Professional Football Researchers Association Forum

According to the voters apparently NFL football became a LOT more exciting at the turn of the 21st century.

Some good ones on there, but Chris has a point. Where is the Ice Bowl? Where is the 1962 AFL Title Game? Where is the 1958 NFL Title Game? The 1971 AFC Conference Championship Game (Miami-Kansas City)? The Heidi Bowl?

Ah well ... I am getting old ...

One indication of how bad the "new" Browns are is that the best game they could come up with is a game that they were their usual total mess for the first half before coming back with their biggest comeback ever. As far as the "old" version, I can think of plenty of available regular season games I'd prefer seeing rather than the 1990 playoff game against the Bills.

JeffreyMiller wrote:Some good ones on there, but Chris has a point. Where is the Ice Bowl? Where is the 1962 AFL Title Game? Where is the 1958 NFL Title Game? The 1971 AFC Conference Championship Game (Miami-Kansas City)? The Heidi Bowl?

Ah well ... I am getting old ...

How many of those full broadcasts are even available, though? I'd like to see what options, if any, the fans could choose from. I'm gonna speculate that it was multiple choice rather than write in whatever games you wanna see.

There were 161 games on the master list according to nfl.com. They probably didn't even have most of the lesser known gems on there- games like Cle-Min 80, SL-Cle 85, Cle-Chi 86, and GB-Det 86.

JWL wrote:There were 161 games on the master list according to nfl.com. They probably didn't even have most of the lesser known gems on there- games like Cle-Min 80, SL-Cle 85, Cle-Chi 86, and GB-Det 86.

Not sure there was anything terribly memorable about the 1986 Browns-Bears game. The other two Cleveland games had late-game dramatics. They could have had either 86 Browns-Steelers game--the first broke the 16-year curse of never winning at Three Rivers, while the second was an OT thriller.

I thought it was an exciting game featuring an up and coming team and the Super Bowl champions. Maybe it just wasn't as good as I remember?

JeffreyMiller wrote:Some good ones on there, but Chris has a point. Where is the Ice Bowl? Where is the 1962 AFL Title Game? Where is the 1958 NFL Title Game? The 1971 AFC Conference Championship Game (Miami-Kansas City)? The Heidi Bowl?

Ah well ... I am getting old ...

The issue is, most of those games are simply not available. Of the games you named, only the 1962 AFL Championship is available and there are clips available on youtube. I have seen the Oilers Texans broadcast in order to write about it and it is missing a couple small gaps but it is about 95 percent complete.

The closest we'll ever have to a full broadcast of the Ice Bowl is the NFL's Greatest Games show and the radio broadcast of the game. A lot of these great games are unfortunately lost to time. If a copy of the Ice Bowl broadcast were in the network archives, somebody would have already smuggled out a copy and there would be a gazillion copies of the game out there and it would already be on youtube.

There are a lot of old games on YouTube. I hear there are also sites where you can paste the URL of the youtube video and it converts it to a MP4 video which you can then download to your hard drive. What's even better is that some of these videos have old commercials in them which takes me back down memory lane.