback because of an injury to John Unitas. Matte threw two TD passes to Jerry Orr.
Not everyone embraced the game. Green Bay coach Vince Lombardi, whose Packers split Playoff Bowls in 1963 and 1964, called it "a hinky-dink game, played by hinky-dink teams in a hinky-dink town."
No one was ever sure what Lombardi had against Miami.
Detroit, which had the misfortune of being in the same conference with the Lombardi Packers and the Unitas-led Colts, played in the first three Playoff Bowls, and went 3-0, beating Cleveland, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The Colts and the Los Angeles Rams are the only other teams to win two games. Green Bay, the St. Louis Cardinals and Dallas each won once.
Cleveland was the biggest loser, falling three times in the Playoff Bowl.
The game results and stats don't count in NFL records. The league viewed it as another exhibition game.
The proceeds at least went to a noble cause, the first NFL player pension fund. Players from the winning team were paid $600 in the first Playoff Bowl and $1,200 in the last.
If you thought three preseason games were too many …
In the early days of the NFL, it was not uncommon for teams to play "barnstorming" games before and after the season. The old Pittsburgh Pirates would even schedule exhibition games against semipro teams during bye weeks of the NFL schedule.
Obviously there was no players association back then to put a stop to that nonsense.
During the 12- and 14-game season eras, teams generally played as many preseason games as they wanted to schedule, sometimes only four or five. But in 1970, the league expanded the preseason to six games, which continued until 1978, when moving to a 16-game schedule reduced the preseason games to four.
For those who think six preseason games was too many, consider this: NFL teams didn't have the year-round training programs they have now, such as conditioning, weight training, organized team activities and mini-camp. The increase in joint practices has also lessened the need for preseason games.
But when players departed the team's facility after the final game of the season and didn't return until the first day of training camp, playing and preparing for six preseason games (and also practicing twice a day, forbidden under current Collective Bargaining Agreements), was needed to get players into shape.
Speaking of the NFL preseason …
Before the advent of the NFL Hall of Fame game to serve as the opener to the preseason, there was the College All-Star Game.
The what?
Yes. The same guy who pioneered the first Major League Baseball All-Star game, Chicago Tribune sports editor Arch Ward, came up with the idea of pitting the defending NFL champion against a team of college all-stars, with the proceeds going to charity.
The game was played in Chicago from 1934 to 1976, with the Bears battling the College All-Stars to a scoreless tie in front of 79,432 at Soldier Field in the first game.
The Bears won the second game 5-0 and the All-Stars won their first in 1937, 6-0 over Green Bay on Sammy Baugh's TD pass. The college team was 3-1-2 in the first six years and through 1947 were 5-7-2. The pros quickly began dominating and were 24-4 until the end of the series and finished with a 31-9-2 margin.
Pressure from NFL coaches worried over losing top draft picks to injury (and not having them in camp for two weeks so they could practice with the All-Star team) led to the elimination of the game after the Pittsburgh Steelers won 24-0 in 1976. The NFL champions won the last 12 College All-Star games.
Goalposts on the goal line?
There was a time when the original founders of football thought this was a good idea. The goalposts, with two supporting standards, were on the goal line and therefore in the field of play.
According to NFL records, the goalposts were on the goal line from 1920 to 1927, then moved to the back of the end zone when the NCAA did. Inexplicably, the NFL moved the goalposts to the goal line in 1933 and kept them there until 1974.
Goalposts on the goal line led to more chip-shot field goals. Given the standard of the holder lining up 7 yards behind the line of scrimmage, it was possible for kickers to be credited with 8-yard field goals. The shortest field goal on record in the NFL was a 7-yarder by George Blanda of the Chicago Bears against the Detroit Lions on Sept. 26, 1954.
The Jaguars' Cam Little will see that 7-yarder and raise 61: His NFL record 68-yarder last year against Las Vegas.
Goalposts on the goal line also created some interesting red-zone pass patterns.
“The goal line goal post was part of offensive strategy,” former broadcaster Don Criqui told Sports Illustrated in a 2017 article. “It was an extra blocker on goal-line runs and crossing patterns. Receivers Lance Alworth of the Chargers and Bernie Casey of the LA Rams were two of the best I saw at using the goal post to screen defenders on pass patterns. Goal line goal posts brought excitement and danger.”
Receivers would even run patterns into the end zone, grab a goal post and use it to spin around and go in the other direction, leaving the defender behind.
But there were even more instances of players getting injured crashing into the goal posts, even after the NFL went to the single standard post. Offenses also got frustrated with passes hitting the posts (which were ruled incomplete). The most famous instance of that was in Super Bowl VII when Washington's Billy Kilmer had tight end Jerry Smith wide open in the end zone, only to have his pass get deflected by the post.
The NFL finally went back to the college rule for the goalpost in 1974, putting them behind the end zone, with the crossbar parallel to the back edge of the end zone.
Dual-use fields
From early September to late October, many NFL and Major League Baseball teams used the same stadium. If it was a natural grass field, it led to the sight of football fields being laid out over baseball fields, with the bare ground of the infield still visible and in play.
New York, Washington, Oakland, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and San Francisco were examples of mixed-use stadiums with natural-grass play, where football teams had to play on turf and dirt. And ask any former grounds crew worker at a cold-weather site how tough it was to grow sod over the infield when you had to start in October.
As recently as 2013, the Jacksonville Jaguars played at Oakland with dirt still dominating most of the field. When quarterback Chad Henne had to scramble one time, Times-Union Jaguars writer Ryan O'Halloran noted on X that Henne gained 9 yards "and is safe at second."
With the Raiders moving to Las Vegas and the boom in stadium construction, NFL and Major League Baseball teams no longer share fields.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: NFL of the past included a game for third place and goal posts in play
