1967 NFL season

• 1. Introduction

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  The 1967 NFL season ended on the last day of December, in temperatures that dropped to thirteen degrees below zero on the field in Green Bay, Wisconsin. That game, between the Packers and the Dallas Cowboys, would become one of the most storied contests in the history of American football. It is remembered simply as the Ice Bowl. What made a quarterback sneak in frozen mud the defining image of an entire season? And how did a team from a small Wisconsin city end up writing itself permanently into the record books? This is the story of the 48th regular season of the National Football League, a year that brought expansion, a new division structure, a strange outbreak of tied games, and a dynasty completing something no team had managed in nearly four decades.

• 2. A League Remade

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  Before a single game was played, the NFL looked different on paper. The New Orleans Saints joined the league as its sixteenth team, and with that addition the old two-division structure gave way to four divisions spread across two conferences. The Eastern Conference divided into the Capitol Division, home to Dallas, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Washington, and the Century Division, with Cleveland, New York, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis. The Western Conference split into the Central, containing Chicago, Detroit, Green Bay, and Minnesota, and the Coastal, made up of Atlanta, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. A small historical footnote: when the NFL first settled on the groupings on the 30th of November, 1966, the Capitol Division was actually called the Federal Division. The name changed before the season began. An unusual arrangement also governed the Saints and Giants, who agreed to swap divisions and then return to the 1967 alignment in 1969, so that every Eastern Conference team could visit New York at least once across the three-year span.

• 3. The Saints Arrive

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  Tom Fears became the first head coach of the New Orleans Saints when the expansion franchise took the field at Tulane Stadium. Before the regular season, an expansion draft on the 9th of February, 1967 let the Saints select 42 players from the rosters of established clubs. The year-old Atlanta Falcons were given a reprieve and exempted from losing any players to the new team. Then, in the spring, the 1967 NFL/AFL draft was held on the 14th and the 15th of March at New York City's Gotham Hotel. With the very first pick of what was the first common draft between the two leagues, the Baltimore Colts chose defensive tackle Bubba Smith out of Michigan State. Smith's selection at the top of the draft announced the arrival of a new generation of players into a league in the middle of remaking itself.

• 4. Baltimore's Bitter Tiebreaker

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  The Baltimore Colts posted a record of 11 wins, 1 loss, and 2 ties, which was the best record in the entire NFL in 1967. They did not make the playoffs. Starting in 1967, the league replaced its old tiebreaker system with a new one that began with net points scored in head-to-head competition. Previously, from 1933 through 1966, a one-game playoff was held whenever two teams finished level at the top of a division. The Coastal Division came down to Baltimore and the Los Angeles Rams, who had met twice during the regular season: once a 24-24 tie in Baltimore in mid-October, and then a 34-10 Rams victory at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on the final Sunday of the regular season. The Rams held a 24-point edge in those two head-to-head meetings, and that margin handed them the division title. The other three division winners that year each finished with just nine victories, making Baltimore's exclusion one of the sharper ironies of the season.

• 5. A Season Full of Ties

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  Nine NFL games ended in ties during the 1967 regular season, more than in any year since 1932. When the two ties played in the American Football League are counted alongside them, since those records became official NFL records after the merger, 1967 stands as the only season since 1932 with ten or more tied games. The Baltimore-Los Angeles tie in October was one of the two that ultimately decided a division title and kept the league's best record out of the postseason. The new schedule structure gave each team 14 games: six within its own division, four against the other division in its conference, and four against all the teams in one division from the opposite conference.

• 6. The Ice Bowl

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  Green Bay defeated Dallas on the 31st of December, 1967 in the NFL Championship Game that came to be known as the Ice Bowl. The game-winning moment came on a quarterback sneak: Jerry Kramer's block for Bart Starr opened the path for the score that put the Packers ahead for good. The 1967 season was also the year the playoffs expanded to four teams, with division winners advancing rather than conference champions alone. Playoff sites had been determined in advance, rotating by a set formula known before the season started. The hosts for the 1967 championship round were the Capitol and Central division winners for the first-round conference championship games, with the Western Conference hosting the championship game itself. Two weeks after the Ice Bowl, Green Bay traveled to Miami's Orange Bowl and defeated the AFL champion Oakland Raiders 33-14 in Super Bowl II on the 14th of January, 1968.

• 7. Lombardi's Last Stand

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  Super Bowl II, played on the 14th of January, 1968, was Vince Lombardi's final game as head coach of the Green Bay Packers. At the time, the contest carried the official title of the AFL-NFL World Championship Game, though most people already called it the Super Bowl. That win completed something remarkable: the 1965-67 Packers became only the second team in NFL history to win three consecutive championships. The first to do it was the same Packers franchise, from 1929 through 1931. No team has won three straight NFL titles since. The Most Valuable Player award that season went to Johnny Unitas, the quarterback for Baltimore, despite his team's playoff exclusion. Coach of the Year was shared by George Allen of the L.A. Rams and Don Shula of Baltimore, the two men whose teams had met in the tiebreaker that defined the Coastal Division race.

• 8. Rule Changes and Farewells

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  Two visible changes reshaped the look of NFL fields in 1967. The "slingshot" or "tuning fork" goalpost, featuring one curved support rising from the ground and positioned behind the crossbar, became the league standard, replacing the previous offset goalpost that had used two straight supports. Before the offset posts were introduced, the supports had stood directly on the goal line. All posts were also required to be painted bright gold. A six-foot border was established as standard around the playing field; the outer edge of that border defines how close non-participants may stand, giving officials a lane to work in. The season was also marked by the deaths of two players from the league's earliest decades: Guy Chamberlin, who had played for the Chicago Bears and Canton Bulldogs among others and was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1965, died on the 4th of April at age 73; and Hobby Kinderdine, an original member of the Dayton Triangles who played center from 1920 through 1929, died on the 22nd of June at age 72. Detroit's Mel Farr won Offensive Rookie of the Year, while his teammate Lem Barney took Defensive Rookie of the Year, a rare double for one franchise that pointed toward Detroit's continued investment in young talent heading into 1968.