23 0 3 23 Date 26 December 1965 | 14 6 Attendance 30,361 | |
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Similar 1957 NFL Championship Game, 1956 NFL Championship Game, 1960 NFL Championship Game, 1962 American Football L, 1965 NFL Championship Game | ||
The 1965 American Football League Championship Game was the sixth AFL championship game, played on December 26 at Balboa Stadium in San Diego, California.
Contents
It matched the Western Division champion San Diego Chargers (9–2–3) and the Eastern Division champion Buffalo Bills (10–3–1) to decide the American Football League (AFL) champion for the 1965 season.
The defending champion Bills entered the game as 6½ point underdogs; the Chargers had won the first regular season meeting on October 10 by a convincing 34–3 score and tied the Thanksgiving rematch 20–20.
In favorable 60 °F (16 °C) conditions on the day after Christmas, the Bills shut out the Chargers and repeated as champions, scoring two touchdowns in the second quarter, one on a punt return. They added three field goals in the second half to win 23–0. Of the ten AFL title games, this was the only shutout.
This was the last AFL Championship to end the season; the first Super Bowl followed the 1966 season.
Officials
The AFL still had five game officials in 1965; the NFL added a sixth official this season, the line judge. The AFL went to six officials in 1966, and the seventh official, the side judge, was added in 1978.
Referee Jim Barnhill died less than three months after this game; while officiating a high school basketball playoff game in Wisconsin, he collapsed and died at age 45.
Players' shares
The winning Bills players were allocated $5,189 each, while the Chargers players received $3,447 each. This was twice as much as the previous year and about 70% of the players' shares for the NFL championship game.
The attendance was nearly 10,000 lower than 1964, but the television money was increased with NBC.
Aftermath
This game marked the last time that a final pro football championship was decided in December, within the same calendar year as regular season games (the 1965 NFL Championship Game was played on January 2, 1966). The following season would conclude with the first Super Bowl played in January 1967.
This is the last professional American football championship game to have been won by a team from Buffalo, New York, as well as the last of any major league team from the city. Indeed, the fortunes of both teams, and for that matter both cities, would go southward since then. The Bills would not appear in another championship game until Super Bowl XXV when the infamous Wide Right occurred, and would also proceed to lose the next three Super Bowls. The Chargers meanwhile would not appear in another championship until Super Bowl XXIX, which they lost to the San Francisco 49ers, 49-26. San Diego and Buffalo currently have the longest and second-longest championship droughts respectively for any city that has at least two major sports franchises.
Marty Schottenheimer, a rookie linebacker for the Bills, went on to a long coaching career in the NFL, including leading the Chargers as head coach from 2002-2006. He, too, would not win another championship in his career until the 2011 UFL Championship Game.