1967 NFL Championship Game - Legacy

Legacy

The game was the end of an era and the beginning of another. This would be the last year the NFL championship game was considered more important than the Super Bowl, 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. Landry, not alone, believed that football games should never be held in weather conditions so harsh. The NFL did not award an outdoor Super Bowl to a cold-weather city for decades; MetLife Stadium in New Jersey is scheduled to be the first in 2014.

With Green Bay having won five NFL championships in seven years 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. 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 waning seconds of each game, Landry was subject to criticism that he was unable to win the Big One, a stigma that persisted until Dallas won their 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 turning point to Dallas becoming America's Team because of the way the Cowboys battled back in the game.

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

Interviewed by reporters amid the Packers' post-game celebrations, Jerry Kramer's comments about Lombardi were widely quoted later. Intimtating 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."

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. 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.

At the snap of the ball on the block, Jethro Pugh believed that Kramer had moved early. He never mentioned it for years, because he did not think it fair to make excuses. Pugh's reticence on the uncalled offsides would bring him acclaim him as a man of class. Years later, Dan Reeves, when asked about the quarterback sneak by Starr, said it was a bad call.

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