Peter King wrote about this game today. Interesting read
https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.co...ng/?cid=fmiatw
Fifty years. Amazing. Fifty years have passed since the longest game in NFL history ruined Christmas dinners nationwide. Fifty years since, halfway through the second 15-minute overtime period in the Miami-Kansas City AFC playoff game, Garo Yepremian kicked a 37-yard field goal to send the Dolphins to a 27-24 victory for the ages.
That makes the game sound too form, too regular. Sitting in my living room in Enfield, Conn., magnetized to the black-and-white TV that late-afternoon-into-night, it’s the football game I most remember as a kid. Eighty-two minutes and 40 seconds in the muck of old Memorial Stadium, KC’s last game there before moving to Arrowhead the next season. It was one of the great games in NFL history, featuring one of the great individual performances of all time. A nice back, Ed Podolak, who never had even an 800-yard rushing season in a nine-year professional career, had 350 total yards (rushing, receiving, kickoff, punt), a playoff total that has never been matched to this day.
“Don’t you think I should be proud that it’s standing after 50 years?” Podolak, 74, said by phone on Christmas Eve from his Iowa home. “I’m an old fogey, and I am!”
The mark that this game made on football history is almost incalculable. The first true kicker to make the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Jan Stenerud, had a field goal blocked in the second quarter, missed a 31-yarder that would have won the game with 35 seconds left in the fourth quarter, and missed another field goal in the first overtime. When a New York Times reporter called Stenerud to talk about the game in 2012, Stenerud told him, “Do you want to talk about my mother’s funeral too?” Then Stenerud hung up. Coach Hank Stram thought this was his best team ever, and the loss left him heartbroken. KC lost the first Super Bowl, won the fourth and Stram was convinced they’d have beaten Baltimore in the AFC title game and then Dallas in the Super Bowl if his team had just gotten by Miami. As it was, that was the first of three straight Super Bowl appearances for Miami, which lost this one and then won the next two. The loss seemed to have staying power for Kansas City, which didn’t make the playoffs for the next 15 years.
“The week of that game,” Podolak recalled, “they figured out different ways to use me. That was smart because Miami basically double-covered Otis Taylor all day. That left me open.”
Podolak had 17 carries for 85 yards, eight catches for 110 yards, three kick returns for 154 yards, and two punt returns for one yard. Thirty touches, 350 yards. His TD catch in the first quarter gave Kansas City a 10-0 lead, and his TD run in the fourth, running through safety Dick Anderson, gave KC a 24-17
Miami tied it on a late TD pass from Bob Griese to Marv Fleming. With 1:25 left in the game, Podolak took the ensuing kickoff back 78 yards to the Miami 22-yard line. A minute later, here came Stenerud to try to win it from 31 yards out. Wide right. “Jan’s a great, great friend, and he was a great, great player,” Podolak said. “This time of year is very difficult for him, and he doesn’t deserve it.”
In the second overtime, Miami’s Nick Buoniconti tackled Podolak—one of 20 tackles on the day—and Podolak looked him on the ground and said, “Do you think this game will ever end?”
“We just wanted to keep playing, no matter how we felt,” said Podolak. “But at that point, we were, as Jackson Browne once said, running on empty.”
In the sixth period, seven minutes and 40 seconds in, Yepremian’s kick won it.
As noted author Michael MacCambridge unearthed in his book “America’s Game,” there was one other painful piece of the game for Kansas City. On the second-quarter field-goal block by Miami on the Stenerud kick, holder Len Dawson saw the Dolphins overloaded to one side and called for a fake to the other side, with Stenerud set to receive the direct snap from long-snapper Bobby Bell and run behind two pulling guards. Problem was, Bell thought Stenerud had missed the fake call, and so snapped to Dawson, not Stenerud. In fact, Stenerud had heard the call and wasn’t ready to kick, and by the time he was, the Dolphins smothered it. “[Stenerud] would have gone right in for the touchdown,” Stram told MacCambridge for his book.
Talk about an agonizing way to lose. One other point: Seventeen Hall of Famers in the stadium that day—14 players, two coaches and Kansas City owner Lamar Hunt. And it was Podolak who stole the show from all of them.