Third Place

In individual sports, third place has been a “thing” for a long time. After all, in the Olympics, which is dominated by individual sports, they give you a medal for finishing third. In team sports, though, third place is, usually, not something most of those involved believe is worth playing for.

Oh, there are still team competitions where a third place game takes place, the biggest of those, obviously, being the World Cup. For fans, the game is fun, a chance to see two of the best teams in the world serve up a little appetizer before the biggest sporting event on the planet concludes with the biggest game Earth will see for four years. For the teams? It depends. And, this is the rub when it comes to third place games.

See, if you came into the World Cup, like, say, Croatia in 1998, the third place match is a big deal. The Croatian football team had been established just four years before, and, making it to the semi-finals was a huge achievement. Playing for third place was important to Croatia, and it won the match with an upset over Netherlands. Sweden’s 1994 effort was also a big deal, as the Swedes were not expected to make the tournament semi-finals, and both team and country rejoiced with a parade in Stockholm after the team claimed victory. But. Teams that enter the tournament with different expectations are often far less interested in the third place match. Instead, they are disappointed that they won’t be playing in the Cup Final and often play reserves, resting their best players. But. Fans like the game, and there’s no reason to believe it’s going anywhere any time soon. Such is not the case with other third place games.

Sticking with soccer for a moment, both the UEFA Championships and England’s FA Cup, the oldest national soccer tournament in the world, had third place games at one time, but both have been defunct for decades. But, before you make fun of those silly Europeans and their third-place soccer matches, allow me to remind you that two of the Big Five American team sports once featured third place games as well. Wait. What?

Let’s start with the NFL. Yes. The NFL. When the league started, there were no playoffs. Teams simply played their scheduled games, and, when the season was over, there was a vote taken at the owners’ meeting to determine the league champion. No. I am not making that up. Eventually, a change was made and the champion was determined by winning percentage (since teams played an uneven number of games in those days). This was the standard the NFL owners had been using anyway, so, despite the change, nothing really…um…changed. In 1932, though, the league was presented with a problem. Two teams, the Chicago Bears and the Portsmouth Spartans finished with an identical winning percentage. (Both teams went 6-1, with Chicago sporting six ties and Portsmouth four…but, ties were not counted by the league when determining winning percentage, meaning the teams were both considered to have finished with an .857 percentage.) An additional game would be needed to determine the champion.

The decision was made to play the game in Chicago at Wrigley Field. But. This was Chicago in December. The weather was bad. Very bad. And, fearing a low turnout for the game, the league moved it inside to Chicago Stadium. Problem was, Chicago Stadium being an indoor facility, wasn’t exactly made for football. It had a concrete floor and it was not large enough to accommodate a football field. “Adjustments” had to be made.

First, the playing surface would be mulch. Because, a week before, a tanbark mulch had been placed on the floor of the stadium for a circus. (Circuses have animals. Animals leave things behind. Such was the smell left behind by the circus elephants in the tanbark that one Bears player actually threw up on the field.) The sidelines were placed right up against the stands, but that still left the field ten yards narrower than normal. The league compensated by, for the first time, requiring all plays to be started at or between the hash marks. And, the field was also only 80 yards long instead of 120. The playing surface, then, was just 60 yards long, as the other twenty yards were needed for the two end zones.To better simulate the actual, you know, length of a football field, the league ruled that, each time a team got inside the ten yard line, the ball would be moved back 20 yards. The goal posts were placed on the goal lines instead of the end lines. And drop kicks and field goals were banned. No. I am not making any of this up. (And, no, Roger Goodell was not commissioner at the time…though this definitely sounds like his work.) This is how they were going to play the league championship game.

It was a disaster. With little room to operate and terrible footing in the mulch, nobody could get much of a ground game going. Chicago’s John Doehling tried to throw. His first attempt went into the stands. So did many of the punts and kickoffs, one hitting a sign for one of the building’s tenants, the Chicago Blackhawks. Another hit the organist as he played. (Still not making this up.) Entering the fourth quarter, the game was scoreless. Chicago finally got on the board on a controversial pass. Back Bronko Nagurski took a handoff, stopped, and threw a pass to Red Grange in the end zone for a touchdown. Rules at the time required that all passes be thrown from at least five yards behind the line, and Portsmouth argued, to no avail, that Nagurski was not five yards behind the line at the time. Later, Portsmouth fumbled the ball out of its own end zone for a safety, and that’s the way the game ended, with Chicago in front 9-0.

Yes, the game was a disaster, but. The idea of a championship game and the game itself proved popular with the fans, leading to some changes in NFL rules. The league had used most of the same rules as college football since its inception, but it thought some adjustments to help increase scoring might be in order. So, it decided to move the goal posts to the goal lines permanently (though this was changed back in 1974) to make kicking field goals easier. Also in an effort to help offenses, the league put in place rules that required that all plays start from at or between the hash marks and that allowed forward passes to be thrown from anywhere behind the line of scrimmage.

The biggest change, though, had nothing to do with the rules. It was the creation of a yearly championship game. For 1933, the league expanded to ten teams and split the teams into two conferences. The winners of the two conferences would, at the end of the season, meet in a single game to decide the league’s champion, a one-game version of baseball’s World Series. Now. If it had stopped there, I wouldn’t have had (ok, I loved doing it) to tell you that long story to get to this one. But. It didn’t. In 1959, the NFL was about to have some competition from the new American Football League. Oh, there’d been competition for the league before, but the AFL had something those earlier leagues didn’t…television. The new league had a contract with ABC, which showed games nationally every Sunday (sometimes even showing doubleheaders). The NFL, meanwhile, had few games on national television and its post-season still consisted of a single scheduled game, just like it had since 1932. Thus the “Playoff Bowl” was born.

The point of the new post-season game was to provide more of the league’s product to a national audience. But. The “Playoff Bowl” was not an expansion of the league’s post-season championship “tournament”. It was a third-place game. The winners of the two conferences would still play one another in a single game for the league’s championship (a game that would still take place on the home field of one of the teams…with home field decided on a rotating basis). The “Playoff Bowl”, on the other hand, would be played at a neutral site, the Orange Bowl in Miami, the week after the NFL Championship Game. It would match the second-place teams in the respective conferences and the prize would be…yes…third place.

There was some limited fan interest in the game, but, the coaches and players absolutely hated it. The last thing two teams who’d missed out on a chance to win the title wanted to do was play a meaningless exhibition in Florida a week after the season was over. (And, while the NFL billed the “Playoff Bowl” as a postseason game back when it existed, today those games are considered exhibitions. The results of the games are not included in teams’ all-time postseason results, nor are the statistics from those games included in teams’ or players’ all-time postseason stats.) Lombardi himself had a scatological term for the game, and loathed playing in it. His Packers suffered one of their rare postseason losses in the game following the 1964 season. And, did not want to repeat the feeling of either having to play in that game or losing it. So. They won the next three NFL Championships. But, I digress.

After the 1966 season, the NFL expanded to four divisions of four teams and, for the first time, had a championship tournament that featured more than a single scheduled game. (The league champion did play the AFL champion in what was then called “The NFL-AFL Championship Game” after the 1966 season, but that was not an NFL postseason game, obviously.) The winners of the four divisions played off, meaning there were two semi-final games, and then the NFL Championship Game. Add in the Super Bowl, and the league now had four actual playoff games…but, despite that increased inventory, the “Playoff Bowl” stayed alive, now matching the losers of the two semi-final games. The stake was finally driven into the heart of the “Playoff Bowl” a few years later, in 1970. When the NFL and AFL completed their merger, forming a 26 team league of two conferences and six divisions, the new NFL expanded its playoffs again, this time to eight teams, four per conference. With seven scheduled playoff games, when once the league had had only one, the need for the “Playoff Bowl”, if there had ever been one, had clearly passed. Oh, there was a suggestion to keep the game alive, with the losers of the NFC and AFC Championship Games meeting the week before the Super Bowl, but, that idea was dropped and the late, unlamented “Playoff Bowl” shuffled off this mortal coil after ten seasons.

But, I noted that two of the Big Five American team sports once had third place games. The other was college basketball. Now, even today, many preseason college tournaments feature third place games. The idea there, though, isn’t about someone caring about finishing third. It’s about giving two teams an extra game, which is what those tournaments are about. Many four-team high school tournaments, especially Christmas tournaments, do the same thing. That way, everybody gets two games. But, the NCAA Tournament?

Yes, back in the day, “March Madness” featured a “consolation game” on Final Four weekend. The losers of the two Saturday semi-finals met for third place. And, while, early in the life of the Tournament, fans liked the game, since it was a rare chance to see two of the top college teams in the country play, as the years went on and the field expanded, interest in the game waned. As for the players and coaches, most of them hadn’t had any interest in the game to start with. Like the case of the NFL teams who played in the “Playoff Bowl”, the teams playing in the consolation game weren’t exactly consoled by doing so. They were disappointed and ready to go home, and, the last thing most of those involved wanted to do was hang around for two more days to play a meaningless game. But. The game, which started in 1946, continued to be played. Until 1981. When John Hinckley, Jr. stepped in.

As I’m sure you know (and, perhaps, remember), on the afternoon of March, 30, 1981, Hinckley shot then-President Ronald Reagan. That evening, the NCAA Tournament was scheduled to conclude with a game between Indiana and North Carolina. There was also a consolation game scheduled between Virginia and LSU. With news of the assassination attempt spreading around the country, NCAA officials, possibly mindful of the black eye the NFL got for playing its games as usual the Sunday after the assassination of President John Kennedy, were considering cancelling the games. A possible split championship had been discussed. Said officials were on the phone with the White House, trying to get information on President Reagan’s condition when Virginia and LSU took the court for warmups. Consultations continued for some time, with NCAA officials deciding to stay in touch with the White House to keep abreast of the president’s condition. If things went badly, the games would be cancelled. Well. One would. Because, while the talking was going on, the consolation game started.

So, NCAA officials sat watching the third place game, which turned out to be a good, competitive contest. Watching, all the while realizing that, if things did not go well in Washington, they were watching the last basketball game of the season…which would leave the organization in the absolutely ridiculous position of having a team claim the third spot in the tournament on the court while not having one claim the championship there. Virginia beat LSU 78-74. And, things went well in Washington. The championship game was played with Indiana beating North Carolina. But, the situation that had occurred on March 30, 1981 convinced the NCAA that the third place game was no longer needed. It was eliminated for the following tournament, and now the semi-final losers are free to go home after a long season, rather than stick around to play in a game nobody wants to play in. But. The third place game continues to hold a peculiar spot in the sport’s history. Princeton’s Bill Bradley still holds the record for the most points scored in a Final Four game with 58. He got them in the 1965 consolation game against Wichita State.

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