crystawlclear :
The Super Bowl’s origins lie in the creation of the American Football League (AFL) in 1960. Started by a group of businessmen who wanted their own pro football franchises but were frustrated by the NFL’s unwillingness to expand, the AFL forged ahead as an alternative league playing a more wide-open brand of football. So began a rivalry that would help propel pro football ahead of baseball as the most popular spectator sport in the country by the end of the decade.
In 1966, after several years of competition, NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle and Lamar Hunt, owner of the AFL’s Kansas City Chiefs, negotiated a merger agreement in which the two leagues would formally join together in 1970. In the meantime, the AFL and NFL champions would play each other at the end of the season and Hunt suggested calling the new game the “Super Bowl.” Though both he and Rozelle thought a better title could be found, sportswriters started using the moniker in advance of the inaugural game in January 1967 and it stuck.
Though there was anticipation before Super Bowl I between the Green Bay Packers and Kansas City Chiefs, the hype did not remotely approach what we see today. The game, which was held in the Los Angeles Coliseum, did not even sell out. As Michael MacCambridge, author of a history of pro football, observed, “fans simply weren’t used to traveling to neutral sites.” Though the Vince Lombardi-era Packers routed the Chiefs and ratified the notion of NFL superiority, the game drew 65 million television viewers, the largest ever for an American sporting event at the time.
The game’s popularity took off from there as the New York Jets’ shocking upset of the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III gave the AFL credibility. After the merger, the NFL split into the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National Football Conference (NFC) and the victors of those conferences fought it out at the end of each season. The two-week gap between the conference championship games allowed suspense to build, as the media presence grew dramatically. By 1974, the event had grown to such proportions that Norman Vincent Peale declared that if Christ were alive “he’d be at the Super Bowl.
2026-04-15 16:22:47