Super "Irony" Bowl
The Gold Sheet
As mentioned many times during this postseason, we've seen a lot of pro football in the 53 seasons we've been publishing. That would include every Super Bowl since the first one between the Packers and Chiefs back on January 15, 1967 at the L.A. Coliseum, which is also the only Super Bowl I've ever attended. And that game was a lot more interesting than modern-day historians would have you believe, as the AFL upstarts from Kansas City were very much in the game until the third quarter, when Green Bay finally took charge en route to a 35-10 win. Which, in retrospect, was a lot more competitive than many subsequent Super Bowls we’ve seen over the years?
As can be imagined, we take a lot of questions from readers and other interested observers about the history of the Super Bowl, which holds a special tug for a generation of sports fans who, like us, have been around for all of them. Which is probably the main reason the Super Bowl has become such a contemporary phenomenon, with its entire history so fresh in the minds of so many. And why it seems to have a greater connection with the masses than more-venerable sporting institutions such as the World Series or Kentucky Derby, each of which predates us all.
That reader curiosity in our recollections prompted us to embark upon our own nostalgic Super Bowl journey on these pages and those of our website in recent years, as we've gone about ranking all of the Super Bowls, from the best to watch to the worst. While our list (presented inversely, from 43rd, or worst, to first) will appear in is entirety over the next week on www.goldsheet.com, we'll share with you our top five Super Bowls...
5-XXIII, San Francisco 20 - Cincinnati 16 (at Miami)...Lots of drama, as despite being outgained by a near 2-to-1 margin, Cincy hung tough thanks to Stanford Jennings' 93-yard kickoff return TD late in the third quarter and a couple of missed FGs by 49er PK Mike Cofer, and even held a late 16-13 lead thanks to a Jim Breech FG with only 3:20 to play. But the incomparable Joe Montana cemented his place in Canton by authoring perhaps the best winning drive in Super Bowl history, taking the 49ers 92 yards to the title, culminating in a 10-yard TD toss to John Taylor with just 34 seconds to play.
4-XIII, Pittsburgh 35 - Dallas 31 (at Miami)...Long considered the standard by which great Super Bowls should be measured, this one featured great teams, great players, and great plays, though the most-enduring memory of XIII might be veteran Cowboys TE Jackie Smith dropping a sure TD pass that would have leveled the score in the 3rd Q. It was also an unofficial title bout for "team of the decade," as each had won two Super Bowls in the '70s prior to kickoff. All it lacked was a real down-to-the-wire finish, as a belated Dallas rally in the final few minutes narrowed a 35-17 Steeler lead to the 35-31 final margin, though the last TD, scored with 22 seconds to play, caused apoplexy for many gamblers and Vegas sportsbooks, with the pointspread having bounced between 31/2-41/2 for much of the previous two weeks!
3-XLII, N.Y. Giants 17 - New England 14 (at Glendale, AZ)...A taut affair, with the 12-point underdog Giants flustering the undefeated Patriots with their defense throughout the first three quarters. Then, not unlike a 10,000-meter race at the Olympics, both broke into a sprint for the finish line, with three lead changes in the final quarter. In the end, however, it was the surprising Giants on top, with Eli Manning answering Tom Brady's late TD pass with one of his own to Plaxico Burress to win it with 35 seconds to play. A circus catch by WR David Tyree on New York's final drive (after a Houdini-like escape in the pocket by Eli) rates alongside Lynn Swann's acrobatics a generation earlier among the best catches in Super Bowl annals.
2-XLIII, Pittsburgh 27 - Arizona 23 (at Tampa)...Although one of the chippiest SBs, big plays and a wild fourth quarter made XLIII one to remember. The Steelers looked on the verge of a KO several times, first after dominating early action, then after LB James Harrison's 100-yard TD interception on the last play of the first half staked Pittsburgh to a 17-7 lead at the break. The Cards' defense grimly kept the Steelers within earshot until the Kurt Warner-led offense finally awakened in the 4th Q, and for a moment it appeared as if Larry Fitzgerald's 64-yard TD catch with 2:37 to play would give the Big Red their first title in 61 years. But Ben Roethlisberger, who had been mostly muffled since the 1st Q, calmly drove Pittsburgh downfield for the winning TD pass in heavy traffic to Santonio Holmes with just 35 seconds to play.
1-XXXVIII, New England 32 - Carolina 29 (at Houston)... Though it took a while for this one to warm up (no scoring until late in 1st half), it turned into a real corker, especially a wild fourth quarter (perhaps the best 15 minutes in SB history) that featured three lead changes and a total of 37 points. Carolina, which had rallied to take a 22-21 lead on an 85-yard TD pass from Jake Delhomme to Muhsin Muhammad with 6:53 to play, fell behind 29-22 on a Tom Brady-Mike Vrabel TD pass and Kevin Faulk two-point PAT, only to level matters on a Delhomme-Ricky Proehl scoring pass with 1:08 to play. Brady then led a textbook game-winning drive, ending in Adam Vinatieri's 41-yard FG at the final gun. Both defenses were spent by the end of the game, when the last team with the ball looked like it was going to win. And XXXVIII deserves to be remembered for the great game it was, rather than Janet Jackson's malfunctioning wardrobe at halftime!
It's interesting that the top three Super Bowls on our list have all been played within the past six years, which confirms a no-so-subtle change in the pattern of the games that for a long time were absent almost any drama. Indeed, blowout results were so expected in Super Bowl games during most of the '80s and '90s that oddsmakers were forced to adjust pointspreads just to address the phenomenon. Hard as it is to believe, the biggest pointspread of the entire 1994 NFL season came in Super Bowl XXIX, when the price on the favored 49ers ballooned to 18 1/2 over the underdog Chargers. When San Francisco ended up covering that game more handily than the 49-26 final might suggest, it also signified an end of an era when one-sided games were the rule, rather than the exception, in Super Bowl games. In the 15 years since, almost every Super Bowl has been competitive and filled with varying degrees of drama, save for perhaps Denver's comfy win over Atlanta in XXXIII, Baltimore's romp past the Giants in XXXV, and Tampa Bay's cruise past Oakland in XXXVII.
Still, modern Super Bowls are absent some of the emotional edge that was common among the first four of them when the rival NFL and AFL played their own schedules before the respective champions would face off for all of the marbles. And the Super Bowl is really the last vestige of that intense rivalry between the competing leagues in the '60s, when the animosity also boiled into preseason games between 1967-69. Although it's hard for modern-day NFL fans to imagine preseason games generating such interest, we have always believed that some of the real boiling points of the old NFL-AFL rivalry happened during the exhibition seasons of those years. Regional matchups between the 49ers and Raiders, Rams and Chargers, and Cowboys and Oilers were instant hits, and to this day we're not sure longstanding New York football fans will ever forget the first time the Giants and Jets squared off, which didn't happen until 1969. It was one of the more ballyhooed preseason games in history, taking place at the historic Yale Bowl in New Haven, with Joe Namath's Jets, helped by rookie DB Mike Battle's punt return exploits, whipping the old-line Giants, 37-14.
But 1967 was the year the AFL-NFL rivalry boiled, when the 16 much-anticipated interleague contests helped define that preseason as the "Summer of the Little Super Bowls." Teams really played to win those interleague preseason battles, too, as The Sporting News' Larry Felser duly noted at the time. "'Exhibition' is hardly the word," said Felser. "From the talk around both leagues, at least some of those games, if not all of them, will take on the characteristics of a vendetta." None played more to win than Hank Stram's Kansas City Chiefs, who used their August 23 preseason game against George Halas' Chicago Bears as an opportunity to avenge that Super Bowl loss seven months earlier vs. the Packers. Which the Chiefs did, and then some, running up a 66-24 scoreline that finally made the old, established league take notice and reportedly brought a tear to the eyes of the "Papa Bear" when the game was complete. As the score mounted that night at old Municipal Stadium, Bears DB Richie Petitbon asked Kansas City WR Chris Burford if the Chiefs were going to ease up. "Not tonight, Richie," said Burford, as the carnage continued. And any old AFL fan will have fond memories of the first of those 16 interleague exhibitions in 1967, when pesky Denver upset Detroit, 13-7, at DU Stadium, bruising the Lions in the process when rushing for 222 yards, 89 of those by big Cookie Gilchrist (who scored the Broncos' only TD). All-Pro DT Alex Karras had famously said he would "walk back to Detroit" if his Lions lost, something the press in the Rockies had a lot of fun with the week after the game ("Alex Karras reached Omaha today"). When the dust settled, the established NFL had won 13 of those 16 "exhibitions" in the summer of '67, but many came down to the wire, and by the next preseason in 1968, the AFL would end up with the advantage.
Things figure to be more civil next Sunday in Miami, although we think it ironic that neither the Indianapolis Colts nor New Orleans Saints even existed when the first Super Bowl was played in January of '67. Of course, the Colts were then based in Baltimore, and the Saints were a year away from making their debut as an NFL expansion team. And the Saints' journey has been a colorful, if not particularly successful, one in the 42 years since, although no team was christened with a bigger bang than New Orleans, when rookie John Gilliam took the opening kickoff back for a 94-yard TD against the Rams (Miami's Joe Auer had done the same for the expansion Dolphins the previous year). The first time the Saints and Colts tangled was late in that 1967 campaign, when New Orleans' ex-Colt QB Gary Cuozzo actually outpassed his old teammate Johnny Unitas 214-148 yards, although Unitas' Baltimore won handily, 30-10. The Saints, though usually entertaining, did a lot of losing for the next generation, failing to make the playoffs until 1992 or win a postseason game until 2000.
Another irony about this matchup is that Colt QB Peyton Manning grew up a Saints fan in New Orleans, where his dad Archie was QB from 1971-82. Archie never quite became the savior of the franchise as many expected after his opening game in '71, when he scored a last-play TD to beat the Rams in a pulsating 24-20 thriller. Unfortunately, that might have been Archie's greatest moment as a Saint. And had New Orleans fans had known then that a Manning would be playing at QB the first time the Saints would reach the Super Bowl, they would have never believed it would be more than 38 years later, and that it would be Archie's son taking the snaps...for the opposing team. Ironic, indeed!
The recent trend of competitive Super Bowls is reflected in improved performance of the underdogs, who have now covered six of the last eight in the "Supe" after an extended run of chalk-dominated results prior. Overall, SB favorites still lead underdogs by a 22-18-2 count (with one pick 'em in SB XVI between the 49ers and Bengals), although that chalk edge has been shrinking in recent years. And even though we have been treated to a number of thrillers in recent Super Bowls, almost half of them (21 of 43) have still been decided by 14 points or more.