THE LONGEST PRO FOOTBALL GAME EVER PLAYED : ‘Twas Christmas, ‘71, When Dolphins Sleighed Chiefs in 2nd Overtime, 27-24

Christmas Day wasn’t made for football.

“Christmas is for singing carols and trying to catch up with Santa Claus,” former quarterback Bob Griese said recently.

Yet Griese starred in the most famous of all Christmas Day games.

“We played six quarters of football that time,” he said. “All afternoon and into the night. It was the longest NFL game ever played.”

Actually, the elapsed time wasn’t that much, just 3 hours 21 minutes, a quickie by today’s standards of television-commercial-induced marathons. But in this case, length of game was measured in much, much more than simply elapsed time.

The day was Dec. 25, 1971, a year when the league experimented with Christmas playoffs.

The Miami Dolphins, led by Griese, and the Kansas City Chiefs, quarterbacked by Len Dawson, were tied at the half, 10-10; after three quarters, 17-17; after four, 24-24, after five, 24-24, and after five and a half, 24-24.

Would it ever end? Possibly not. The kickers, Miami’s Garo Yepremian and Kansas City’s Jan Stenerud, had been missing field goals all over the place. League rules require that playoff games continue until there’s a winner, and they could still have been missing field goals, theoretically, five hours later. Or five years.

But a kicker’s chances improve if he gets enough shots, even in a high-pressure game, and in the sixth quarter, Griese wearily got Miami going on still another drive. After he handed off to fullback Larry Csonka for 29 yards to the Kansas City 30-yard line, Yepremian kicked it the rest of the way. In that era, the crossbar was on the goal line.

Thus at 7:40 of the second overtime period, Miami had pulled it out on Yepremian’s 37-yard field goal, 27-24, extending a 60-minute game to 82 minutes and 40 seconds.

“When I walked out on the field (for that kick), it was as if the stadium was empty,” Yepremian was to say later. “It was the most quiet moment of my life.”

While the ball was airborne, the Kansas City thousands remained standing and motionless, and deathly silent, as Yepremian ran off screaming happily, with his arms in the air like a referee’s.

“I knew it would be a good field goal,” he recalled. “I said to myself, ‘Hey, this is the biggest moment of your life, you’d better turn back and look.’ And just as I turned, I saw the ball going through the goal posts.”

That’s what Kansas City couldn’t stand.

“I’m still asked about that win wherever I go,” Griese said. “People seem to remember the longest game more than a Super Bowl game or the World Series. There was something about the combination of Christmas and the length of the game that fixed it in people’s memories. To tell you the truth, it’s the only game I recall clearly, myself--after 20 years of football--aside from the (three) Super Bowls I played in.”

Throughout the nation, football fans stayed joyously at their TV sets that holiday afternoon, ignoring their Christmas trees, Christmas guests and Christmas presents, not to mention their Christmas dinners.

“Time kind of stood still, people tell me,” Griese said. “They remember in detail where they were and what they were doing during the game.”

And they like to talk about it.

“Mothers tell me we took so long to win that I ruined their dinner,” he said. “Dads say they can’t remember if they ever had dinner.”

Griese and his teammates never wanted to play again on Christmas Day.

“It’s a tough time of year to be out of town,” he said. “You’re not only away from home for Christmas, you’re away on Christmas Eve, too. Then you get up Christmas morning and ask yourself: Is this really what I should be doing today? Isn’t this the wrong day for football?”

Griese said the distractions on such a day are too much.

“You see a cheerleader in a Santa Claus suit, or you see a Santa Claus in the stands,” he said, “and it takes your mind completely off football.”

Still, the teams and the athletes all made history that Christmas. The record they set--82 minutes to finish an hour of football--may never be broken. Or so Sid Gillman, the Philadelphia assistant, and others have speculated.

“The good pass offenses today are too lethal to be shut down that long again,” Gillman said. “If you pass well enough to make the playoffs, you have what it takes to score in overtime.”

Griese, who sometimes won in the 1970s on days when he only threw seven or eight passes, carries Gillman’s reasoning one step further.

“The defenses and offenses are both too good today,” he said. “They’re both capable of the kind of big plays that will break up a sudden-death game in short order. It certainly wouldn’t take the Raider defense 82 minutes to beat you.”

Although some fans believe the NFL’s present sudden-death rule is unfair because it doesn’t give both sides an opportunity to advance the ball, Griese said he’d rather kick off than receive in overtime against a 1985 playoff team.

“In overtime,” he said, “I think the defense has the edge these days against an offensive team that is on its own 20-yard line. All the defense has to do is knock the ball loose from the quarterback, or a receiver, and it’s all over.”

In Griese’s opinion, the modern big-play defensive teams have changed the whole philosophy of sudden-death football.

“It’s a game of field position now,” he said. “The question isn’t who has the ball in overtime. The question is where the ball is on the field.”

It wasn’t like that in 1971.

“The longest game ever played was won with offense,” Griese said.

His wife, Judi, was back home in Miami that Christmas and stuck out the game on TV as their two eldest sons romped around the lighted tree. They are Scott and Jeff, now 17 and 15. Brian, 10, has only seen it on tape.

“Brian likes the overtime game better than any Super Bowl tape,” Griese said.

A native of Evansville, Ind., Griese was the son of a plumber. He lived in Indiana and played football at Purdue, until the Dolphins claimed him and moved him to Miami. An NBC football analyst now, he is known for the plays he draws on TV screens during NFL games.

As Miami’s golden-armed, golden-era quarterback, Griese played in three straight NFL title matches and was the winning pitcher of Super Bowls VII and VIII.

The longest-ever NFL game preceded that three-year Miami binge.

It fact, it set it up.

“We were a very young team in 1971,” Griese said. “In Kansas City on Christmas Day, we were playing the king of the mountain. The Chiefs were coming off a Super Bowl the year before, and when they kept taking the lead against us--once in the first half and twice in the second--we could have folded.

We could have said we fought the good fight, good night. When we hung in and won--in 82 minutes--it was the start of the Dolphins’ dynasty.”

Three weeks later, they played in their first Super Bowl, although, before that, they had a Christmas to celebrate.

“We got out of Kansas City as fast as we could,” Griese recalled. “By the time we’d flown home, though, Christmas was over. It was long after midnight. I remember that Judi still had the lights blazing on our Christmas tree, but she had decided to open her present the next morning. That was all right with me. I’d already had mine.”