1970 NFL season

• 1. Introduction

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  The 1970 NFL season was the 51st regular season of the National Football League, and the first in which two rival leagues finally played under one roof. For years, the NFL and the upstart American Football League had competed for fans, players, and television money. The merger had been agreed in 1966, but it took four years to fully take effect. When it did, the sport that Americans knew was transformed overnight. How did 26 teams divide themselves into a single, coherent league? Who decided which teams went where? And what happened when the most famous coach in the game died before the season was even halfway done? The answers to those questions run through a single, consequential year.

• 2. Drawing the Map

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  In May 1969, three NFL clubs agreed to something no team relishes: moving into unfamiliar company. The Baltimore Colts, the Cleveland Browns, and the Pittsburgh Steelers each accepted a transfer to join the ten former AFL franchises in the new American Football Conference. The remaining thirteen NFL teams stayed together as the National Football Conference. The goal was balance; thirteen teams in each conference, arranged in three divisions apiece, with the Eastern divisions carrying five teams and the other four divisions carrying four each.

  The AFC realignment went relatively smoothly, but the NFC was another matter. Discussions about how to sort those thirteen clubs grew so contentious that five different plans were proposed and rejected. The final arrangement was not chosen by a committee vote or a commissioner's decree. On the 16th of January, 1970, Pete Rozelle's secretary, Thelma Elkjer, drew the winning plan from an envelope placed inside a vase. That is the method by which the structure of modern professional football was decided.

  The resulting divisions kept most traditional rivalries intact, which was the central concern for fans and owners alike. The NFC East in particular was arranged to balance competitive strength rather than pure geography. Plans to add two expansion franchises were also discussed, though that ambition was set aside; the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Seattle Seahawks would not join the league until 1976.

• 3. The Draft and the Rules

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  From the 27th to the 28th of January, 1970, teams gathered at the Belmont Plaza Hotel in New York City for the first unified draft. Pittsburgh held the first overall pick and used it on quarterback Terry Bradshaw of Louisiana Tech University. That selection would define the Steelers for the decade ahead.

  With two leagues merging, someone had to decide which rules would govern play. The NFL's standards became the baseline, with two AFL practices carried over as exceptions. The scoreboard clock became the official game clock, replacing the field judge's watch that the old NFL had used. Players' last names also became universal on the backs of jerseys; AFL teams had long used them, but pre-merger NFL clubs had not. One AFL innovation that did not survive was the two-point conversion. The league had tested compromise rules on the subject during late-1960s preseasons, but ultimately kept the NFL's single-point standard. The two-point conversion would not reach the NFL until 1994.

• 4. Monday Night and the Networks

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  CBS and NBC each retained the broadcast rights they had held before the merger: CBS for NFC games and NBC for AFC games. A clean arrangement, down to interconference matchups, where the visiting team's conference determined which network carried the game. All Sunday afternoon games in a team's home market remained blacked out, so fans tuned to the same network every week regardless.

  The two networks split Super Bowl rights on a yearly rotation, alternating through Super Bowl XVIII. For those years, whichever network did not carry the Super Bowl picked up the Pro Bowl the following week. All three networks signed four-year contracts running through 1973.

  The season's defining broadcast launch came on the 21st of September, 1970, when ABC's Monday Night Football debuted. The NFL became the first professional sports league in the United States to air a regular series of prime-time nationally televised games, and the only league ever to appear simultaneously on all three major broadcast networks. The first Monday Night Football booth featured play-by-play man Keith Jackson, commentator Howard Cosell, and former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Don Meredith. Over at CBS, Paul Christman had been the lead color commentator, but he died of a heart attack on the 2nd of March, 1970, and Pat Summerall took his place. Both teams that reached the Super Bowl that year, the Colts and the Cowboys, had suffered lopsided losses on Monday Night Football during the regular season.

• 5. Lombardi, Piccolo, and Kalsu

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  Vince Lombardi had led the Green Bay Packers to five NFL championships and two Super Bowl titles. He had then taken on the Washington Redskins as head coach. In late June, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He died on the 3rd of September, 1970, at age 57, just before the regular season began. Offensive line coach Bill Austin stepped in to run the Redskins for the rest of the year.

  Brian Piccolo, a running back for the Chicago Bears, died on the 16th of June, 1970. Bob Kalsu, an offensive guard for the Buffalo Bills, died on the 21st of July at age 25. Kalsu was killed while on active duty during the Vietnam War, making him one of the very few active professional athletes to die in that conflict. Jimmy Conzelman, who had played wing back for the Detroit Lions, the Milwaukee Badgers, and the Providence Steam Roller, died on the 31st of July at age 72; he had been elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1964.

  The season also saw a significant coaching upheaval in its own right. Don Shula left the Baltimore Colts to take over the Miami Dolphins, and Don McCafferty replaced him in Baltimore. Boston's Clive Rush resigned after seven games for medical reasons, with John Mazur finishing the season as interim before being hired full-time for 1971. In New Orleans, Tom Fears was fired after a 1-5-1 start; J.D. Roberts replaced him.

• 6. Stadiums, Turf, and the Bears' Dilemma

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  The NFL had new minimum requirements for its venues, and not every team's home could meet them. Wrigley Field, where the Chicago Bears had long played, seated fewer than 50,000 and lacked lights, making it ineligible for late afternoon and night games. The Chicago Cubs, who owned the stadium, were in playoff contention and unwilling to reconfigure it for football. The Bears played their first home game of 1970 at Northwestern University's Dyche Stadium in Evanston, treating it as a trial for a possible permanent move. That plan collapsed after opposition from Big Ten athletic directors and Evanston residents. Negotiations to remain at Wrigley Field also fell apart. The Bears moved to Soldier Field in 1971, where they play to this day, with a single interruption in 2002 when a Soldier Field renovation sent them temporarily to the University of Illinois' Memorial Stadium.

  The Boston Patriots played at Harvard Stadium in 1970, their fourth facility in eleven seasons, because Harvard Stadium was the only Massachusetts venue that met the NFL's 50,000-seat minimum. The search for a stable home pushed the team to build Schaeffer Stadium in Foxborough, which opened in 1971. The move came with a name change: Boston became New England.

  Two new multi-purpose stadiums opened that year. Riverfront Stadium replaced Nippert Stadium as the Bengals' home; Three Rivers Stadium replaced Pitt Stadium for the Steelers. In Philadelphia, Franklin Field hosted its last Eagles season before Veterans Stadium opened in 1971.

  Seven teams played on artificial turf in 1970, up from two in each league the year before. The five newcomers joining Houston and Philadelphia were Cincinnati, Dallas, Miami, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis. Super Bowl V at the Orange Bowl in Miami was played on Poly-Turf, making it the first Super Bowl contested on an artificial surface.

• 7. Records and the Race

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  On the 8th of November, New Orleans Saints placekicker Tom Dempsey kicked a 63-yard field goal as time expired, defeating the visiting Detroit Lions 19-17. The kick broke the previous record by seven yards, a record that had stood for seventeen years since Bert Rechichar set it. Dempsey's mark held for 43 years before it was matched and eventually surpassed.

  The division races produced a near-crisis in tiebreaking. Late in the regular season, a scenario emerged in which the Cowboys, Lions, and Giants, all playing at home and favored to win, could have finished with nearly identical records. Under that outcome, New York would have claimed the NFC East title and a coin flip would have decided the wild card between Dallas and Detroit. The Giants' upset loss to the Los Angeles Rams removed that possibility. The close call prompted the league to expand its tiebreaker criteria afterward to reduce reliance on a coin flip.

  In the AFC East, Baltimore finished 11-2-1, winning the division comfortably under first-year head coach Don McCafferty. The Colts beat the Dallas Cowboys 16-13 in Super Bowl V on the 17th of January, 1971, at the Orange Bowl in Miami. The following Sunday, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the NFC beat the AFC 27-6 in the Pro Bowl.