A middling team, not a champion
The 1967 San Francisco 49ers did not win a title, and it is worth saying so plainly, because the franchise’s famous championships came much later, in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1967 the team finished with a 7-7 record, in the middle of its division, and missed the playoffs. The season is mainly of interest as a snapshot of a club in transition, in a city that was then attracting most of the world’s attention for other reasons.
The setting: a new division
The NFL had expanded to sixteen teams that year and reorganised into four divisions. San Francisco was placed in the Western Conference’s Coastal Division with the Los Angeles Rams, the Baltimore Colts and the expansion Atlanta Falcons. It was a tough neighbourhood. The Rams and Colts both had outstanding seasons, with records near the top of the league, and both were ahead of the 49ers. Atlanta, in only its second year, was well behind. San Francisco finished third.
The new alignment meant that the division winner alone qualified for the playoffs, so even a respectable record could leave a team out of the postseason, as the 49ers’ 7-7 did. The NFL champion that year was Green Bay, which beat Oakland in Super Bowl II.
Coach and quarterback
The head coach was Jack Christiansen, a former Detroit Lions defensive back who had been a star in the 1950s and had coached the 49ers since 1963. His teams had improved gradually from an awful start, but never broke through, and 1967 was his last season in charge. Dick Nolan replaced him in 1968 and led the club back to the playoffs in 1970.
The quarterback was John Brodie, a former Stanford player who had been with the franchise since 1957. He was by then a veteran in his thirties, an accurate passer and one of the league’s more productive quarterbacks in the mid-1960s. Brodie was also an accomplished golfer, and later played on the senior professional golf tour. His best individual recognition came after 1967: in 1970 he was named the league’s most valuable player.
The roster included linebacker Dave Wilcox, a future Hall of Famer, and fullback Ken Willard, among others. Even so, the 49ers of the period were more often described as a team of good individuals than as a complete side, with defensive weaknesses that held them back.
Life at Kezar Stadium
In 1967 the 49ers still played at Kezar Stadium, which stood at the edge of Golden Gate Park and had been the club’s home since it was founded in 1946. Kezar had opened in 1925 and held roughly 60,000 for football. It was an older, open-air stadium with limited facilities by later standards, and the city’s wind and fog were common themes in descriptions of games there.
The stadium sat only a short distance from the Haight-Ashbury district, then the centre of the Summer of 1967 in San Francisco. The cultural events a few streets away, and the Spring Mobilization rally that was reportedly held at Kezar itself in April, had little direct relationship to football, but the two worlds shared the same part of the city. For 49ers fans, the Sunday crowd was still mostly a conventional one, in a neighbourhood that outsiders increasingly associated with something else.
A franchise before its rise
Before the move to Candlestick Park in 1971, the 49ers’ history was one of near-misses. The franchise began in the All-America Football Conference in 1946 and joined the NFL in 1950. It reached a Western Conference playoff in 1957, losing to Detroit in a game remembered for the Lions’ comeback, but had no championship. The 1960s were a lean decade with few winning seasons.
That changed after 1967. Under Nolan, the team won the Western Division in 1970, in its last season at Kezar, and made the playoffs in following years. Then, after a wait, a new coach and quarterback in the late 1970s started the run of titles that would define the franchise. None of that was visible in 1967, when the club’s expectations were modest and its fans were used to losing more than winning.
How to place 1967
The year 1967 is best seen as a middle point. The 49ers did not collapse, but nor did they contend. Their significance is mainly as an example of how an ordinary NFL franchise lived through a year of change in the sport: a bigger league, new divisions, a looming merger with the AFL, and a home stadium that was running out of time. Anyone looking for the great teams of that football season should look to Green Bay, Dallas, Los Angeles and Baltimore.