by Ray Keating
The Keating Files – January 31, 2020
The Super Bowl kicks off on Sunday night at 6:30 PM EST. And much of the United States will be watching the Kansas City Chiefs take on the San Francisco 49ers.
No doubt, the Super Bowl ranks as America’s biggest sporting event, with an estimated 112.7 million viewers having tuned in to last year’s game. This year’s contest will be the 54th Super Bowl.
54th? Wait, I thought the NFL was celebrating its 100th anniversary throughout this season?
The NFL’s festivities marking 100 years of the league were occasionally interesting, but the NFL rarely does well with its own history. And that is made clear when the Super Bowl rolls around each year.
The NFL, as well as most fans and the media, always talk about who won (and lost) Super Bowls, but little, if anything, is said about previous NFL champions and those championship games (except for the occasional mention of the 1958 NFL Championship game won by the Baltimore Colts in overtime). Yes, there were NFL champions before Super Bowl I was played at the conclusion of the 1966 season.
So, we often hear about the New England Patriots and the Pittsburgh Steelers winning the most Super Bowls – each with six. Impressive? Of course. But in reality, there are three NFL teams with more NFL titles.
The Green Bay Packers actually are the NFL’s team with the most championships at 13. Next come the Chicago Bears with nine, and then the New York Giants at eight.
The highly vaunted Patriots have a considerable journey ahead to even become number three, never mind more than doubling their current Super Bowl wins to match the Packers’ achievement.
Also, consider that the much-maligned Cleveland Browns and Detroit Lions – each without a Super Bowl appearance – both have four NFL championships. The Arizona Cardinals have no Super Bowl wins, but were NFL champs twice when the team played in Chicago.
The Philadelphia Eagles won their first Super Bowl two years ago, but that actually was the team’s fourth NFL championship.
Why aren’t the pre-1966 NFL champions fully celebrated and recognized by the league, fans and the media? It’s rather bewildering and exceedingly ridiculous.
And what about the losers? This is a sore point for this writer being a lifelong fan of the Minnesota Vikings, who have lost four Super Bowls without a victory. That abysmal record is matched by the Buffalo Bills (who did it four years in a row).
But perhaps Bills and Vikes fans can take some solace in noting that several teams have lost more NFL championship games. The Denver Broncos dropped five, as did the Bears, Browns and Patriots. The Rams and Redskins each lost six. But there’s more – the Giants lost 12.
Major League Baseball and the NHL truly embrace their histories. Fans, the media and each league embrace and fully recognize the champions from the start of their respective leagues. But even during this season of celebrating 100 years of the NFL, the league continued to show that it really cares little about its own championship teams prior to the “Super Bowl era.”
The NFL has fumbled its chance to raise to equal prominence all of those teams that won championships before 1966. Perhaps the NFL will get around to doing a high-profile, determined salute to those teams one day.
As for which team will make history during the Super Bowl LIV, the Chiefs are seeking their second NFL title, having won Super Bowl IV at the end of the 1969 season. The Chiefs lost Super Bowl I. Meanwhile, the 49ers are an impressive 5-1 in NFL championship games (all Super Bowls), with its last win in 1994 (and losing in 2012).
A 49ers’ victory would put the team in elite company, tying the Patriots and Steelers with six Super Bowl wins ... and yet, far behind the Packers’ incredible – indeed, historic – 13 championships.
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Ray Keating is a columnist, a novelist (his latest novel is The Traitor: A Pastor Stephen Grant Novel, which is the 12thbook in the series), an economist, a nonfiction author (among his recent works is Free Trade Rocks! 10 Points on International Trade Everyone Should Know), a podcaster, and an entrepreneur. The views expressed here are his own.
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