Playoff Bowl

The Playoff Bowl (officially, the Bert Bell Benefit Bowl) was a post-season game for third place in the NFL, played ten times following the 1960-69 seasons. Bell was a co-founder of the Philadelphia Eagles as well as a co-owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers during much of the 1940s. He was the commissioner of the NFL from 1946 until his death in October 1959, which occurred while attending an Eagles-Steelers game.

Locations

All ten games in the Playoff Bowl series were contested at the Orange Bowl in Miami. The games were played in January, the week following the NFL championship game (and the collegiate Orange Bowl game on New Year's Day). The NFL's Pro Bowl (all-star game) was played the week after the Playoff Bowl.

History

After the 1959 season, NFL owners faced competition from the newly-formed AFL and wanted a vehicle through which to showcase more of its superior NFL professional football product on television. At the time. few NFL games were televised and there was only one scheduled post-season game, the NFL Championship Game. The Playoff Bowl was devised to match the second-place teams from the NFL's two conferences (Eastern & Western). This doubled from two to four the number of top NFL teams appearing in post-season play on national 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 in the game was waning.

In the 1967 season, the NFL expanded to 16 teams and four scheduled post-season contests. The NFL sub-divided its two conferences (now 8 teams each) into two divisions of four teams each: 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) appeared in the Playoff Bowl to vie for third place. For the three seasons (1967-69) 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.

The end of the Playoff Bowl

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. 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.

Official Status

Although the ten Playoff Bowls were official third place playoff games at the time they were played, the NFL currently classifies them as exhibition games, and does not include them in the official results (or statistics) for the post-season.

Criticism

Legendary coach Vince Lombardi disliked the Playoff Bowl, coaching in the game following the 1963 and 1964 seasons, after winning NFL titles in 1961-62. 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 rinky-dink football game, held in a rinky-dink town, played by rinky-dink players. That's all second place is—rinky 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 from (1965-67. As of 2007, the Packers are the only NFL team ever to achieve this "three-peat" in the post-season era (which began in 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 "rinky-dink" Miami's Orange Bowl in January 1968.

Legacy

One vestige of the Playoff Bowl remains, in that the head coaches of the losing teams from the conference championship games are the head coaches of their 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.)

Playoff Bowl results

All ten games were played at the Orange Bowl in Miami, Florida.

References

*"NFL Record and Fact Book" (ISBN 1-932994-36-X)
*"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

* [http://www.mmbolding.com/BSR/The_Playoff_Bowl.htm The Bert Bell Playoff Bowl]