Super Bowl I

• 1. Introduction

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  Super Bowl I was played on the 15th of January 1967, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, and almost nobody came. Of the stadium's 94,000 seats, 33,000 went unsold. Local newspapers ran editorials complaining that tickets priced at twelve, ten, and six dollars were simply too expensive. The television blackout kept Los Angeles viewers from watching on the stations right down the street. Nobody quite understood yet what this game would become.

  Two rival leagues had spent years fighting over players, money, and bragging rights. A bidding war had grown so fierce that when the NFL's New York Giants signed a kicker named Pete Gogolak away from the AFL's Buffalo Bills in early 1966, AFL owners called it an act of war. The leagues finally agreed to merge and settled on a championship game to decide which one was actually better. What no one fully grasped was that they were inventing something. The record books would be blank. Every statistic set that afternoon would stand forever as the first of its kind.

  The questions hanging over the day were pointed: Could the AFL's best team compete with the NFL's established dynasty? Would the Green Bay Packers simply embarrass the Kansas City Chiefs, as most sportswriters predicted? And why, if this was such a historic occasion, did a third of the seats sit empty?

• 2. A Rivalry Forced into Peace

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  Pete Gogolak's signing broke a gentlemen's agreement that had held the two leagues apart. When the NFL's New York Giants brought him over from the AFL's Buffalo Bills, Gogolak was still under contract with Buffalo. AFL owners treated it as a declaration of hostilities and immediately signed several contracted NFL players in retaliation, including eight of the NFL's top quarterbacks.

  The damage to both sides mounted fast enough that the leagues went to the negotiating table. On the 9th of June 1966, they signed a merger agreement. The deal covered a shared college draft to end the bidding war, a plan to combine into a single league, and the creation of a championship game between the two leagues' title winners.

  Los Angeles was not awarded the game until the 1st of December, less than seven weeks before kickoff. The date itself was not confirmed until the 13th of December. Finding the right window required squeezing between the existing AFL and NFL championship games, which were already scheduled for the 26th of December and the 1st of January. The two league title games were ultimately broadcast on New Year's Day in an unprecedented television doubleheader, with the AFL game from Buffalo on NBC and the NFL game from Dallas on CBS three hours later.

  The players' stakes were real: each member of the winning team would receive $15,000, and each player on the losing side would take home $7,500. Those sums came on top of the championship bonuses earned two weeks earlier, when the Packers' shares were $8,600 each and the Chiefs' were $5,308 each.

• 3. Two Teams, Two Footballs

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  Hank Stram coached the Kansas City Chiefs into the game after an 11-2-1 regular season and a decisive 31-7 road victory over the defending AFL champion Buffalo Bills in the AFL Championship Game on New Year's Day. Their offense had led the entire AFL in points scored, posting 448 for the season, and in total rushing yards, with 2,274.

  Quarterback Len Dawson finished the year as the AFL's top-rated passer, completing 159 of 284 passes for 2,527 yards and 26 touchdowns. Wide receiver Otis Taylor caught 58 passes for 1,297 yards and eight touchdowns, giving the Chiefs a genuine deep threat. The defensive secondary was anchored by safeties Johnny Robinson and Bobby Hunt, who each recorded 10 interceptions during the season.

  Vince Lombardi's Green Bay Packers had completed a transformation that still seemed remarkable. Eight years before, the franchise had posted a 1-10-1 record, the worst in the NFL that season. Lombardi arrived in January 1959 and immediately began reshaping the roster. He signed Fred Thurston, a guard who had been cut by three other teams, and made a trade with the Cleveland Browns that brought linemen Henry Jordan, Willie Davis, and Bill Quinlan to Green Bay. By 1960 the Packers were in the NFL Championship Game. They won NFL titles in 1961, 1962, 1965, and 1966.

  Bart Starr was the NFL's top-rated quarterback in 1966 and won the league's Most Valuable Player Award, completing 62.2 percent of his passes for 2,257 yards, 14 touchdowns, and only three interceptions. Fullback Jim Taylor led the team in rushing with 705 yards. The relationship between Lombardi and Taylor had frayed that season because Taylor had informed the team he planned to play out his option and sign with the expansion New Orleans Saints in 1967. Lombardi, furious over what he saw as a betrayal, refused to speak to Taylor for the entire season.

  The game itself required a logistical arrangement that had never existed before. Because the Chiefs and Packers played under different leagues' rules, each team used its own league's ball on offense. When Kansas City had the ball, the official AFL football was in play, the Spalding J5V, slightly narrower and longer than its NFL counterpart. When Green Bay had the ball, it switched to the NFL's ball, Wilson's model known as "The Duke." Even the officiating crew was a blend of AFL and NFL referees, with NFL official Norm Schachter as head referee. To neutralize the difference in the two leagues' uniform styles, a neutral design was created for the officials: familiar black and white stripes with all-black sleeves bearing each official's number.

• 4. The Pregame Noise

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  CBS announcer Frank Gifford interviewed Vince Lombardi before the game and later described what he found: Lombardi was shaking visibly and held onto Gifford's arm for support. The entire NFL had made clear it needed the Packers not just to win but to win convincingly, as proof that the older league was in a different class from the AFL upstart.

  The Chiefs carried their own pressure. Linebacker E. J. Holub said afterward that players in the tunnel were physically ill from nerves. For quarterback Len Dawson, the game carried a personal dimension. He had spent three seasons as a backup in the NFL before the AFL gave him a starting job and, in the Chiefs, a team that let him thrive.

  Kansas City cornerback Fred Williamson, who called himself "The Hammer," spent the week before the game issuing threats. He publicly stated that two forearm blows to Boyd Dowler and one to Carroll Dale would be sufficient to neutralize the Packers' receivers. The statement generated considerable press coverage and set a pregame tone of theatrical bravado that would prove awkward by the final whistle.

  The Packers practiced at UC Santa Barbara. The Chiefs worked out at Veterans Field in Long Beach. Game day brought mild temperatures and clear skies over the Coliseum. Tickets that had drawn editorial complaints about their price of six to twelve dollars were, in 2023 values, equivalent to roughly $55 to $109.

• 5. First Half: Closer Than Expected

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  After the teams traded punts on their opening possessions, Bart Starr drove Green Bay 80 yards in six plays. The key moment came when Boyd Dowler, who had re-injured his shoulder on the drive, was replaced by Max McGee. McGee had caught just four passes for 91 yards and one touchdown during the entire regular season. He slipped past cornerback Willie Mitchell, made a one-handed catch at the 23-yard line, and ran it in for a 37-yard touchdown to give Green Bay a 7-0 lead.

  Kansas City answered. Dawson led a six-play, 66-yard drive that featured a 31-yard pass to Otis Taylor to set up first-and-goal at the Packers' seven. He then threw a seven-yard touchdown to fullback Curtis McClinton to tie the game at 7-7. The Packers responded with a 73-yard drive that saw Starr convert four consecutive third downs before Jim Taylor scored on a 14-yard run using the Packers' trademark sweep play. Taylor's touchdown was the first rushing score in Super Bowl history.

• 6. Willie Wood and the Third Quarter Turn

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  Early in the third quarter, Kansas City moved to its own 49-yard line with a chance to take the lead for the first time. Linebackers Dave Robinson and Lee Roy Caffey blitzed heavily, collapsing the Chiefs' pocket. Robinson, Jordan, and Aldridge converged on Dawson, who threw a weak, wobbly pass toward tight end Fred Arbanas. Safety Willie Wood intercepted it and returned it 50 yards before being dragged down at Kansas City's five-yard line.

  Bart Starr later wrote that it was "the biggest play of the game." Hank Stram agreed. Elijah Pitts scored from the five on the next play, making it 21-10, and the Chiefs never threatened again. Kansas City gained only 12 yards of total offense in the entire third quarter. Dawson completed just 5 of 12 passes for 59 yards in the second half.

  Wood's story was itself an example of Lombardi's talent for finding players others had overlooked. Wood had played quarterback in college and was not selected by any NFL team in the draft. When he joined the Packers in 1960, Lombardi converted him to free safety. By the end of his 12-year career, Wood had been named to the All-Pro team nine times.

  McGee, the substitute receiver who had barely played during the regular season, added a 13-yard touchdown catch in the third quarter after a 56-yard drive that he anchored with three receptions for 40 yards. Green Bay led 28-10 going into the fourth quarter.

• 7. The Hammer Falls the Wrong Way

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  Fred Williamson's pregame boasts came to an emphatic end in the fourth quarter. While Kansas City was already well behind, Williamson's head collided with running back Donny Anderson's knee. He then suffered a broken arm when his own teammate, linebacker Sherrill Headrick, fell on him. Williamson was carried off the field. He had recorded three tackles in the game.

  Elijah Pitts scored his second touchdown on a one-yard run to close the scoring at 35-10. Packers halfback Paul Hornung, who had missed most of the season with a pinched nerve in his neck, was the only Packer who did not see action. Lombardi asked him late in the fourth quarter if he wanted to enter the game, and Hornung declined, unwilling to risk aggravating the injury.

  McGee finished with seven receptions for 138 yards and two touchdowns, records that stood as the longest of any receiving performance in any Super Bowl at that point, simply because no one had played one before. Starr completed 16 of 23 passes for 250 yards and two touchdowns and was named the game's Most Valuable Player. After the final whistle, a reporter asked Lombardi what he thought of the Kansas City Chiefs. Lombardi acknowledged they were an excellent, well-coached club. He then added that he thought several NFL teams, Dallas among them, were better.

• 8. The Broadcast That Almost Vanished

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  Both NBC and CBS had the right to televise the game, since each network held broadcast contracts with its respective league. The two networks set up competing operations at the Coliseum and erected a fence between their production trucks to separate the rival staffs. NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle decreed that NBC had to use the video feed provided by CBS, since the Coliseum was home to the NFL's Los Angeles Rams. CBS received a rating of 22.6 and a market share of 43, reaching 26.75 million viewers. NBC drew an 18.5 rating and a 36 share, seen by 24.43 million. The combined market share was 79, with 51.18 million total viewers.

  Despite that audience, the broadcast tapes were subsequently wiped by both networks. Videotape was expensive at the time, one half-hour reel costing roughly $300, and neither network expected the game to carry lasting historical significance. For decades, only two small fragments survived: a clip of Max McGee's opening touchdown and a clip of Jim Taylor's touchdown run, both shown publicly in 1991.

  In January 2011, a partial recording of the CBS telecast was reported to have been found in a Pennsylvania attic. A collector named Troy Haupt eventually came forward in 2016, after years of communicating with the press only through his lawyer, to explain how he had acquired it. The Paley Center for Media in New York restored and digitized the footage, which was shown publicly for the first time on the 10th of February 2024, as part of an exhibit called "Beyond the Big Game," staged with the NFL and the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The tape, a two-inch color videotape, is missing the halftime show and most of the third quarter.

  NFL Films, which had a camera crew at the game, spent months searching its archives and announced on the 11th of January 2016 that it had located all 145 plays from Super Bowl I across more than two dozen separate sources. The restored footage, with audio from the NBC Radio broadcast featuring announcers Jim Simpson and George Ratterman laid over the images, was broadcast by NFL Network on the 15th of January 2016, the game's 49th anniversary. On the 25th of June 2025, a researcher named Ray Langstone spotted a 29-minute Avco Cartrivision highlights release on eBay and announced the find on the Missing Episodes Forum, adding one more fragment to the incomplete record of the afternoon.