Once upon a time, you actually had to be a pretty good football team to qualify for the NFL’s playoff tournament.
Before each conference split, like an amoeba, into four divisions. Before the addition of a second, then third wild card team in the 80’s and 90’s. Before added expansion caused the league to positively burst at its waistband.
Before all that, win totals of double digits were almost absolutely required in order to play into January. In fact, had the Lions not benefited from the NFL’s first experiment in wild card playoffs, they would have been one of those fine teams on the outside looking in.
1970. Nixon as your president, Watergate just a twinkle in someone’s crooked eye. The year of the Kent State killings. Words like “groovy” and “mod” were all the rage. Tie dye shirts. And plenty of changes for the NFL – and big ones, at that.
There was Monday Night Football, for one. That long-running TV anthology series debuted on September 21, with the Cleveland Browns hosting and beating the New York Jets of Joe Namath. No word on when the first Styrofoam brick was forged, to toss at Howard Cosell’s mug.
There was a merger, too. The NFL and American Football League had agreed a few years earlier to join forces, mainly to end the outlandish bidding wars that were making millionaires of college graduates. So they kicked things off, so to speak, with a few championship games – eventually known as Super Bowls – prior to morphing into one big old league in time for the 1970 season.
So the NFL had ballooned from 16 teams to 26, just like that. Two conferences – the National and American. Three divisions per conference, the winners of each one qualifying for the tournament. Oops – three’s an odd number.
Enter the wild card.
The team with the next-best winning record after the three divisional winners would gain entry. The 1970 Lions were that team – the NFC’s first-ever wild card.
And you thought the Lions were never a pioneer, except in how to lose football games!
After scuffling along to a 5-4 record, which included losing to the New Orleans Saints on Tom Dempsey’s 63-yard field goal, the Lions ran off five straight victories to storm to the finish line at 10-4. Not as good as the Minnesota Vikings’ 12-2, so they settled for commissioner Pete Rozelle’s wild card ticket.
The opponent would be the Dallas Cowboys, in the Cotton Bowl. The day after Christmas, 1970. The Lions were on a roll, maybe the hottest team in the league. Only one of their final five victories was over a team with a losing record. A few of their victims were even division leaders when the Lions knocked them off.
These were the Lions, though, so naturally there was a question mark at quarterback, even with their spiffy 10-4 record. Greg Landry, the third-year man out of Massachusetts, or Bill Munson, the more grizzled veteran? Both had played almost half a season each, each attempting about the same amount of passes. Landry was a scrambler – a third running back, really. Munson was a pocket guy. He didn’t move so good. But he could wing it.
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The 1970 Lions averaged about 25 points a game, yet couldn’t manage even two field goals worth of scoring to beat the Cowboys in that playoff game.
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Landry got the start, with head coach Joe Schmidt opting for the mobile, younger QB to counter the Cowboys’ ferocious Doomsday Defense.
The game quickly settled into a feeble display of offense. Or great defense. Take your pick. Regardless, the stars of the game were the punters, especially in the first half. First downs were only a rumor. The Cowboys had managed a field goal, though, for a 3-0 halftime lead.
Early in the third quarter, the defenses still in control, the Cowboys sacked Landry in his own end zone for a safety. 5-0 Dallas.
It remained that way until the fourth quarter. Schmidt, desperate for a spark, did the Lions thing and switched signal callers. In came Munson, and he would have one last drive to save the game for the Detroiters. Forced to take to the air – a place where Landry had failed miserably all afternoon – Munson nonetheless managed to pitter-patter the Lions downfield. The clock was inside two minutes, and the Lions had crossed the 50-yard line, thanks to Munson’s short, safe passes. The Cotton Bowl crowd grew nervous.
Eventually, the Lions made it inside the Cowboys’ 30. Barely a minute remained.
Munson went to the air again, seeking out receiver Earl McCullough. The pass was slightly high, and McCullough couldn’t quite rope it in with his two hands. He only managed to tip it, and it was intercepted – inside the Cowboys’ 20. Game over. Season over.
5-0, Cowboys.
It remains one of the most notorious playoff scores in NFL history, along with the Bears’ 73-0 pasting of the Redskins in a championship game played about four decades earlier.
The 1970 Lions averaged about 25 points a game, yet couldn’t manage even two field goals worth of scoring to beat the Cowboys in that playoff game. I’ve always firmly believed that had the Lions been able to get by the Cowboys, they would have represented the NFC in Super Bowl V, instead of Tom Landry’s bunch. Their opponent in the conference championship game would have been the San Francisco 49'ers, a team the Lions had handled in the regular season.
Twenty-five years later, another hot Lions platoon, winners of their final seven regular season games, would go into Philadelphia for one of those wild card games. They lost, 58-37.
5-0. 58-37. Whatever. Same endgame.
The Lions did get their revenge, sort of, when they beat the Cowboys 38-6 in the playoffs following the 1991 season. It remains their only postseason victory since 1957 – the Runner Up Bowl wins in the early 60’s not counting, of course.
“5-0! A baseball score!,” defensive tackle Alex Karras moaned after the playoff loss to the Cowboys.
After the Lions lost a crucial game to the Packers in the 1962 season – thanks to a major gaffe by the offense in the form of a poorly-decided pass that was intercepted late in the game – Karras hurled his helmet at quarterback Milt Plum in the lockerroom.
Karras threw no helmets in Dallas on December 26, 1970. Maybe he should have; he was released the following summer, in training camp. The 5-0 playoff match was his last NFL contest.
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