Flashback: 1970

[HoosierCat]

Courtesy of SI's Don Banks.

The Top Five

Don Banks, SI.com

Four weeks to go in the NFL's regular season, and this is when the fun starts. Everybody loves a playoff race. Everybody knows the scenarios backwards and forwards. Everybody can talk tiebreakers.

This year, like most every other season, somebody will come out of nowhere in the final month and make a late, mad dash to the playoffs (No. 6 seed in the NFC, we're looking in your direction). And if the frantic run is memorable enough, we'll add that team to our mental list of the squads that put together some of the NFL's greatest playoff-race drives.

Here are five of our favorites from the 1970 merger on. Every one of these teams looked dead in the water at some point in their playoff-bound season, and every one of them got hot when it mattered most, finding a way to live another day:

1. 1970 Cincinnati Bengals -- The legendary Paul Brown was head coach. The on-his-way-to-legendary-status Bill Walsh was the quarterbacks/receivers coach. On the roster were future Bengals head coaches Sam Wyche and Bruce Coslet, and longtime NFL assistant Chip Myers. But that's not what the 1970 Bengals are known for. Playing in just its third season of existence, Cincinnati made history as the youngest expansion team (at the time) to ever make the playoffs. And the Bengals did it in dramatic fashion.

After opening the season with a home win against Oakland, the Bengals stumbled to six consecutive losses, looking all the world like the same team that had gone 7-20-1 in its only two seasons of AFL play. But then something clicked, and Cincinnati won its final seven games, to finish 8-6 and atop the new four-team AFC Central.

The Bengals, in that torrid stretch, averaged just under 30 points per game, and the icing on the cake was the team that Cincinnati beat out for the division title by one game: Their hated cross-state rival Cleveland Browns, the franchise with whom Paul Brown had made his Hall of Fame name, but then fired him after the 1962 season. Alas, the Bengals magic ended in the playoffs, as Cincinnati lost to the eventual Super Bowl champion Baltimore Colts 17-0 in the AFC's divisional round.

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