Strike up the band ...
There's a lot of football happening this 1970 weekend, and Ebony is just in time with its helpful lineup of "man-sized football snacks" ...
Heath Post 1970 Nation (#HP1970N) will remember that we got an early-bird peek at Ebony's NFL70 projections, but those came from this November issue ...
(This issue also features a compelling double-truck promotion of the Ebony-Jet Record Club ...)
(But I digress ...)
Here are the Nov. 15, 1970, NFL matchups:
"With the full lineup of 3M sports games, even you can play like a pro--without losing your amateur standing. ...
ReplyDelete"We like pancakes!"
For Patio Snack Rolls: "We know what Americans like."
DeleteHear, hear! I might get myself a Patio TV dinner for lunch today.
DeleteNBC's The Wonderful World of Disney is showing Monkees, Go Home on this Sunday night 1970, and it looks very good.
ReplyDeleteMary Tyler Moore ... solid.
ReplyDeleteCollege Football Update ...
ReplyDeleteNebraska's offense is a sight to behold ...
ReplyDeleteThe Cornhuskers are ranked fourth in the nation; No. 20 Kansas State is in Lincoln with its flashy quarterback, Lynn Dickey, who was featured in Sport earlier this fall with a chance to steal the Big 8. But it's 14-0, Nebraska, after one quarter ...
ReplyDeleteFinal: 51-13. Nebraska's really good. Attendance was reported at 67,894 at Memorial Stadium. For all but about 15 years of my whole life, I've lived in towns that were smaller than 67,894 people.
ReplyDeleteHow the Top 10 fared Saturday, Nov. 14, 1970:
ReplyDelete1. Notre Dame (8-0) and Joe Theismann beat Georgia Tech, 14-7.
2. Texas (8-0), the defending champ, beat Texas Christian, 38-0. I hope these two teams play again for the national championship. Fake 1970 me went to the Cotton Bowl last year, and that game was awesome.
3. Ohio State (8-0) beat Purdue, 10-7. Sport also did a Q&A earlier this year with four stud college quarterbacks. Theismann was one. Ohio State's Rex Kern was another.
4. Nebraska (5-0-1) beat Kansas State, 51-13.
5. Michigan (6-0) beat Iowa, 35-0. I think it says 6-0, anyway. I think the Chicago Tribune is making its type smaller.
6. Stanford (6-2) lost to Air Force, 31-14. Stanford's Jim Plunkett was another of the four Sport quarterbacks.
7. Arkansas (8-1) beat Southern Methodist, 36-3.
8. Auburn (7-2) lost to Georgia, 31-17.
9. Louisiana State (7-1) beat Mississippi State, 38-7.
10. Tennessee (701) was idle.
The fourth Sport quarterback was Ole Miss's Archie Manning.
Syracuse 19 at West Virginia 28. Morgantown rushes the field.
DeleteBut Nov. 14, 1970, is going to turn out to be one of the very worst days in college-football history--and particularly awful for Bobby Bowden and the rest of the people of West Virginia.
DeleteFrank Sinatra and a bunch of other people are celebrating Jack Benny's 20th year on TV on NBC on Sunday night.
ReplyDeleteThis is good, but I wish he had just come out and done this whole album.
OK, back to Week 9 of the NFL season ...
ReplyDeleteThe 2-5-1 Saints come to Miami to play the 4-4 Dolphins, and Tom Brookshier says the locals are riding Don Shula to bench fourth-year-quarterback Bob Griese (in favor of John Stofa, presumably).
ReplyDeleteNew Orleans--featuring its all-Ohio State backfield of Tom Barrington and rookie Jim Otis--leads 10-7 early. And then four times Miami drives into Saints territory, only to fumble three times and see the fourth possession squandered on a Griese overthrow to the end zone. There's a throw in this clip to the flat where Griese flings the ball under heavy pressure, and Jim Kiick has to wrestle the ball away from a streaking New Orleans defensive back. If that pass had been returned for a touchdown and 17-7 Saints lead, and the Dolphins had gone on to slip to 4-5, I wonder if that would've been the end for Bob Griese (and start of John Stofa) in Miami.
ReplyDeleteBut, alas, Griese hits a deep pass to his new stud receiver, Paul Warfield, and then Kiick has a 56-yard run later in the game. And Miami wins, 21-10.
Pro Football Reference says Bob Griese's career ends up being comparable with those of Terry Bradshaw, Drew Bledsoe, John Hadl, Donovan McNabb, Roman Gabriel, Jim Kelly, Ben Roethlisberger, Jim Hart, Mark Brunell and Phil Simms. But Griese's first three seasons--and Griese was in his fourth season in 1970--compare most closely with the first three years of Mark Rypien, Doug Williams, Pat Haden, David Carr, Neil O'Donnell, Drew Bledsoe, Jason Campbell, Jay Schroeder, Jake Plummer and Jim Plunkett.
DeleteChicago (3-5) at Green Bay (4-4)...
ReplyDeleteI've become a big Cooper Rollow fan. Here are parts of the sports editor's game story in the Nov. 16, 1970, Chicago Tribune ...
ReplyDeleteThere is so much good stuff happening in these paragraphs in such economical ways ...
DeleteBart Starr, his right arm throbbing with pain, took the Green Bay Packers 80 yards in the final two minutes to earn a 20 to 19 victory over the Chicago Bears before 56,263 screaming fans today in Lambeau Field.
ReplyDelete"All I could see was green grass ahead of me," said the Packer quarterback after he scored the winning touchdown on a three-yard rollout around right end with three seconds remaining and Dale Livingston added the extra point.
Mac Percival had brought the Bears from behind to an apparent 19 to 13 triumph by kicking three field goals in the final period.
"The play was sent in from the bench," Starr explained minutes after he leaped like a startled fawn from the underbrush and sped around the flank into the end zone to bring the Packer record to 5-4. ...
That first paragraph that appears here is actually the second paragraph of Cooper Rollow's story. Here’s his lede: “GREEN BAY, Wis., Nov. 15—The old master of suspense wrote another electrifying chapter to his personal success saga today."
DeleteThe lede is fine, but the second, "Bart Starr, his right arm throbbing" paragraph is a quintessential "nut graph." You could read Cooper Rollow's second paragraph alone and be sufficiently up to speed with what happened in yesterday's game. My favorite part is how he mentions the number of people at the game. There were only about 88,000 people living in Green Bay in 1970, but this football game drew 57,000 people (and they were screaming). That's a meaningful fact about humanity.
The "green grass ahead of me" quote is evocative as all get-out, and I imagine the first dozen paragraphs pretty much wrote themselves as soon as Cooper Rollow heard it come out of Bart Starr's mouth.
DeleteWhen Starr scampered over the goal line, Doug Buffone, the Bears' left linebacker, was nowhere in sight.
ReplyDelete"My job was to keep the tight end from going off the line of scrimmage," Buffone said. "The ball was faked into the middle and I knocked down (Packer tight end John) Hilton."
I don't know what the post-game protocol was in 1970, but my guess is that Cooper Rollow went and got this quote himself in the Bears' locker room. This is the kind of key, specific detail that an athlete can/will give a reporter immediately following an event when they're exhausted in every way--if the athlete is actually asked a key, specific question and her or his decisions at that moment. Athletes so often sound dull because they get general, vague questions with no possible clear answer (e.g., How much did you guys want this today? "Ummm? ... 12.8 much?")
DeleteIt was Starr's first full-time appearance since he was injured in the Los Angeles game four weeks ago and the decision to let the 36-year-old quarterback play was not made until minutes before the opening kickoff.
ReplyDelete"After he threw a few times in practice I asked him if he thought he could play," said Coach Phil Bengtson. "He said he'd like to give it a try. He was in constant pain throughout the game."
It was obvious that Starr was not putting his old zing on the ball, but he was surprisingly accurate. He wound up with 23 completions in 35 attempts for 220 yards.
At one juncture, Starr had completed 15 passes and 11 of them had been short ones to his swinging backs. But neither the quarterback nor his coach would admit that the short passing game was dictated by Starr's bad arm.
"You don't complete many bombs against a zone defense like that of the Bears," Bengtson declared.
"The Bears were giving me a good rush and I didn't have time to throw the long ones," echoed Starr.
More terrific detail from inside the statistics here, and Cooper Rollow wouldn't've had the boys at Football Outsiders feeding him material.
DeleteUnfortunately for the Bears, they did not give Starr much of a rush during the vital last minute and 40 seconds. Instead of putting the heat on Starr, the Bears went back into their "prevent" defense with only three men on the line.
ReplyDeletePercival had just missed a 43-yard field goal attempt which would have clinched victory for the Bears when Starr brought the Packers up to the scrimmage line at the Green Bay 20.
Fresh troops had been sent in to help Starr in the per- sons of Larry Krause and Perry Williams after Donny Ander- son and Jim Grabowski had handled the running back chores for the bulk of the game.
"We needed some guys with some energy who weren't all tuckered out," Starr said. "I can't say enough about the way Krause and Williams played in the clutch."
On first down at the 20, Starr hit his old crony, End Carroll Dale, on the right sideline for 18 yards. After missing Krause, the Packer whipped the ball to Hilton over the middle for 29 yards to the Chicago 33.
One minute and 20 seconds remained when Starr hit Krause for 11 yards and first down at the 22. A six-yard shot to Williams followed by an 1l-yarder to Krause left 29 seconds showing on the scoreboard.
With the scrimmage line at the 5, a Bear was offside, and Starr, reacting quickly, threw the ball out of bounds. The Packers had no timeouts remaining, and this gave him time to receive instructions from the bench during the automatic timeout after officials walked off the penalty-half the distance from the goal line.
The Bear defense, which had played an outstanding game, braced for the one final effort, but as soon as Starr headed to his right with the football, it was obvious he was going to make it.
Note that without overreaching and assigning blame (when he really wouldn't know who to blame), Cooper Rollow points out the problem of the Bears' prevent strategy late in the game. Maybe that was the head coach. Maybe it was a defensive coach. Maybe it's that the players made mistakes and did the wrong thing. Maybe it's a mutiny in the huddle. Maybe the coaches the best plays they could understanding the limitations of their players in such a late-game situation. Whatever. Who knows? All Cooper Rollow knows is that there was a problem, and he says so.
DeleteAnd, of course, the point about the Chicago penalty and the lack of Packer timeout is brilliant.
Delete(Incidentally, note that Bart Starr never in his paragraphs does anything but praise other people--even his opponents. I know some people would say, well, it's easy to be a nice guy when you win, and I know some people might think that Bart Starr was just being political. Pishposh. I think Bart Starr knows how to live and treat people right.)
DeleteThe Bears had their usual troubles on offense. Operating under Jack Concannon, they never once made a successful third down play on their own. The Bears had 14 third down opportunities and the only time they made the first down yardage was when the Packers were called for holding.
ReplyDeleteConversely, Starr had 19 third down chances and converted seven of them into first downs.
If it hadn't been for Percival, the Bears wouldn't have been in the ball game at all. Big Mac, who clicked from 23 yards out in the third period, kicked field goals of 38, 13 and 31 yards in the fourth quarter to apparently bring Coach Jim Doolev's club out of the woods.
Devastating, late blame paragraphs from Cooper Rollow here--again, though, without overreach. He doesn't say the third-down struggles were Jack Concannon's fault--just that they happened under his watch. It's interesting, by the way, that Cooper Rollow didn't quote Jim Dooley in this story.
DeleteThe headline on the wire-service AFC roundup two pages later in the Nov. 16 Chicago Tribune was, "Carter Paces Bengal Upset of Browns." That's Virgil Carter, who had a falling out last season with Jim Dooley and who ended up via waivers in Cincinnati after Greg Cook was injured.
DeleteIn the Bears' defense of their 3-6 seasons so far, it must be noted that they are missing one very key component to their attack. The truly amazing Gale Sayers played in only two games this season. He had his second 1,000-yard-rushing season last year after hurting his right knee, but he never did look right. This year, it was his left knee that was injured. Hoptown 1970 me just hopes he gets all of the rehabilitation time he needs and returns next season or whenever and gets on to the second half of a terrific career; Sayers is only 27, after all.
ReplyDelete(And thank you for another year, Wikipedia.)
DeleteI love how frequently commentators like Tom Brookshier take shots at computers in this era ... Buffalo (3-5) at Baltimore (7-1) ...
ReplyDeleteI love how frequently commentators like Tom Brookshier take shots at computers in this era ... Buffalo 17 at Baltimore 17 ... Atlanta 13 at Philadelphia 13 as rookie Mark Moseley misses a last-second, 27-yard field-goal try for the Eagles (both teams look fantastic, however) ...
ReplyDeletePat Summerall says that Don Maynard and George Sauer looked like Don Maynard and George Sauer, even though it was Al Woodall and not Joe Namath throwing to them, and the 1-7 Jets shocked the 5-2-1 Rams in Los Angeles, 31-20.
ReplyDeleteTom Brookshier, meanwhile, says it was "the Virgil Carter Show" in Cincinnati (Cooper Rollow takes note), and the 2-6 Bengals beat the 4-4 Browns, 14-10. The Associated Press roundup of this Sunday's games quoted Paul Brown calling this the greatest victory of his coaching career, and that's pretty fun to think about.
6-1-1 49ers 30 at 2-5-1 Oilers 20 ... Summerall: "For a while, it appeared that Houston could be a spoiler ... But the game turned in the 49ers' favor when No. 27, Al Randolph, spiked Houston's punt, and the ball rolled out of the end zone for a safety ... Houston's secondary began to falter under the whip arm of the hottest quarterback in pro football."
ReplyDeleteKansas City (4-3-1) at Pittsburgh (4-4) brings Len Dawson back to Pittsburgh, the team that cut him before he went to the Chiefs, to new Three Rivers Stadium ... Brookshier: "The recurring nightmare of the championship quarterback who got away ... For a time, these two tough, stone-aged squads traded favors with in kind until it seemed neither was willing to take advantage of the other ... Defense has been the reason for Pittsburgh's strong showing in 1970, and No. 44, Lee Calland, is one of the ringleaders of that unit they call, 'Trackdown Incorporated.' ... But, after a stuttering start, Kansas City got rolling ... Len Dawson, one of the more famous castoff Steeler quarterbacks, gave Pittsburgh the air, hooking up on 19 of 24 passes for 257 yards and three touchdowns--this one, the first of two to his dentist, Billy Cannon ... It's likely that, in their two Terrys, Pittsburgh holds at least one of the great quarterbacks for the future. But, for now, it was Len Dawson's day." Chiefs, 31-14.
ReplyDeleteRedskins (4-4) at Giants (5-3) ... Summerall: "An all-but-forgotten player, No. 24 Tucker Fredrickson, played the greatest game of his career ... But in the third quarter, the Redskins exploded. No. 31 Charlie Harraway race 57 yards the first time the Redskins touched the ball. Sonny Jorgensen flew one to Charley Taylor, and the Redskins were disappearing in the distance ... At the end of the third period, Washington led, 33-14 ... But, in the fourth quarter, Ron Johnson became the man of the minute, as he ripped off yardage in greedy hunks. Yards turned into points, but what New York fan dared to hope that the Giants could pull it out? ... Every minute had its hero, and the man of the next minute was Tucker Fredrickson, whose 57-yard excursion gave the Giants new life ... The last minute belonged to Ron Johnson, who skirted end and swooped into the end zone like a victorious war eagle. For New York, it was their sixth straight win. And although they trail the Cardinals by one full game, they may soon be taking that Giant step to the top."
ReplyDeleteDetroit (5-3) at Minnesota (7-1) ... Brookshier: "Eventually, the Lions inspired defense caused a Gary Cuozzo fumble. They took advantage on a Greg Landry-to-Mel Farr reception. Detroit led, and their fans loved it … Gary Cuozzo lofted a sky bolt to No. 21, Jim Lindsey, but the Vikings still trailed, and time was waning … Then, for the third time in the game, Clint Jones took the ball in, and the Vikings had pulled it out. For them, it meant six wins in a row and an almost-unbeatable lead in the NFC Central Division. For the Lions, it meant that hope was almost at an end. And it proved that to beat the purple pillagers, you have to give more than 100 percent. And how do you do that?” Vikings, 24-20.
ReplyDeleteSan Diego (3-3-2) at Boston (1-7) ... Brookshier "Once again, Joe Kapp was in search of the magic of Minnesota past ... Jim Nance topped an early drive with Boston's third touchdown in seven games and the first Patriot lead since the second week of the season. But the winter of Joe Kapp's discontent is not yet over ... Chargers: 16-14. Love NFL Films' late shift to the Dave Brubeck-ish number behind graceful Lance Alworth in mucky Boston.
ReplyDeleteOakland (4-2-2) at Denver <4-4) ... Summerall: "Lou Saban had to find a way to stop a three-game losing streak ... As always, Oakland was on top early ... Oakland moved to a commanding, 17-6 fourth-quarter lead ... Suddenly, with less than a quarter remaining, Denver began to control the action, as No. 14, Pete Liske, came off a bootleg to spear No. 83, Jim Whalen ... The pendulum of play had swung toward Denver, and a worried John Madden watched the Broncos take the ball away from his Raiders and roar upfield again. ... The momentum-fired Broncos had forged a sudden, 19-7 lead with only four minutes left until victory. Denver's long-suffering fans sensed sweet revenge ... Oakland's old man sensed a challenge ... In 21 years, George Blanda has learned it all ... to stand tall under pressure, like the pressure of a winning touchdown pass ... Blanda and Fred Biletnikoff made it look easy ... All in a day's work for Oakland's old miracle man." Raiders: 24-19.
ReplyDelete