There’s no shame in third place, but it’s certainly not what professional athletes dream of achieving. So it’s understandable that when the National Football League instituted what was essentially a consolation match following the NFL Championship Game, players, coaches, and the media gave it scathing nicknames like “Runner Up Bowl,” “So What Bowl,” “Loser Bowl,” and even “Toilet Bowl.”
Officially known as the Bert Bell Benefit Bowl to honor former NFL Commissioner Bert Bell, who had died suddenly in October 1959, the third-place game came to be known as the Playoff Bowl. Bell had come up with the idea as a way to raise funds for the NFL players’ pension plan—an admirable purpose at a time when pro athletes' salaries were a tiny fraction of what they are today. During its decade-long existence, the Playoff Bowl raised around a million dollars for the pension plan, while players on the winning Playoff Bowl team would take home a bonus of up to $1,200.
The Playoff Bowl was first contested at the end of the 1960 season in a bid to rival the impressive TV viewership figures of the fledgling American Football League (AFL). Televised nationally on CBS, the Playoff Bowl took place at the Miami Orange Bowl in early January, usually a week after the NFL Championship Game. It featured the runners-up of the NFL’s Eastern and Western Conferences—the two teams that had lost out on the chance to compete for the championship title.
Though the annual Playoff Bowl had become a well-known television event by the mid-1960s, it was fated to fade into irrelevance with the advent of the Super Bowl and the merger of the AFL with the NFL, which was completed in 1970. That January, the Los Angeles Rams defeated the Dallas Cowboys 31-0 in a lackluster finale to the Playoff Bowl story.
The forgotten battle for third place:
- CBS paid just $75,000 for the broadcasting rights to the inaugural game, which pitted the Detroit Lions against the Cleveland Browns (the Lions won 17-16).
- Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi (the namesake of the Super Bowl trophy) was an especially vocal critic of the Playoff Bowl. The Packers competed for third place in the NFL twice, winning the Playoff Game following the 1963 season. However, after the Packers lost the 1964 game, he railed against it as "a hinky-dink football game, held in a hinky-dink town, played by hinky-dink players.”
- The Packers’ Playoff Bowl loss was more historically significant than anyone could have imagined at the time. In part fueled by the embarrassment of finishing fourth in the league so publicly, Lombardi led the Packers to three NFL championships in the 1965, 1966, and 1967 seasons. He also led the team to victory in the first two AFL–NFL World Championship Games, retrospectively termed Super Bowl I and Super Bowl II.
