UPDATED: I enjoyed watching the Jets upset the Colts this weekend...
...in Super Bowl III, which was re-broadcast in living color last night on the NFL Network, the oldest existing videotape of a Super Bowl telecast (from January 1969, of course; in case you forgot there was the late Curt Gowdy doing a promo for NBC coverage of "President Johnson's final State of the Union address on Tuesday night." Think LBJ could have gotten health care passed?....sorry, I digress.)
Just about the only thing I've ever achieved in life is that I've seen every single Super Bowl, starting in 1967, when I was age 7-going-on-8, and it was cool to thus re-watch the last quarter of the Jets' mega-upset over a ridiculously young-looking Don Shula's Colts. I'm curious if anyone else saw here it, and saw these things that shouldn't have been surprising but still were, such as...
-- watching the Jets' non-soccer-style kicker Jim O'Brien kick a 9-yard field goal (!), which was actually a lot harder than it sounds, because it was such a sharp angle from the hashmark, through the narrower goalposts that were set on the goal line.
-- watching defensive and offensive linemen who were normal sized human beings -- i.e., 240 pounds or so -- and not 350-pound freakizoids of nature.
-- the simplicity of the offensive schemes -- I swear most of the passing plays were either a "down-and-out" or a "post."
-- the amazing simpliciity of the telecast itself, with only a couple of camera angles, rare instant replays that seemed to come from only one camera in the end zone, no Goodyear blimp (for the SUPER BOWL -- are you kidding me!) and of course rare "graphics" that were usually just a player's name and number and looked like they came from a manual typewriter. Also, the time clock was shown infrequently and until the final two minutes the announcers (Gowdy, Kyle Rote and Al DeRogatis) rarely even mentioned the clock at all.
The other thing about that game is that as good as the Jets -- especially their defense -- played that afternoon, the Colts might have won if they had substituted Johnny Unitas, who mounted a late-game comeback, earlier in the game. Looking it up on Wikipedia, I also learned that in leading the Jets to an NFL championship, Joe Namath only had a 49 percent completion percentage in the regular season and threw more interceptions than touchdowns. But he's a Hall of Famer...times really do change!
Not so much for the since-then-woeful Jets, who back in the present lost predictably to the Colts today. Still rooting for the Saints, who still have a prayer at this point.
UPDATE: Dat's the ticket! It was great watching the Saints win...and Favre lose!