Super Bowl III

• 1. Introduction

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  Super Bowl III was played on the 12th of January 1969 at the Orange Bowl in Miami, Florida, and it changed professional football forever. The New York Jets, an 18-point underdog representing the upstart American Football League, walked onto that field and beat the Baltimore Colts 16-7. The Colts had gone 13-1 during the regular season and had obliterated the Cleveland Browns 34-0 in the NFL Championship Game. The Jets, by contrast, had barely survived a 27-23 nail-biter against the Oakland Raiders just weeks earlier. Almost no one outside the Jets' locker room gave them a serious chance.

  Three days before the game, Jets quarterback Joe Namath appeared at the Miami Touchdown Club and told the audience flat out: "We're gonna win the game. I guarantee it." The room laughed. Colts linebacker Mike Curtis recalled that the Baltimore team "sort of laughed at" Namath's boast. What followed was not just a football game. It was a collision between two leagues, two eras, and two very different ideas about who belonged at the top of professional sports. The questions worth sitting with are these: how did the Jets actually pull it off, and why did the Colts never see it coming?

• 2. Two Leagues, One Grudge

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  The National Football League had dominated professional football since after World War I, absorbing or outlasting every rival that challenged it. When the American Football League began play in 1960, it was the fourth league to carry that name and try to dethrone the NFL. Unlike its predecessors, this AFL survived, largely because it secured a television contract before individual teams had been doing that piecemeal. The junior league grew strong enough to compete for players directly with the NFL.

  After the 1964 season, a bidding war erupted, culminating in the AFL's New York Jets signing Alabama quarterback Joe Namath to what was then an unprecedented contract. Fearing that such battles over players would become the norm, NFL owners led by commissioner Pete Rozelle struck a merger agreement with the AFL in June 1966. The deal called for a common draft, interleague preseason play, and an annual championship game between the two leagues' winners. The NFL champion Green Bay Packers, coached by Vince Lombardi, had easily won the first two such championship games, in January 1967 and 1968, apparently confirming the older league's superiority.

  Lamar Hunt, the founder of the AFL, is credited with coining the term "Super Bowl." The nickname had not been officially applied to the first two games at the time they were played; it only became the registered name starting with the third contest. So Super Bowl III was, quite literally, the first game to officially bear that name.

• 3. The Colts' Machine

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  Baltimore entered the game as arguably the most dominant team the NFL had produced. Their long-time starting quarterback, Johnny Unitas, suffered a pre-season arm injury, forcing coach Don Shula to turn to Earl Morrall, a veteran who had bounced through four teams over 12 inconsistent seasons. Morrall proceeded to have the best year of his career, leading the NFL in passer rating at 93.2. His performance was so strong that Shula kept him as the starter even after Unitas recovered enough to play.

  The Colts' defense was historic. They allowed only 144 points during the regular season, tying the 1963 Bears' all-time record for fewest points surrendered. Bubba Smith, a 6-foot-7, 295-pound defensive end, anchored the line as the NFL's best pass rusher. The secondary combined for 29 interceptions on the season. Baltimore was also the only NFL team to regularly deploy a zone defense, giving them an advantage against NFL opponents who had little practice attacking it.

  The offense was equally fearsome. Wide receiver Jimmy Orr averaged 25.6 yards per catch. Willie Richardson averaged 18.9. Tight end John Mackey added 45 receptions for 644 yards and 5 touchdowns. Running back Tom Matte led the team in rushing with 662 yards and 9 touchdowns. Baltimore's offense ranked second in the NFL in points scored at 402 for the season, trailing only the Dallas Cowboys.

• 4. Namath's Guarantee

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  Namath made his famous prediction not in a press conference but at an all-public social event, and under circumstances he later insisted were more spontaneous than calculated. He had not planned to make any grand statement. A rowdy Colts supporter at the Miami Touchdown Club boasted loudly that Baltimore would steamroll the Jets, and Namath responded in the moment: "We're gonna win the game. I guarantee it." Sportswriter Dave Anderson, who was present, did not initially consider the remark newsworthy because Namath had been saying similar things all week. It was a piece by Luther Evans of the Miami Herald that carried the quote and made it famous.

  Coach Ewbank later joked he "could have shot" Namath for it. But the Jets themselves were not rattled. Matt Snell said the entire team, not just Namath, felt insulted at being listed as 19.5-point underdogs. Tellingly, the Jets considered the Oakland Raiders a better team than the Colts, and they had barely beaten Oakland 27-23. After studying game film of Baltimore in the days before Super Bowl III, Jets tight end Pete Lammons was heard to say, "Damn, y'all, we gotta stop watching these films. We gonna get overconfident."

  Tickets for the game were priced at $12, $8, and $6.

• 5. How the Jets Won

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  The Jets came in with a carefully constructed game plan. Wide receiver Don Maynard had strained his hamstring in the AFL Championship Game, but his reputation as a deep threat was so fearsome that the Colts devoted extra defensive attention to him throughout Super Bowl III. Maynard caught zero passes. Coach Ewbank had told his receivers to find the dead spots in Baltimore's zone defense and hook up there, trusting Namath to deliver. With Colts cornerback Lenny Lyles, weakened by tonsillitis all week, assigned to cover George Sauer one-on-one, Sauer caught 8 passes for 133 yards.

  Namath also changed how he called plays. Rather than calling them in the huddle, he gave formations and snap counts, then read the Colts' alignment at the line of scrimmage and called the actual play there. Center John Schmitt recalled that the Colts were "in shock" and that no matter what they did, running back Matt Snell would run the other way. Snell carried 30 times for 121 yards and the Jets' only touchdown, repeatedly attacking the Colts' defensive right side behind offensive tackle Winston Hill. Notably, Hill had been cut by the Colts as a rookie five years earlier, and he spent the game systematically overpowering 36-year-old defensive end Ordell Braase, the same man who had made Hill look bad in Colts training camp.

  The Colts threw four interceptions. Cornerback Randy Beverly intercepted two passes, becoming the first player in Super Bowl history to record two picks in a single game. The flea-flicker play at the end of the first half captured the Colts' dysfunction perfectly: Morrall failed to see wide receiver Jimmy Orr standing wide open near the end zone and instead threw into coverage, where Jets safety Jim Hudson intercepted it as the half ended. Orr later said, "I was open from here to Tampa."

• 6. The Aftermath

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  Namath finished the game completing 17 of 28 passes for 206 yards without a touchdown or an interception, good for an 83.3 passer rating. He was named the game's most valuable player, making him the first player in Super Bowl history to win MVP without personally scoring or throwing for a touchdown. Morrall completed just 6 of 17 passes for 71 yards with 3 interceptions, producing a passer rating of 9.3, one of the worst in Super Bowl history.

  In 1983, Bubba Smith alleged in his autobiography that the game had been fixed so the merger would proceed smoothly. He offered no conclusive evidence, and his claims were never corroborated. Former coach Don Shula flatly rejected the allegation, saying the way he remembered the game was that "everyone missed everybody all day long, including Bubba." Smith died in 2011.

  Baltimore defensive back Bobby Boyd retired after the Super Bowl to join the Colts coaching staff. In a 2010 interview, he described waking in the night for years replaying the loss. "I had nightmares about it for a long time," he said. "Many a time, I'd wake up thinking, 'Why didn't we try this or that?' Then I'd get up, angry, drink a Coke, watch TV to calm down and then try to go back to sleep." He said eventually the dreams stopped, but "I'll be thinking about that game to the day I die." Boyd died in 2017.

  The Jets have not appeared in a Super Bowl since that January evening in Miami, losing the AFC Championship Game in the 1982, 1998, 2009, and 2010 seasons, making their 1969 title both the peak of the franchise and a standard they have never reached again.