The Las Vegas Raiders and New York Jets are set to square off for the 48th time Sunday afternoon in Las Vegas.
The teams’ 17th meeting during the 1968 American Football League regular season lives in infamy after fans were unable to watch the game’s last minute and missed a wild comeback effort after NBC switched away from the game before it was over.
What Is the Heidi Game?
In a contest that is now known as the “Heidi Game,” the Jets faced the Raiders on Nov. 17, 1968, for what seemed to be a fairly innocuous AFL regular-season game.
The high-scoring affair saw New York pull ahead 32-29 with just 1:05 remaining in the game, at which point NBC evidently figured the game had been decided and switched away to the children’s movie “Heidi,” its scheduled programming for the time.
Then, chaos ensued, as documented on the Raiders’ team website.
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The Raiders took over at their own 23-yard line, and shortly after, scored on a 43-yard touchdown pass from Daryle Lamonica to Charlie Smith to lead 36-32 with 42 seconds left. Jets returner Early Christy then fumbled the ensuing kickoff, which Preston Ridlehuber recovered and ran in for a touchdown to make it 43-32 and effectively ended the contest.
Just like that, the Raiders had pulled off an improbable comeback to defeat New York, an effort most viewers were unable to watch in real time due to NBC’s broadcasting gaffe.
“We knew that we won the game, the people in the stadium won the game, but the people that were watching on television across the country thought we lost,” then-Raiders coach John Madden later remarked.
Instead, NBC had to run some text across the screen during its broadcast of “Heidi” informing its audience that the Raiders had indeed won.
It’s a game that has gone down in notoriety as one of the greatest regular-season contests ever, partially for its wild finish and gaudy stats, but in large part due to the circumstances that kept viewers from witnessing the late theatrics.
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