No Network Telecast (game was played in Los Angeles, and at the time, there was no way to send live TV programs from the West Coast to the East Coast and vice versa)
The 1967 NFL Championship Game was televised by CBS, with play by play being done by Ray Scott for the first half and Jack Buck for the second half, while Frank Gifford handled the color commentary for the entire game.[4]Pat Summerall and Tom Brookshier served as sideline reporters. Gifford and Summerall were intimately aware of the personality differences that existed between Landry and Lombardi because they had both played on the New York Giants during Landry's and Lombardi's tenure at the Giants. Over 30 million people would tune in to watch the game.[citation needed] No copy of the complete telecast is known to exist. Some excerpts (such as the announcers' pre-game comments on the field) were saved and are occasionally re-aired in retrospective features. The Cowboys' radio broadcast on KLIF, with Bill Mercer announcing, and the Packers' radio broadcast on WTMJ, with Ted Moore announcing, still exist.
The 1964 NFL Championship Game also the last NFL Championship Game televised in black-and-white, as well as the last game in which penalty flags in NFL games were white. The league switched to bright yellow flags the next season. The gate receipts for the game were about $635,000 and the television money was $1.9 million.[5] Each player on the winning Cleveland Browns team received about $8,000, while Baltimore Colts players made around $5,000 each.[6][7] This was about triple the amount for the players' shares in the AFL championship game.[8]
NBC paid the league $926,000 for the broadcast rights for the 1963 NFL Championship Game.[9][10] The gate receipts for the game were about $500,000 and the television money was $926,000. For the first time, the NFL tried a closed-circuit telecast in the local blackout area, with 26,000 viewing on large screens in four locations: McCormick Place, International Amphitheatre, Chicago Coliseum, and Chicago Stadium;[11][12] tickets ranged from $4 to $7.50.[11] Gross receipts were $1,493,954, with $35,402 from the closed-circuit telecast.[13]
Due to the NFL's blackout policy which aimed to protect gate receipts, until 1973, fans in a team's home market could not watch their team's regular season and playoff games on television, even if they were title games as was also the case in 1962.[14] New York fans made reservations for motels in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Connecticut so they could watch the game out of the 75-mile (120 km) blackout zone,[15][16] and even though the game was played in 17 °F (−8 °C) temperatures with 35–40 mph (56–64 km/h) winds, only 299 of the 65,000+ Giant fans who bought tickets to the sold out game stayed home.[17]
The 1961 NFL Championship Game was touted as "The Million Dollar Game," owing to the $600,000 in television broadcast rights paid to the NFL by NBC combined with a $400,000 gate to be generated through a projected sale of 40,000 tickets at the unitary price of $10 per seat regardless of location in the stadium.[18] With 40,000 tickets sold at $10 each and $615,000 in TV revenue, this game was the first NFL Championship to generate $1 million in revenue.[19] Each player on the winning Green Bay Packers team received $5,195, while New York Giants players made $3,340 each.
During overtime of the 1958 NFL Championship Game, when the Baltimore Colts were on the eight-yard line of the New York Giants, someone ran out onto the field of Yankee Stadium, causing the game to be delayed; rumors have stated that it was an NBC employee who was ordered to create a distraction because the national television feed had gone dead. The difficulty was the result of an unplugged TV signal cable,[20] and the delay in the game bought NBC enough time to fix the problem before the next play.[21]
An estimated 45 million people watched the game on television in the United States.[22] This audience could have been even greater except that because of NFL restrictions, the game was blacked out in the greater New York City area.[23][24] Still, the impact from this game is far reaching. A year later, Texas billionaire Lamar Hunt formed the American Football League, which began play with eight teams in the 1960 season. The growth of the popularity of the sport, through franchise expansion, the eventual merger with the AFL, and popularity on television, is commonly credited to this game, making it a turning point in the history of football. NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle was said by Giants owner Wellington Mara to have attributed professional football's surge in popularity to the game, because it "happened just at that time, in that season, and it happened in New York".
The 1951 NFL Championship Game the first NFL championship game to be televised coast-to-coast,[25] and was blacked out by the league in the southern California area. The DuMont Network purchased the championship game TV rights from the NFL in May for five years (1951–55) for $475,000.[26][27][28][29][30] The gross receipts for the game, including $75,000 for radio and television rights, was just under $326,000, the highest to date, passing the previous record of $283,000 five years earlier in 1946. Each player on the winning Los Angeles Rams team received $2,108, while Cleveland Browns players made $1,483 each.[31]
^Hall, Dan (May 22, 1951). "Hallucinations". St. Petersburg Times. p. 17. Retrieved October 31, 2011. Bell said the money received each year under terms of the agreement will be placed in the players' pool.
1 – Dates in the list denote the season, not necessarily the calendar year in which the championship game was played. For instance, Super Bowl LIV was played in 2020, but was the championship for the 2019 season.
2 – From 1966 to 1969, the first four Super Bowls were "World Championship" games played between two independent professional football leagues, AFL and NFL, and when the league merged in 1970 the Super Bowl became the NFL Championship Game.