The Dream Season featuring the 1978 Steelers

Watch the 1989 Dream Season that attempted to decided the greatest NFL team of all-time

In 1989, Steve Sabol, co-founder and then-president of NFL Films, called the Dream Season, “The most exciting program in (NFL Films) history.”

So, what was the Dream Season?

It was a very unique show that aired on ESPN in 1989 and was meant to determine the greatest NFL team of all-time. NFL Films collaborated with NFL Challenge — a strat-o-matic type of game that featured the best teams in history — to determine the game results. The idea was to air one featured game on ESPN every week by creatively using NFL Films footage and having Steve Sabol himself announce the games with the Eagles’ play-by-play radio announcer Merrill Reese.

The Dream Season would consist of 20 teams split into 4 divisions, oddly though, teams didn’t necessarily play all the other teams in their division. The regular season would last just 6 weeks but the four division winners would advance to the semi-finals and the two winners of those games would play in the Dream Bowl to determine the greatest team ever. Actually, since they did not have teams prior to 1950 (and since the show aired in 1989) then it was really to determine the best team from 1950-1988.

Including the 2-week post-season, the complete season consisted of 8 total weeks and would air on Sunday nights. This was specifically because ESPN wanted to fill the first Sunday nights of the NFL season with football related content, since their NFL contract to air the Sunday night game was only for the latter half of the season. This also allowed them to compete with TNT who aired the live Sunday night games in the first half of the season.

Each week, in addition to the featured game, they would show halftime highlights and then post-game highlights for most of the other games, all of which were narrated by Chris Berman.

The show was not without issues, not the least of which was that NFL Challenge was not an extremely sophisticated game. However, it earned publicity and NFL Films did an outstanding job.

Now, with the complete footage apparently extremely rare, I decided to revive it and share it here in an intended week-by-week basis. First, I’ll show the featured game (and list those games below). Then, in a separate post, I’ll show the highlights of the other games that week and present each individual game in one video by showing both the first and second half highlights of that respective game edited together.

So, what are the 20 teams? Well, despite two different Browns teams, Cowboys teams, and Raiders teams - there’s only one Steelers team. This is likely because they won 4 Super Bowls in 6 years and are thus made up of many of the same players.

Here’s all 20 teams broken shown into their Dream Season divisions.

NORTH: ’53 Lions / ’64 Browns / ’66 Packers / ’76 Raiders / ’85 Bears

EAST: ’59 Colts / ’60 Eagles / ’68 Jets / ’78 Steelers / ’86 Giants

SOUTH: ’55 Browns / ’69 Chiefs / ’71 Cowboys / ’72 Dolphins / ’82 Redskins

WEST: ’51 Rams / ‘63 Chargers / ’77 Cowboys / ’83 Raiders / ’84 49ers

There are some notable omissions, including the ’56 Giants, ’62 Packers, and the ’63 Bears. It’s also interesting that they only chose the ’63 Chargers as the lone pre-Super Bowl era AFL team. One would strongly assume they would have the ’61 Oilers and the ’64 Bills but such decisions were likely made based on available footage.

Steve Sabol said that one of the featured games they were trying to do, which was allegedly pushed by ESPN, was to showcase the ’64 Browns against the ’86 Giants. This would allow ESPN to promote a Jim Brown vs Lawrence Taylor showdown. However, despite their efforts, NFL Films ultimately realized it couldn’t be done for a featured game (despite those games being condensed themselves) because there wasn’t enough usable footage. It’s also worth noting that footage from the 60’s looks very different from footage from the 80’s and this adds to the challenge. Nonetheless, the ‘64 Browns facing the ‘86 Giants would be one of the games from week 1 that they showed highlights of.

Newspaper clip from the Pittsburgh Press on Sep 3, 1989

They did manage to pull off a featured game with a team form the 1960’s and a team from the 1980’s when they pitted the ’66 Packers against the ’84 49ers. When you watch that game, you can certainly see the difference in footage and uniforms but, for some reason, the charm of it really works. In fact, it’s my favorite featured game of the series.

For the non-featured games, it’s not always obvious who the home team is, and there are multiple games in the season’s final week that are not even mentioned, but I managed to piece together everything so as to detail it here in the coming weeks, something I don’t think anyone has done since the show aired.

In case you’re wondering, the schedule for the 1978 Steelers is as follows:

Week 1: @ ’83 Raiders / Week 2: @ ’68 Jets / Week 3: vs ’77 Cowboys / Week 4: @ ‘55 Browns / Week 5: vs ’69 Chiefs / Week 6: vs ’66 Packers

Their two toughest games certainly seem to be Week 1 at the Los Angeles Raiders and Week 6 at home against the Packers. The only highlights not shown for the Steelers were against arch-rival Cleveland Browns as it’s one of the games they simply rattle off the score of. You might notice that the Steelers only play one team in their division (‘68 Jets).

Here is the regular season featured game schedule, which I intend to post each week:

Week 1: ’85 Bears @ ’77 Cowboys

Week 2: ’84 49ers @ ’66 Packers

Week 3: ’69 Chiefs @ ’76 Raiders

Week 4: ’82 Redskins @ ’86 Giants (missing 4th quarter footage, except for ending)

Week 5: ’72 Dolphins @ ’68 Jets

Week 6: ’76 Raiders @ ’85 Bears

Lastly, here is the full schedule of games for week 1 of the Dream Season. I’ll post the highlights in a separate article from the featured game.

Week 1 Featured Game:

’85 Bears @ ’77 Cowboys (Payton vs Doomsday, Staubach vs the 46 Defense)

Highlights of the following (note - it’s not always obvious who the home team is):

’76 Raiders @ ’68 Jets (Namath vs Stabler)

’66 Packers @ ’60 Eagles (Lombardi seeks revenge on Van Brocklin)

’71 Cowboys vs ’69 Chiefs (Dallas vs the franchise that began in Dallas)

’59 Colts @ ’72 Dolphins (Can Unitas defeat the undefeated?)

’86 Giants vs ’64 Browns (Jim Brown vs Lawrence Taylor)

’78 Steelers @ ’83 Raiders (A literal brawl — you’ll see what I mean)

NFL Films did not do any highlights for these 3 games

’53 Lions vs ’63 Chargers

’82 Redskins vs ’55 Browns

’84 49ers vs ’51 Rams

So, are you ready to live (or re-live) the Dream Season?