Professional Football Researchers Association Forum

JWL's post about both 1985 Eagles/Vikings games on the thread I started about 'hidden' great games inspired this thread. Both were indeed great games with the last of the two (season finale, Eagles 37-35 win) getting even less historic attention due to Eagles already being eliminated along with Marion Campbell already fired. Fred Bruney being interim HC that game (1-0 'career' record) always an interesting trivia footnote.

What other interesting twice in a regular season matchups between non-division opponents between '78 and '01 come to mind? Only one that truly comes to mind for me are both playoff teams, Jets and Giants, getting swept by non-playoff Hawks and Pack respectively in '81. I guess there never were two such games between two playoff or above-500 teams.

I was watching the 1985 Bills season highlight a few weeks ago and they played the Chargers twice.

MatthewToy wrote:I was watching the 1985 Bills season highlight a few weeks ago and they played the Chargers twice.

I think that would be the last time that they played SD until Week 1 of the 1998 season, which was the first game of Ryan Leaf's career, and the first game for Rob Johnson and Doug Flutie in a Buffalo uniform.

As for other series, the 1986 Bills-Chiefs 2-fer was interesting. You had the up and coming Bills against a Chief team that would get to the playoffs for the first time in 15 years on the strength of it's defense and special teams. Both teams won on the road. The Chiefs won 20-17 in Week 4 at Buffalo, and the Bills won 17-14 in Week 13 at Kansas City (a revenge win for Marv Levy, who was hired a few weeks before).

7DnBrnc53 wrote:

MatthewToy wrote:I was watching the 1985 Bills season highlight a few weeks ago and they played the Chargers twice.

I think that would be the last time that they played SD until Week 1 of the 1998 season, which was the first game of Ryan Leaf's career, and the first game for Rob Johnson and Doug Flutie in a Buffalo uniform.

Under the scheduling format of that time, for two teams in the same conference to miss playing each other for a span of twelve years is downright bizarre.

Todd Pence wrote:

7DnBrnc53 wrote:

MatthewToy wrote:I was watching the 1985 Bills season highlight a few weeks ago and they played the Chargers twice.

I think that would be the last time that they played SD until Week 1 of the 1998 season, which was the first game of Ryan Leaf's career, and the first game for Rob Johnson and Doug Flutie in a Buffalo uniform.

Under the scheduling format of that time, for two teams in the same conference to miss playing each other for a span of twelve years is downright bizarre.

In a similar vein, the last time the Raiders made a regular season trip to face the Colts in Baltimore was 1975--"Ghost to the Post" was two years later. Their next road trip to face the Colts didn't occur for another 25 years in 2000. However, the first official Ravens game in history was in Baltimore--against the Raiders.

Dallas played GB twice in '89

Whenever I think about non-division teams meeting twice I always think Chargers-Colts. Mostly because it was interesting to me as a kid - not only because they played twice, but also because they played twice in three weeks.

The first seven games between the Cowboys and Bucs (including an '81 playoff game) were all in Big D. Oddly, they played each other in 1983, but didn't matchup again until 1990--when they played each other twice in a three-week span. In the latter case, that was Dallas' first visit to Tampa. After that game, the two teams wouldn't face each other again for 10 years.

The Los Angeles Raiders never played in Pittsburgh during the regular or post season.