Today, the New England Patriots are the gold standard of the NFL, with their five Super Bowl titles in the Bill Belichick-Tom Brady era. To say that wasn’t always the case would be an understatement. The 1990 New England Patriots are a case study of the franchise’s bad old days—they were a hideous football team […]
To young football fans, the Browns struggling through an awful season is pretty much par for the course. But the world of 1990 was different. In that world, the Browns were coming off a strong decade, where they made the playoffs each year from 1985-89, including three appearances in the AFC Championship Game. The complete […]
Buddy Ryan was feeling the pressure in Philadelphia. Since arriving as head coach in 1986, the renowned defensive guru had turned a struggling team into a steady playoff contender. But the Eagles had not advanced deep into the postseason under Ryan. Between the desire of the fan base for more and Ryan’s prickly personality, it […]
The 1990 Chicago Bears came into the season looking to show they were still the same team who had dominated the old NFC Central from 1984-88. The 1989 season had been marked by calamitous collapse, where a 4-0 start turned into a stunning 6-10 finish. Mike Ditka handed the reins to a new quarterback and […]
Joe Gibbs only missed the postseason in consecutive years one time in his storied coaching career. Those years were 1988 and 1989. The 1990 Washington Redskins got Gibbs and the franchise off the schneid, as they returned to the playoffs, won a game and set the stage for future greatness.
Editor’s Note: This is part of a series of sports history articles aimed at preserving the best moments of the modern sports era, from 1976 to the present. The focus is team sports—college & pro basketball and football, major league baseball and hockey.
This article offers a snapshot of 1990 sports, a year that saw a big upsets in the key NFL playoff games and complete college football chaos break out.
We have to focus on a specific segment of the New York fan base…The Giants won the Super Bowl which is the main claim to fame, so it has to be someone from the New York Fan Aristocracy—one who pulls for the Yanks, Giants and Rangers, as opposed to the Underdog New York Fan who opts for the Mets, Jets and Islanders. At this point, the Aristocracy also saw the Rangers win their division and advance to the second round of the playoffs. The whole city united around the Knicks which had a nice season and won a playoff series. But we have to get more specific yet. Let’s move to the part of the city which spills into the Connecticut suburbs, as UConn basketball had its first good team of the Jim Calhoun era and reached a regional final. And let’s narrow it down even further. Notre Dame has a huge fan base in New York City, given its ethnic Catholic population. The Irish won the Sugar Bowl. So if you’re a member of the Aristocracy, live in or close to Connecticut and are one of the city’s Notre Dame backers it was, as Frank Sinatra might put it, “A Very Good Year.”