Green Bay had not been to the Super Bowl since Lombardi won the first two in 1966 and 1967. New England made it in 1985, but had never won it. Whichever fan base went home triumphant, it would be a championship a long time in coming.
The Buffalo Bills came to the end of the 1992 NFL season the same way they’d reached the previous two—as AFC champions. But the Bills yet to win the sport’s ultimate prize and the pressure was on in the 1992 Super Bowl to win their first title.
This post is part of a series of sports history articles commemorating under-the-radar teams and moments in a given year. This article focuses on the 1998 Minnesota Vikings and the ecstasy that was their dominating regular season, along with the agony that was their NFC Championship Game loss.
You can make the argument that this was the most stunning play in the history of the NFL postseason. I’ve done a brief run through the annals of NFL playoff history to try and see if there’s anything even remotely comparable. As a disclaimer, my research consisted of clicking through the playoff scores of the past 35 years on Pro Football Reference and relying on my own memory triggers from there, so I won’t claim this is an exhaustive review, but there are very few plays which even get in the same ballpark as The Baltimore Bomb.
This post is part of a series of sports history articles commemorating under-the-radar teams and moments in a given year. The 1984 Denver Broncos marked the first year that John Elway was unequivocally the starting quarterback and he scaled great heights, before suffering a final disappointment that prepared him for the future.
Joe Gibbs had been one of the NFL’s greatest coaches during his 1981-92 run with the Washington Redskins, highlighted by three Super Bowl victories with three different starting quarterbacks. The franchise had fallen on hard times after his retirement, earning only one playoff berth in the ensuing eleven seasons. So when Gibbs came out of retirement prior to the 2004 season, it’s not for nothing that his was a second term that won bipartisan plaudits in the D.C. Beltway.
Monday Night Football was in Atlanta on October 30, 1978 and the up-and-coming Falcons were looking to make their mark. This was a franchise that had produced just two winning seasons since its inception in 1966 and never made the playoffs. But coming off consecutive wins, they were 4-4 coming into this game and were playing host to one of the traditional powers of the 1970s, the Los Angeles Rams. It was time for the 1978 Atlanta Falcons to take the next step.
We’ve had five days to digest the results of Championship Sunday—or if you’re a fan in Baltimore and San Francisco, to regurgitate them back up. And a question remains—was the Ravens’ 23-20 loss in New England the most gut-wrenching conference championship game loss in the Super Bowl era of NFL playoff history?
I can already hear the shouts in San Francisco, who say it wasn’t even the most gut-wrenching loss of January 22, 2012, much less the 46-year history of the Super Bowl era. But I think Baltimore fans get the nod in the agony department for these reasons
In the first part of TheSportsNotebook’s NFL Championship Sunday extravaganza, we opened up NFL championship history to look at 1978, and celebrated the greatness of the Pittsburgh Steelers and Dallas Cowboys. But the downside of that was, the games were lacking in drama. To pick a year where both championship games went down to the wire, let’s focus in on 1987, a year I would argue was the best in terms of competitive drama. Both title games went down to a final battle on the goal line
As part of The Sports Notebook’s NFL Championship Sunday extravaganza, we’re featuring two years that represent different types of NFL championship history. In 1978, the games weren’t especially competitive, but you had two of the league’s signature teams step up and make the mark. The Pittsburgh Steelers and Dallas Cowboys were each gunning to be the first franchise to three Super Bowl wins as they got set for Championship Sunday following the ’78 season.
It’s time for another weekend with the first round of the NFL playoffs. Yesterday, as I was making a three-hour drive through central Wisconsin, I grabbed a diet Dr. Pepper, relaxed and tried to think of the most memorable games in NFL playoff history this round since 1990. That year is the cutoff point because it’s when the NFL expanded the postseason to 12 teams and had four opening-round games. I’m afraid to say I was able to remember the matchup and winner of all 84 first-round games, and pertinent points from a lot of them. The fact I can remember this stuff while casually driving is surely at least one explanation for a lot of the problems in my life. But it is what it is, and I am who I am. So I thought I’d put a few of those memories down here.
Today, sports on Christmas Day are built around the NBA. In recent years, it was a college bowl game that was only the sports action. Perhaps no Christmas Day sports were as consequential as 1971 when the NFL played its divisional playoff round and one of them would be the longest NFL game ever played.