It Was 30 Years Ago Today

Special thanks to these guys
for the vintage Sporting Green scans.

Time to get things started again after last week's bye...

So, what do you remember about the 49ers' 13-3 victory over the Packers during the 1981 season? I can tell you where I was on that day - watching the game on a little black and white TV in my dad's garage. And the game was played in Milwaukee County Stadium (back then, the Packers split their home schedule between Milwaukee and Green Bay).

The game itself wasn't very exciting - at the time, Green Bay, coached by legendary Packers quarterback Bart Starr weren't much of a threat in the NFC Central, probably because Starr wasn't a legendary HEAD COACH. They had a decent offense with Lynn Dickey, who would end up passing for nearly 4,500 yards a couple of years later, and receivers like Chargers exile John Jefferson and future Hall-of-Famer James Lofton. But for the most part, the Packers of the 70s and 80s were stuck in neutral, between the Lombardi championship years of the 60s and their Holmgren/Favre resurgence in the 90s.

Meanwhile, the 49ers were coming off their 45-14 beatdown of the Cowboys with a chip on their shoulder after being slighted by the national media. They were still trying to prove they weren't a fluke, and while this victory over the Packers was short on highlights, it was one of the first signs of the 49ers becoming a methodical machine on the road, as they pounded Green Bay into submission by the beginning of the 4th quarter.

And that's probably the one word I could use to describe this game: methodical. They slowly and surely took the home team and crowd out of the game while imposing their will on an inferior opponent. Over the next 17 years, we'd see this time and time again, but back in October of 1981, the 49ers were just starting to unveil their blueprint for road dominance. While the 49ers surely didn't take the victory for granted, this became the first of dozens of "ho-hum" road wins  against the league's soft underbelly that the fans would come to expect during the Walsh, Seifert and Mariucci eras.

On this day, the 49ers marched into town, took care of business, and that was that. Nothing more, nothing less. Now, it was payback time for another long-time tormentor with the Rams coming to town.

Next week: The 49ers battle Los Angeles with an assist from The World's Greatest Rock and Roll Band.