The Detroit Lions are trying to win their first NFL championship in 66 years, and one of the teams they had to beat in the postseason to do it then is the same one they must defeat on Sunday night to have a shot at captuting another league crown this season.
That team is the San Francisco 49ers, who host the Lions in the NFC Championship Game at 6:30 p.m. The winner will advance to the Super Bowl in two weeks to play the winner of the AFC Championship Game at 3 p.m. Sunday between the Kansas City Chiefs and the host Baltimore Ravens.
What you may be surprised to know is that the Browns were the second — and final — team the Lions had to beat to win the league title way back when.
Here’s how it all happened: the Lions and 49ers both finished the 1957 regular season with 8-4 records and tied for first place in the Western Conference. The clubs had split their two games against one another, the 49ers overcoming a furious Detroit rally in the fourth quarter and four touchdown passes by quarteback Tobin Rote to win a close one, 35-31, at San Francisco in their first meeting, and then two weeks later, the Lions won in a rout, 31-10, at Detroit. In their next-to-last regular-season game, the Lions beat the Browns 20-7 at Detroit.
The 49ers and Lions met at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco a week after the regular season ended, on Dec. 22, in a special playoff game to decide who would advance to the NFL Championship Game and face the Eastern Conference champion Browns, who finished 9-2-1, 2-1/2 games ahead of the runnerup New York Giants, the defending NFL champions.
In the playoff game, just as in the regular-season contest at San Francisco, the 49ers blew out to a big lead, 24-7, at halftime. The Lions were so non-competitive that the 49ers players were laughing at them at halftime. What the 49ers didn’t stop to think about was that the teams’ locker rooms were next to each other, with only a wall separating them, and as such the Lions could hear everything the 49ers were saying. The Lions were furious and came out on the second half determined to shut up the 49ers and change the narrative.
The Lions did just that — and then some. After the 49ers kicked a field goal in the third quarter to boost their lead to 27-7, the Lions went to work, scoring 24 unanswered points to win 31-27.
So, then, the Browns came very close to facing the 49ers in the NFL title game. The teams had been arch rivals in the All-America Football Conference from 1946-49, then moved together, along with the Baltimore Colts, to the NFL in 1950 after the AAFC was dissolved.
The Lions also had a score to settle when they hosted the Browns on Dec. 29 in the NFL
title game at what was then known as Briggs Stadium. This was the fourth time in the decade that the teams had met in the championship game. The Lions had won two of the previous three games, 17-7 at Cleveland in 1952 and 17-16 at Detroit in 1953, before the Browns clobbered the Lions 56-10 at Cleveland in 1954.
The last meeting was noteworthy, even historic, in two ways. The first one was the fact the Browns players thought head coach Paul Brown had been too conservative offensively in the title games against Detroit. Brown always sent the plays into games via a messenger guard, but in a secret players-only meeting in the team hotel the night before the game, they decided to change the plays if they didn’t like them and audible into their own plays. They knew Brown immediately would not like it, but they also knew he would grudgingly sign off on it if it worked. And, as evidenced by the final score, it worked like a charm.
The second noteworthy part of that 1954 game is that the Lions were upset because they thought the Browns ran up the score. When they got another crack at the Browns in the title game three years later, and with many of those players still on the Detroit roster in 1957, the Lions set out to get some revenge and they were more than successful in doing so. They raced out to a 31-7 halftime lead and never looked back in rolling to a 59-14 victory. Rote led the way with four more TD passes. The Browns got 69 yards rushing and a touchdown from some rookie named Jim Brown.
And now you know the whole story of how the Browns, Lions and 49ers all came together and battled it out in 1957 in Detroit’s last NFL championship season.
Steve King
