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The Outlook for ’59
Today we head back to the final year of The Fifties, when an unproven head coach named Vince Lombardi took over that position in tiny (by N.F.L. standards) Green Bay, Wisconsin. We’re featuring selections from Sports All Stars Pro Football magazine, which was a preview to the 1959 N.F.L. season. On the cover is Johnny Unitas, who quarterbacked the Baltimore Colts to a world championship in 1958.
One feature in the publication was on the Packers’ center Jim Ringo, who played for the team from 1953-1963. His exit from Green Bay is an often-told tale of Vince Lombardi vs. Ringo’s agent, but the accuracy of that account has been questioned over the years.
Sportswriter/author/cartoonist Murray Olderman provided his football expertise to picking the division winners in the coming season. As you can see, he forecasted the previously woeful Packers as finishing sixth — last — in the Western Division for 1959 at 4-7-1. In fact, Green Bay would achieve a 7-5-0 record, good enough for third place.
Here is a more detailed analysis of what Olderman had to say about the team from the yet-to-be-coined “Titletown, U.S.A.”
And here are the two pages about our Packers from the section of the magazine where each team was profiled in depth.
So you can follow along at home, here is the entire 1959 N.F.L. schedule. As was the case in those days, the Packers finished the season on the West coast, playing at Los Angeles and San Francisco. The “frozen tundra” of City Stadium was not a place the rest of the league wanted to play in December.
Today we head back to the final year of The Fifties, when an unproven head coach named Vince Lombardi took over that position in tiny (by N.F.L. standards) Green Bay, Wisconsin. We’re featuring selections from Sports All Stars Pro Football magazine, which was a preview to the 1959 N.F.L. season. On the cover is Johnny Unitas, who quarterbacked the Baltimore Colts to a world championship in 1958.
One feature in the publication was on the Packers’ center Jim Ringo, who played for the team from 1953-1963. His exit from Green Bay is an often-told tale of Vince Lombardi vs. Ringo’s agent, but the accuracy of that account has been questioned over the years.
Sportswriter/author/cartoonist Murray Olderman provided his football expertise to picking the division winners in the coming season. As you can see, he forecasted the previously woeful Packers as finishing sixth — last — in the Western Division for 1959 at 4-7-1. In fact, Green Bay would achieve a 7-5-0 record, good enough for third place.
Here is a more detailed analysis of what Olderman had to say about the team from the yet-to-be-coined “Titletown, U.S.A.”
And here are the two pages about our Packers from the section of the magazine where each team was profiled in depth.
So you can follow along at home, here is the entire 1959 N.F.L. schedule. As was the case in those days, the Packers finished the season on the West coast, playing at Los Angeles and San Francisco. The “frozen tundra” of City Stadium was not a place the rest of the league wanted to play in December.
