Bob Gill wrote:As for the footage itself, it looked to me line the offensive linemen were much higher off the ground in their stances ...
Jim Taylor looked pretty good running the ball -- more agile than I remembered. And he was well past his prime (1960-64) by 1966, so much so that the Packers let him go to the Saints a year later.
I think watching the line play was most fascinating. The LB's also, especially Bell.
Taylor even had good runs when the legendary Packers OL'men didn't give him the greatest blocking (in their defense, KC's DL and again, Bell ... )
Jim Taylor is a longtime favorite of mine, if I can go slightly off topic here. By the early 90's, when I was a kid, when I talked about my favorite football players (after listing all the Seahawks, of course) I would say Deion Sanders (my favorite player) then I would say Jim Taylor and Jack Lambert. Now, my parents were awesome and ordered me a ton of NFL Films VHS's, and the MNF VHS's and SI VHS's, etc and I re-watched those over and over but really I was seeing Taylor and Lambert (and the "Holy Roller" clip and "The Sea of Hands" clip, etc) over and over on TV as a kid.
Things like the 1980 Browns NFL Films, I didn't even have that on VHS (do now), but I knew it by heart and could recall the entire program by the time I was 10 because I had seen it so many times on TV. Or 1987 with the cheesy "Road to the Super Bowl" song that for some reason I thought was amazing as a kid ("if you hit, that road with all your soul" ha!) knew the entire program and I didn't have a copy of that either (do now), it just was replayed on TV so many times that I knew it. Just like Packers NFL Films programming, where I thought Jim Taylor was amazing and loved how he ran the ball and I knew all the Lambert clips, the Browns, throwing down Cliff Harris, etc ... It was all just on TV and I saw it all multiple times a year every year growing up.
It's crazy to me that now, with a million channels, that kids don't see these things growing up anymore. They should be seeing the '96 Jags team HL film (a personal favorite of mine) 10 times a year while they're watching one of the million ESPN's or while watching NFLN, they should have seen the "Greatest Games" of the "Tuck Rule" so many times by now that they can recall the entire program start to finish, they should know Emmitt Smith's run against the Falcons, Barry Sanders against the Pats, those images should be burned in their memory. They aren't, because they are never shown. It's sad.