Here is what I wish for you, dear reader, no matter which side of the football divide you may hang your hat. I wish for you a return trip to the fall and early winter of 1981. \u201cChariots of Fire\u201d was the big picture in theaters. \u201cCelebration,\u201d the perennially ubiquitous Kool & the Gang song, was on endless loop on the radio. \u201cDallas,\u201d of course, was the No. 1 TV show.<\/p>\n
And New York football emerged from protracted hibernation.<\/p>\n
How bad was it then? Put it this way: The Giants played the Bears in the NFL title game on Dec. 29, 1963 \u2014 barely a month after the JFK assassination. That would be the last time they made the playoffs in the LBJ administration, and they would take a full pass on the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations. Eighteen years and 17 seasons passed without a single playoff appearance.<\/p>\n
How bad was it? Put it this way: The Jets played their last game as defending champions of the NFL with 11 days left in the 1960s. They lost that day to the Chiefs in a wind-swept Shea Stadium in an AFL playoff game, then took a full pass on the entirety of the \u201970s without again making postseason.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Here is what I wish for you, dear reader, no matter which side of the football divide you…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":293372,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2051],"tags":[7,226,1917,56,255,2321,2097,6,22253,9,2833,3248],"class_list":{"0":"post-293371","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-jets","8":"tag-football","9":"tag-jets","10":"tag-new-york","11":"tag-new-york-giants","12":"tag-new-york-jets","13":"tag-newyork","14":"tag-newyorkjets","15":"tag-nfl","16":"tag-open-mike","17":"tag-sports","18":"tag-sports-columnists","19":"tag-sports-plus"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/115039839565038749","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293371\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/293372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}