Super Bowl - A Closer Look
When the first AFL-NFL Championship Game was played in 1967, few people in either league could predict that the game would snowball into one of the days on the calendar that an entire nation would look forward to – the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl matches up the last two teams standing after a long, grueling season and a pressure-packed playoff tournament. Every NFL player strives for this from day one and, for those who get here, this is their chance for a piece of history. Super Bowl Champions are immortalized forever. Losers are generally forgotten. As if the drama of the game itself isn’t enough, the Super Bowl has also become a cultural event of monumental proportions, and holders of Super Bowl tickets are sure to witness the game of a lifetime.
That first Super Bowl game was played at the Los Angeles Coliseum, and featured the NFL’s Green Bay Packers at the height of their dominant period in the 1960s, and the Kansas City Chiefs, who were owned by one of the AFL’s co-founders, Lamar Hunt. The Packers would take the game by a 35-10 count. Green Bay would return for the second game in 1968, knocking off the AFL representative Oakland Raiders 33-14 at the former Orange Bowl stadium in Miami. It wasn’t until 1969 and the third game that the Super Bowl name was adopted, and the first two games were retroactively referred to as Super Bowls I and II. Super Bowl III featured another traditional NFL power, the Baltimore Colts, facing off against the AFL upstart New York Jets. Even though the Colts were heavily favored, having lost only once through the regular season and the NFL playoffs, Jets quarterback Joe Namath guaranteed a win at a pregame event in Miami – and then followed through, bringing the AFL its only Super Bowl crown before becoming the merged American Football Conference (AFC).
First the AFC, then the NFC… Throughout the 1970s, the AFC would flex its collective muscles, as the Pittsburgh Steelers rose to prominence while winning three Super Bowls in five years. The Chiefs, Colts (having switched to the AFC as part of the AFL-NFL merger), Miami Dolphins, and Raiders would also win glory for the AFC, while the Dallas Cowboys would be the only NFC team to break through during the decade. The Steelers claimed their fourth Super Bowl to open the 1980s, while the Raiders would win twice more in the early part of the decade as well, but then the NFC would stake their claim as the power conference through the rest of the decade and well into the 1990s. The Washington Redskins, San Francisco 49ers, New York Giants, and the Cowboys would establish a chokehold with multiple Super Bowl wins through the 1980s and 1990s, along with the Chicago Bears and their “Super Bowl Shuffle” team of 1986 and another Packers title in 1997. More recent times have seen the New England Patriots claim three Super Bowls in four years, while newer teams such as the St. Louis Rams, Baltimore Ravens, and Tampa Bay Buccaneers have reached the Super Bowl pinnacles as well.
The 2013 Super Bowl will be played at Mercedes-Benz Superdome, the home of the New Orleans Saints. Get ready to experience the game in person; get your Super Bowl tickets today!
