Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Wednesdays, I will be reviewing 1st and Ten, which aired in syndication from 1984 to 1991. The entire series is streaming on Tubi.

This week, season 3 comes to an end.

Episode 3.13 “Championship Jinx”

(Dir by Bruce Seth Green, originally aired on December 16th, 1987)

Things have a way of working themselves out on 1st & Ten, especially when the season ends and a lot of plotlines need to be hastily wrapped up.

Last week, TD Parker (OJ Simpson) was arrested under suspicion of ticket scalping.  This episode, it turned out that 1) ticket scalping isn’t illegal and 2) TD’s ex-mistress quickly figured out that her boyfriend was trying to frame him.  Someone trying to frame OJ Simpson!?  Like anyone would ever buy that.  Anyway, the main theme here seemed to be that it was a good thing TD cheated on his wife because otherwise, no one would have been around to exonerate him.

Last week, Yinessa was letting fame go to his head.  This week, his father died and the funeral was a media circus.  Yinessa decided to focus on playing football. That’s a good thing, seeing as how the Bulls had yet another championship game coming up.

Zagreb was concerned that he was a jinx after he appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated.  (Yinessa told him that players who appeared on the cover often lost the spark afterwards.) Luckily, Cliff and Jethro brought in a voodoo priestess (Roxie Roker) to exorcise the jinx.

Before the game, Jill told the team that they weren’t only playing for themselves.  They were playing for the memory of Tom Yinessa’s father.  Unfortunately, the Bulls lost the game at the last minute when Billy Cooper’s game-winning catch was reviewed by the booth and declared to be out of bounds.  So, I guess Yinessa’s father is in Hell now.

And so ends the rather odd third season.  Coach Denardo left after the first episode.  Delta Burke left about halfway through the season, just to be replaced by a new female owner who gave a pre-game speech that referred to all of the previous times she had gone to the Championship Game with the Bulls just to see them lose, despite the fact that she wasn’t even a part of the show’s cast during the previous two seasons.  The season began with a player dying of steroid abuse and ended with OJ Simpson proving his innocence.  Oh!  And Zagreb discovered his father was a CIA agent and then he got married.

Was it a good season?  Not really.  This isn’t a good show.  But season 3 was definitely a lot stranger than the previous two seasons and that’s definitely a point in 1st & Ten‘s favor.

Next week, we start season 4!