Roger Brown. The Ultimate Runner-Up.
Roger was a great, great defensive lineman who was a dominating force with the Detroit Lions in the early sixties. In the 1962 “Thanksgiving Day Massacre”, he sacked Bart Starr seven times as the Lions thumped the Packers and gave Lombardi’s greatest team their only loss of the season.
He then was traded to Los Angeles, just in time for George Allen’s resurrection of the team, and he replaced an injured Rosie Grier on the “Fearsome Foursome”, one of the greatest defensive lines to play the game.
Winning just seemed to follow him. Championships did not. This is where “The Playoff Bowl” comes in.
The “Bert Bell Benefit Bowl” (again, I LOVE the alliteration) was created as a charity game to raise money for the NFL players pension fund. So, its heart was in the right place. It was situated in Miami’s Orange Bowl, as the city was eager to have a pro team of its own, and this brought the NFL right into sunny Miami. So, it was a great venue for a great cause.
The problem? No one wanted to play the damn game. It basically said, “You had a great season, but you lost. So, here’s a chance to get injured for very little personal benefit.” The NFL tried to up the ante by claiming the winner was “officially” the third place team in the NFL, but that didn’t help. Vince Lombardi forever scarred the game when his ‘63 Packers had to play after his 11-2-1 team lost the division to the Chicago Bears. He called it “a Sh!t Bowl…a loser’s bowl for losers.” When he lost the 1964 game to the St. Louis Cardinals, he famously said that it was “a hinky-dink football game, held in a hinky-dink town, played by hinky-dink players. That’s all second place is – hinky dink.”
As for Roger Brown? He played in the Bert Bell/Playoff/Sh!t Bowl/Hinky-Dink Game FIVE times–three times with the Lions (1960-61-62) and twice with the Rams (1967 and ‘69), more than any other player. Playing the Playoff Bowl so many times, he said, gave him “the worst inferiority complex”. He added, “I was in five of them, and to have played in it five of the ten years it was in existence is pitiful.” To make matters worse, his last game was the ‘69 Playoff Bowl.
Eventually, the NFL called it an exhibition, because the losing team didn’t want or need another loss added to their season, and the winner gained pretty much nothing. And when Miami got the AFL expansion Dolphins, interest plummeted locally. So when the leagues officially merged for the 1970 season and the playoffs expanded, the Bert Bell/Playoff/Sh!t Bowl/Hinky-Dink Game died quietly and unmourned. And no one dared bring it up with Roger Brown.
Check out this tribute to the Great Roger Brown:
