17. 1966 NFL Championship Game

On New Year’s Day 1967, the visiting Packers faced off against the Dallas Cowboys in the 1966 NFL Championship Game, a game that would determine the 34th champion of the NFL and send the winner to the first Super Bowl two weeks later. The ­Packers, the defending champions, carried a 12–2 record to the ­Western ­Conference title. The Cowboys, whose 10–3 record in the Eastern ­Conference represented the first winning mark for the team that began play in 1960, hosted the game because it was the Eastern Conference’s turn on the alternate-year schedule.

A day after a capacity crowd gathered on New Year’s Eve to watch the University of Georgia beat local favorite, SMU, in the Cotton Bowl, another sellout of 74,152 shook off their hangovers from the previous night and paid $10 to watch the NFL’s best do battle on a sunny afternoon with temperatures in the low 50s at kickoff.

The Packers jumped to a 14–0 lead in the first five minutes. Bart Starr hit Elijah Pitts for the first score. On the ensuing kickoff, Jim Grabowski returned Mel Renfro’s fumble 18 yards for a touchdown. “My feet never touched the ground,” Grabowski told the Milwaukee Sentinel. “I floated to the sidelines.”

Many teams facing an early deficit against the Packers folded, but Dallas—an emerging powerhouse that led the league in both total yards and points—didn’t blink. Led by standout quarterback Don Meredith, the Cowboys tied the game with a three-yard run from Dan Reeves and a 23-yard scamper from Don Perkins.

With Starr spreading his passes around to various receivers en route to a 304-yard day, the Packers grabbed a seemingly safe 34–20 lead with five minutes, 20 seconds left. But Meredith, who had thrown eight straight incompletions, rebounded with a couple of short completions and a first-down scramble. Facing third and 20 in his own territory, Meredith eluded a heavy rush from Lionel Aldridge and Willie Davis and unleashed a long pass for Frank Clarke, who found a seam in the defense, caught the ball at the Green Bay 30, and outsprinted Tom Brown into the end zone to bring Dallas to within a touchdown with 4:09 left to play.

Unable to salt the game away, the Packers were forced to punt. Facing a heavy rush, Don Chandler shanked a 16-yard punt, giving the Cowboys the ball at midfield with just more than two minutes left. Meredith worked quickly. He hit Clarke, a native of Beloit, Wisconsin, for a 21-yard gain and then tried to attack Brown on a corner route. The pass went incomplete, but Brown was whistled for pass interference. With 1:52 left the Cowboys needed two yards to tie the game and force overtime. It might as well have been two miles.

On second and goal at the 1, Meredith called for a rollout pass and completed a touchdown to tight end Pettis Norman that didn’t count because left tackle Jim Boeke jumped offside. That put the ball on the Green Bay 6. A swing pass to Reeves fell incomplete. On third down Meredith hit Norman for four yards. On fourth and goal, Meredith called a rollout run-pass option, the type of play that athletic quarterbacks made a staple 40 years later. As the offense approached the line of scrimmage, Dave Robinson noticed that speedster Bob Hayes, an Olympic sprinter, was lined up in the tight end spot directly in front of him.

In most short-yardage and goal-line situations, the Cowboys would take Hayes out of the game and use tight end Clarke as a flanker and put Norman into Clarke’s spot. This time was different, and Robinson was ready. “Bob Hayes could not block me on his best day,” Robinson said in his deep baritone, unleashing a hearty laugh that punctuates many of his favorite Packers stories. “In fact, if he was twins, the two of them could not have blocked me.”

Hayes wasn’t in the game to block. He was looking for redemption. The Packers had limited him to one reception on the day—a one-yard catch that ended in a fumble that he recovered. He also lost nine yards trying to return three punts. He was almost nabbed for a safety when he fielded a punt at the 1-yard line.

The final play was his shot to erase all of Dallas’ mistakes. The Cowboys wanted the Packers to think a sweep was coming, but Hayes was going to slip away from the line so that the fastest man in the sport was isolated against a cornerback in a one-on-one matchup.

At the snap Robinson engaged Hayes briefly. “I wanted to let him know I was there,” he said, laughing.

As guard Leon Donohue pulled to his right with Meredith following behind, Robinson disengaged Hayes and shot through the gap behind the guard. Donohue saw what was happening and tried to circle back to protect his quarterback. It was too late. Robinson met Meredith at the 8-yard line. “Either Don Meredith was slower than he thought, or I was faster than he thought,” Robinson said. “Anyway, I caught him.”

Robinson grabbed the quarterback by the left arm and wrapped his right arm around the quarterback’s neck near his right shoulder pad. As both men were tumbling to the ground, Meredith had no choice but to flip the ball toward the end zone in desperation. The shotput pass was picked off by Brown, sealing the 34–27 victory. “I got sick to my stomach when he got the pass off,” Robinson said. “He got the ball off, sort of sidearm, and I could not see what was happening. The first thing I heard was the crowd. Then I jumped up and saw Brown getting up with the ball.”

The play left the Cowboys feeling queasy, too. “We made too many errors, and it cost us the ballgame,” Dallas coach Tom Landry said afterward. “Green Bay is a real good team, and it’s no embarrassment to lose to them, but we still had our chances.”

Ermal Allen, the offensive backfield coach on Landry’s staff, marveled at Robinson’s instincts. “He made [the play] himself,” Allen told Chuck Johnson of The Milwaukee Journal. “We’d never run that to the right out of a Brown Left Formation. So he hadn’t seen it on the films or been told to watch for it. He just reacted properly and probably cost us the game.”

Meredith agreed. “[Robinson] should pinch [play to the inside] in that situation,” the quarterback said. “But there he was on the outside chasing me. I knew I wasn’t fast enough to outrun him or cut to the inside, so all I could try to do was throw the ball.”

As the Packers celebrated their fourth title in six years and the $8,600 winners’ share paycheck that came with it (Dallas players got $6,000 each), Robinson knew he would catch some grief from his perfectionist coach, Vince Lombardi, who would have preferred Robinson had stayed home to protect against the run. “Vince knew that what I did was successful,” Robinson said. “But he would never say that in a million years. He graded everyone’s performance with pluses or minuses. He gave me a -2 on that play.”

Eventually, Lombardi relented. In Vince Lombardi on Football, which was published after his death, Lombardi said of the play: “The man who had to make the play for us was the linebacker. He did. Dave Robinson, as he was taught to do, analyzed before reacting and, reading rollout, fought through the blocker protecting Meredith and then chased Meredith with his hands up high, screening him off from his receivers, and when Dave got to him, he tried to pin both arms and forced Meredith to throw the ball up for grabs. We intercepted, and that was that.”

Though it was overshadowed by the Ice Bowl game 364 days later, the Packers’ victory in the Cotton Bowl was special. And Robinson’s dash was the clincher. “I tell people that because of that play, the [Super Bowl] trophy is called the Vince Lombardi Trophy and not the Tom Landry Trophy,” Robinson said. “The Tom Landry Trophy doesn’t sound right.”