(Staubach throws during Super Bowl VI. Photo by Walter Iooss Jr., SI Photos)

1/16/1972 - Cowboys win first Super Bowl

In Super Bowl VI, the Dallas Cowboys take their place as one of the premier franchises in the NFL with a 24-3 demolishing of the Miami Dolphins. Dallas had been in dire need of a championship, having assumed the perception of chokers after a pair of NFL championship game losses to the Packers and a close 16-13 loss to the Colts in Super Bowl V. The Cowboys absolutely destroyed Miami, running for a fantastic 252 yards while their "Doomsday Defense" held Miami without a touchdown -- making them the only team in the 20th century to accomplish such a feat.

"It was a joke," said Dolphins said Don Shula. "Their defense completely controlled our offense."

"People said we were an unemotional team -- that we couldn't win the big one," said Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach, who was the game's MVP with 119 passing yards and two touchdowns. "I think the team proved it is a very emotional team, a great team. All the guys have tried and worked so long for this day."

Staubach, the 1963 Heisman trophy winner who Dallas had drafted two years earlier, had taken over for Craig Morton earlier in the year and had found instant success. With the win in Super Bowl VI, Staubach had won the first 10 starts of his Hall of Fame career: seven in the regular season, three in the postseason. Because of his previous military duties, Staubach was 27 when he entered the league as a rookie and lasted only 11 years in the league.

Super Bowl VI is also notable for featuring a play specifically drawn up by the 37th president of the United States. Richard Nixon had called Don Shula a week before and gave him a play that he thought would work: a down-and-in pass to Paul Warfield. Shula indeed called the play towards the end of the first quarter: it was an incomplete pass. Cowboys coach Tom Landry received a congratulatory phone call from Nixon after the game; Landry told reporters that Nixon praised them for playing "an almost perfect game" while electing not to bring up the trick play that had been run.

Fueled by their embarrassing defeat, the Dolphins came back with a vengeance in 1972. The Dolphins would win the following two Super Bowls, becoming the first to appear in three in a row, and won all of their games in the 1972 season -- establishing themselves as one of the greatest teams in football history.

1/16/1988 - Jimmy The Greek fired

Jimmy "The Greek " Snyder, famous for picking games on CBS's The NFL Today, is fired by the network for racially insensitive comments he made just one day earlier.

The referred remarks came on Martin Luther King's birthday at a restaurant in Washington D.C. When asked how civil rights and sports were tied together, Jimmy The Greek was more than candid. He stated that the reason management was controlled by whites was that it was the last part of sports they could hold on to, adding, "If they take over coaching like everybody wants them to, there's not going to be anything left for white people."

Making matters worse, Snyder went on to explain why he felt black athletes were more prominent in sports than white athletes, and sealed his fate in the process: "The black is a better athlete to begin with because he's been bred to be that way -- because of his high thighs and big thighs that goes up into his back, and they can jump higher and run faster because of their bigger thighs. This goes back all the way to the Civil War when during the slave trading, the owner -- the slave owner would breed his big black to his big woman so that he could have a big black kid."

Snyder immediately found himself on the front page of every newspaper in the country, and CBS, inundated with complaints, fired him the next day. Jimmy The Greek didn't get a chance at redemption. He carried on a Las Vegas betting column until his death in 1996, but could never outlive the infamy of his comments.