https://www.si.com/mmqb/2017/06/22/nfl-playoff-bowl-garbage-time
Before a mostly empty stadium at the Orange Bowl, the Cowboys’ Mike Clark kicks a field goal during the Playoff Bowl against the Vikings in 1969.
NEIL LEIFER/SPORTS ILLUSTRATED
At first, the NFL called it the Bert Bell Benefit Bowl, after the commissioner who died of a heart attack in 1959. Then it became known as the Playoff Bowl and also the Runner-Up Bowl. Players and coaches had their own names for it: Losers’ Bowl, Toilet Bowl. Vince Lombardi famously called it “a hinky-dink game.” Neither the game’s stats nor the result would count, so the players and coaches always asked, What’s the point?
“We hated playing in that game,” says Lee Roy Jordan, a Cowboys linebacker who played in three Playoff Bowls before winning a Super Bowl in 1972. “It didn’t mean a lot.”
Before a mostly empty stadium at the Orange Bowl, the Cowboys’ Mike Clark kicks a field goal during the Playoff Bowl against the Vikings in 1969.
NEIL LEIFER/SPORTS ILLUSTRATED
At first, the NFL called it the Bert Bell Benefit Bowl, after the commissioner who died of a heart attack in 1959. Then it became known as the Playoff Bowl and also the Runner-Up Bowl. Players and coaches had their own names for it: Losers’ Bowl, Toilet Bowl. Vince Lombardi famously called it “a hinky-dink game.” Neither the game’s stats nor the result would count, so the players and coaches always asked, What’s the point?
“We hated playing in that game,” says Lee Roy Jordan, a Cowboys linebacker who played in three Playoff Bowls before winning a Super Bowl in 1972. “It didn’t mean a lot.”
