I apologize, dear reader. I am usually more vigilant about marking important anniversaries. Somehow, I allowed last Saturday to slip through my five hole, leaving me a week tardy in commemorating a seminal moment in our civic sporting history.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That would be Sunday, Aug. 22, 1976.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Fifty years and one week ago, the Jets traveled to Houston and defeated the Oilers 27-24 in the fourth of their six exhibition games after losing the first three. In a nod to usual Jets zaniness, head coach Lou Holtz \u2014 shaken after Richard Todd fumbled a couple of snaps as they were trying to run out the clock late \u2014 summoned Joe Namath to return to the game.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Joe Willie had already relieved his knees of the roughly 90 pounds of braces required to stay upright and pinched a fat chaw of Skoal between his cheek and gums. After limping to the line of scrimmage, he smiled at 10 Jets and 11 Oilers and announced: \u201cFellas, I\u2019m taking a knee. Let\u2019s not get anyone hurt.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I apologize, dear reader. I am usually more vigilant about marking important anniversaries. Somehow, I allowed last Saturday…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":986863,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2051],"tags":[7,226,13638,67580,1917,255,2321,2097,6,22253,9,2833,3248],"class_list":["post-986862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-jets","tag-football","tag-jets","tag-joe-namath","tag-lou-holtz","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-jets","tag-newyork","tag-newyorkjets","tag-nfl","tag-open-mike","tag-sports","tag-sports-columnists","tag-sports-plus"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/117181887494069252","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/986862","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=986862"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/986862\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/986863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=986862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=986862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=986862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}