1967 NFL Championship Game

The NFL added a sixteenth team in 1967 and realigned to four divisions, with each winner advancing to the postseason. Future hall of fame head coach Tom Landry of Dallas led his team to first place in the Capitol Division with a 9–5 record. The Green Bay Packers, and future hall of fame head coach Vince Lombardi, won the Central Division with a 9–4–1 record.

The 1967 game was a rematch of the previous season played in Dallas on January 1, 1967, just 364 days earlier.[9] More than two years after football had become the most popular televised sport in the nation,[10] this game featured a match up that all of America hoped for in the NFL Championship.[9]

Landry's and Lombardi's paths crossed in 1954 with the New York Giants when Lombardi became the offensive coordinator and Landry, the left cornerback for the Giants, took on the added role of defensive coordinator.[11] Landry was the best defensive mind of his era and Lombardi was the best offensive coach of his era.[12] From a personality standpoint, Landry and Lombardi were the antithesis of each other. Lombardi was a vociferously demanding coach[13] who would respond with the greatest elation to success and tremendous sadness to the slightest setback. Landry was stoic and calm in even the most tense situations.

The Las Vegas betting line listed the Packers as 6½-point favorites.[14] The Cowboys would employ their vaunted "Doomsday Defense", a nickname given to the defensive unit by a Dallas journalist because it had been successful at making goal line stands.[15] The eight-year-old Dallas franchise was trying to win its first world championship.[16] The Packers were on a quest to achieve what had never been done before in the modern era – three consecutive world championships (Green Bay had previously won three championships in a row, 1929–1931, when titles were determined on a won-loss percentage basis).[17] To the game, Green Bay brought its renowned Packers sweep and the Cowboys brought a defensive scheme, the Flex, which was specifically designed by Landry to stop the "running to daylight" tactic the Packers employed in their sweep.[18] Although the Packers and the Chicago Bears were arch-rivals,[19][20][21][22] Lombardi's most passionate game planning was in preparing for Landry's "Flex".[23]

Saturday, on the eve of the game, NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle called Jim Kensil and Don Weiss, the executive directors of the NFL,[24] for an update on the weather conditions.[8] It is suspected that they informed him that Sunday's game time temperature of about 5 °F (−15 °C) was playable. Rozelle, who in June 1966 had seen to it that the AFL-NFL Championship game would always be in a warm weather city,[25] inquired if the game could be postponed until Monday. Predictions held Monday would be even colder than Sunday and the game was not postponed.[8] Little did they know that the cold front would be far colder and would arrive much sooner than expected. The Packers, who had for years eschewed late-season home games because of the cold winters,[26] would play host to the Cowboys in a game that would mark the coldest New Year's Eve in the history of Green Bay,[27] and the coldest title game in the history of the NFL,[28] a record that still stands.[29] David Maraniss recounts in his 1999 Vince Lombardi biography When Pride Still Mattered that Packers safety Willie Wood left his home Sunday morning to find his car's battery frozen and dead. When a local service-station attendant was summoned to start the car, Wood told him, "It's just too cold to play. They're going to call this game off."[30]

Kickoff was shortly after 1 pm CST.[41][42] The Packers took a 14–0 lead after two touchdown passes from Bart Starr to Boyd Dowler on their first three possessions of the game. However, despite gaining only two first downs in the first half, Dallas scored twice off Green Bay fumbles late in the half to cut the Packers' lead to 14–10.

The Cowboys then started the second half with a long drive into Green Bay territory, but lost the ball on a fumble. However, they took the lead, 17–14, on a 50-yard halfback option pass by Dan Reeves on the first play of the fourth quarter. After missing a potential game-tying field goal, Green Bay scored the game-winning touchdown on its subsequent drive, re-gaining the lead, 21–17, with only 13 seconds remaining.

Emotionally, both the Packers[66] and Cowboys[67] players were spent. In the Packers' locker room, the players openly wept.[66] Kramer told interviewers, "Many things have been said about Coach (Lombardi). And he is not always understood by those who quote him. The players understand. This is one beautiful man."[68] Packers linebacker Ray Nitschke developed frostbite in his feet, causing his toenails to fall off and his toes to turn purple.[69] Bart Starr had frostbite on his fingers and several Packer players were suffering from flu-like symptoms.[70] Cowboys George Andrie, Willie Townes, and Dick Daniels also suffered frostbite from the game.[71]

The furthest thing from Starr's mind was the thought of playing in the AFL–NFL World Championship Game. To him, this was the Packers' championship game.[72] Green Bay went on to finish the postseason by easily[73] defeating the American Football League (AFL) champion Oakland Raiders, 33–14, in the second AFL–NFL World Championship Game.[74]

Brookshier and other journalists went into the winning locker room for post-game interviews. At some point, journalists had become aware of the significance of the block Kramer and Bowman had placed on Pugh.[75] Of the eleven cameras Ed and Steve Sabol set up to film the game, the pivot and motion capabilities of Camera Five had become frozen by the time Starr's sneak occurred. This particular camera, however, was fortuitously positioned to offer a perfect view of the block.[76] CBS had been replaying the block repeatedly and had been giving the TV audience a detailed perspective of the workings of the offensive and defensive line.

Frank Gifford recounted in his 1993 autobiography The Whole Ten Yards that he requested and received permission from CBS producers to go into the losing locker room for on-air post-game interviews—a practice unheard of in that era. Gifford, as a New York Giants player and a broadcaster, already enjoyed a friendship with Meredith, and he approached the quarterback for his thoughts on the game. The exhausted Meredith, in an emotion-choked voice, expressed pride in his teammates' play, and said, in a figurative sense, that he felt the Cowboys did not really lose the game because the effort expended was its own reward. Gifford wrote that the interview attracted considerable attention, and that Meredith's forthcoming and introspective responses played a part in his selection for ABC's Monday Night Football telecasts three years later.[77] Defensive tackle Bob Lilly took a different view, telling reporters that the Cowboys were a great team except that they could not win the "big one". Wide receiver Lance Rentzel later remarked that on the team plane home from Green Bay to Dallas' Love Field, "not one word was spoken the entire flight."

The game was the end of an era and the beginning of another.[71] This would be the last year the NFL championship game was considered more important than the AFL-NFL World Championship Game, for in the following year Joe Namath and the New York Jets staged an upset victory over the Baltimore Colts that would bring the AFL to full legitimacy and validate the merger of the two leagues that had been agreed upon in 1966 and would be consummated in 1970.[78] Landry, along with others, believed that football games should never be held in weather conditions so harsh.[79] In the post-merger era of the NFL, the World Championship Game (as the Super Bowl is officially called) would be offered to cities on a bid, and no outdoor stadium in a cold-weather city would be offered the World Championship Game until 2013, when MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, hosted Super Bowl XLVIII on February 2, 2014.[29] The NFL, reflecting the impact the "Ice Bowl" had on the sport, considered the selection of MetLife Stadium to be a "one off" occasion. Fortunately, the temperature at kickoff was a balmy 49 degrees, and the game just missed a snowstorm that came the following day.

With Green Bay having won five NFL championships in seven years[80] and the first two Super Bowls, Vince Lombardi retired as head coach of the Packers on February 1, 1968, but retained his position of general manager for the 1968 season.[74] Many Dallas players described this game as the most devastating loss of the 1966–1970 period. Having lost this game and the 1966 title game in the winning seconds of each game, Landry was subject to criticism that he was unable to win the Big One,[71] a stigma that persisted until Dallas won its first NFL title in the 1971 season. In the three seasons following 1967, the Cowboys suffered two upsets in the playoffs to the Cleveland Browns, then lost Super Bowl V to the Baltimore Colts 13–16 on a last-second field goal. Schramm considered this game to be the turning point to Dallas becoming America's Team because of the way the Cowboys battled back in the game.[81]

There has been a bit of revisionism in some Cowboys memories concerning the game. Frank Clarke thought the Packers' final drive was "lucky football," though Chuck Howley acknowledged that the Cowboys' double coverage on the wide receivers left the backs open underneath. Cornell Green even claimed that a bad pass interference call, "the worst call I've seen in history," on Dave Edwards aided the Packers' final drive: "That was the game."[82] In reality, the play Green recalled in which Starr threw a pass behind Donny Anderson happened back in the first quarter; but the call was defensive holding (Willie Townes held tight end Marv Fleming), a 5-yard penalty, and the infraction occurred before Starr threw the pass. There were no penalties called on either team during the final Packers drive. Even Tom Landry in the NFL Film of the Ice Bowl stated that if he had realized the field was frozen, the Cowboys would have switched to a zone defense.

If the Packers did not score on the final drive, Lombardi likely would not have become the iconic fixture in football that he is.[83] Landry later remarked that on the "tundra"[84] of Lambeau Field the better team lost,[85] and that it was Lombardi's ability to develop character in his Packers that gave them the ability to never lose hope.[86] Schramm believed that Lombardi's installation of the heating-coils under the playing field showed he was more concerned with sportsmanship than winning.[87] At Lombardi's funeral mass in 1970 in New York, Cardinal Terence Cooke gave the eulogy, based on Lombardi's favorite scripture, St. Paul's Run to Win letter to the Corinthians.[88]

Interviewed by reporters amid the Packers' post-game celebrations, Jerry Kramer's comments about Lombardi were widely quoted later. Intimating that past press treatments of the coach, including an unflattering 1967 Esquire magazine piece by sportswriter Leonard Schecter were unfair, Kramer said "Many things have been said about Coach. And he is not always understood by those who quote him. The players understand. This is one beautiful man."[89]

The synergy between Gifford and Meredith in the post-game interview prompted Roone Arledge to team Gifford with Meredith and Howard Cosell for the second season of Monday Night Football in 1971.[90] Don Meredith would never win a championship, but he would later become more famous as an announcer for Monday Night Football than he had been as a player. Although Landry and Lombardi were very different, they did respect each other and regarded each other as friends.[91]

A few months later, Lombardi assembled family members, friends and journalists to his home to watch The Greatest Challenge, the 1967 Packers season highlight film, which was produced by Ed Sabol and his son, Steve, and narrated by John Facenda.[92] In the finale of the film, Facenda would say of the Green Bay Packers:

They will be remembered as the faces of victory. They will be remembered for their coach, whose iron discipline was the foundation on which they built a fortress. And most of all, they will be remembered as a group of men who faced the greatest challenge their sport has ever produced—and conquered.

[93]

ESPN's SportsCentury ranked it as #6 on the Greatest Games of the 20th Century in 1999, one of three NFL Games to reach that mark (Super Bowl III in 1969 at #3 and the 1958 NFL Championship Game in 1958 as #1.).

NFL Films produced two highlight films of the Ice Bowl itself, one called "A Chilling Championship" narrated by William Woodson, and another version which was the NFL Game of the Week with a different narrator. Those films were then later used to produce the NFL Films recreation of the game in their "Greatest Games Series", released on VHS and on the Packers History DVD.

On the NFL Network's countdown program, NFL Top 10, the Ice Bowl has been named the top or near the top of several lists such as:

• Top 10 Bad Weather Games– #1
• Top 10 Games with a Name– #2
• Top 10 Gutsy Calls– #1 (Bart Starr's sneak)
• Top 10 Clutch drives– #4

The multimedia narrative 17776, which centers on fantastically arduous football games, refers to the 1967 game and to Gifford's "bite of my coffee" jape in its first chapter.[94]

In 2017, NFL Films produced an episode of its series The Timeline about the Ice Bowl. The episode is co-produced and narrated Michael Meredith, a New York-based filmmaker and son of the Cowboys’ quarterback that day, Don Meredith. At the end of his review, Sports Illustrated writer Peter King wrote "I highly recommend you watch this documentary if you love a good history story, or if you love football—or, of course, if you love either team." Among the people interviewed about the game included actor Willem Dafoe, who attended the game as a 12-year old.

The NFL had six game officials in 1967; the line judge was added two seasons earlier in 1965 and the side judge arrived eleven years later in 1978.

• Cowboys–Packers rivalry
• 1967 NFL season
• History of the National Football League championship
• 1967 American Football League Championship Game
• Freezer Bowl: considered the coldest game in NFL history with wind chill
• Epic in Miami: arguably considered the hottest game in NFL history
• 65th Grey Cup: the CFL championship game of 1977 that was also nicknamed “The Ice Bowl”

• Claerbaut, David (2004), Bart Starr: When Leadership Mattered, Lanham, MD: Taylor Trade Publishing ISBN 1-58979-117-7
• Davis, Jeff (2008), Rozelle: Czar of the NFL. New York: McGraw-Hill ISBN 0-07-159352-7
• Eisenberg, John (2009), That First Season:: How Vince Lombardi Took the Worst Team in the NFL and Set It on the Path to Glory. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
• Flynn, George L. (1976). The Vince Lombardi Scrapbook. New York: Grosset and Dunlap ISBN 0-448-12401-7
• Gifford, Frank and Richmond, Peter (2008), The Glory Game:How the 1958 NFL Championship Changed Football Forever. New York:Harper Collins ISBN 978-0-06-171659-1
• Golenbock, Peter (2005). Landry's Boys – An Oral History of a Team and an Era. Triumph Books. ISBN 978-1572437463
• Gruver, Ed. (1997). The Ice Bowl: The Cold Truth About Football's Most Unforgettable Game. Ithaca, NY: McBooks Press. ISBN 0-935526-38-2
• Gruver, Edward (2002). Nitschke. Lanham, MD.: Taylor Trade Publishing. ISBN 1-58979-127-4
• Kramer, Jerry, and Schapp, Dick (2006), Instant Replay, The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer. New York: Doubleday ISBN 978-0-385-51745-4
• MacCambridge, Michael (2004, 2005), America's Game. New York: Anchor Books ISBN 978-0-307-48143-6
• When Pride Still Mattered, A Life of Vince Lombardi, by David Maraniss, 1999, (ISBN 0-684-84418-4)
• O'Brien, Michael (1987), Vince: A Personal Biography of Vince Lombardi. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc. ISBN 0-688-07406-5
• Phillips, Donald T. (2001), Run to Win. New York: St. Martin's Griffin. ISBN 0-312-27298-7 (hc)
• Ribowski, Mark (2014). The Last Cowboy: A Life of Tom Landry. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation. ISBN 978-0871403339
• Shropshire, Mike. (1997). The Ice Bowl. New York: Donald I. Fine Books. ISBN 1-55611-532-6
• St. John, Bob (2000). Landry: The Legend and the Legacy. Nashville: Word Publishing ISBN 0-8499-1670-4

• Cameron, Steve. (1993). The Packers!. Dallas, TX: Taylor Publishing. ISBN 0-87833-048-8
• Gifford, Frank and Richmond, Peter (2008), The Glory Game:How the 1958 NFL Championship Changed Football Forever. New York: Harper Collins. ISBN 978-0-06-171659-1
• Summerall, Pat and Levin, Michael (2010), Giants:What I learned about life from Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-0-470-90908-9
• Gruver, Ed (2005), The Ice Bowl: The Cold Truth About Football's Most Unforgettable Game, Ithaca, NY: McBooks Press ISBN 978-1-59013-080-3

• Pro Football Hall of Fame's description of the game
• ESPN's list of greatest NFL games, includes the Ice Bowl
• WTMJ retrospective of the game Archived July 23, 2011, at the Wayback Machine with highlights from the original radio broadcast
• Packers 1966 offense playbook

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