Smile | The History of the Super Bowl | YouTube Rabbithole
Alright @YouTheReader,
I had Smile by The Royal Concept on in the background on Saturday Sports 2/11 ‘23 for the Super Bowl LVII. I’m all Usher’d out from OMG and Yeah!, plus I love this tune. It’s one of those songs I can’t get sick of. I first heard it while I was up at school at UAlbany, back when my friends and I would play FIFA 25 hours a day. It's a very catchy tune that I think should get a bit more plays.
Damn, I’m not quite sure exactly what the lyrics behind this are but I always used to get a negative connotation toward how they use “your blog”. Now when I hear this it feels like a personal attack. Do people think of Week to Week Notes as just a blog?!?!? Does that mean I’m just a blogger?!?!? Feck! I’m one of those people, now! Where did it all go wrong?!?!?
Man, FIFA always used to have some of the best video game soundtracks. Would be pretty cool if Olivia Culpo and Claire Kittle gave this a listen, but then again those social media tags were so Thursday Night and we’re Off That already on to Sunday…
I never know how posting things like this comes across, but I still find it pretty cool to wake up on Saturday to the golfer on the top of the leaderboard of the Waste Management Open who liked the post I tagged him on.
Also, Shane Lowry now may know where to get some solid pints in Scottsdale and maybe Lil Jon drinks Irish champagne as well. Believe me, I find it cool, but it’s just me playing a GameBoy on social media.
Are a pair of jeans that get washed twice a month (if they’re not stained maybe longer), a Champion sweatshirt (huge 90s guy, you know), and a Yankee, Jets, or Paddy hat considered dressing sharp?
I’m sorry, but I’m a Simple Man, you won’t see me dressing up like Fidel Castro for a giggle like Everybody’s Favorite Dave! Man, I’ll tell ya, that Portnoy, he is such a silly goose! Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if Davy blew up Week to Week Notes Pageviews by giving the Instagram account @You_The_Reader an endorsement to his Stoolies? I mean, not for nothing, I did endorse the man for President! Oh well, don’t get your hopes up, little old me is too much of a nobody to be on his radar. Back to her…
Last year’s 15-second Reel was kinda ehhhh. It needed a bit of improvement.
The Royal Concept are Swedish, I’m impressed by the lead singer’s American English accent.
She really does have a smile that lights up a room, my favorite. I gotta remember to delete that last sentence before posting the final draft, that’d be so embarrassing.
On to some history of the Super Bowl…
The National Football League was established in 1920 in Canton, Ohio, with the first President of the league being Jim Thorpe. The Native American All-American was not only a gold medalist from the 1912 Olympic games, a .252 hitter during his 6-year stint in the MLB, but he was a star running back as well. In those days, the forward pass was just a figment of our imagination so American football was much more like rugby with 11 men pitching laterals to one another and handing the ball off on every play. The original teams of the NFL were five teams from Ohio (Akron Pros, Canton Bulldogs, Cleveland Tigers, Columbus Panhandlers, and Dayton Triangles), four teams from Illinois (Chicago Tigers, Decatur Staleys, Racine Cardinals [the Cardinals were based in Chicago but took the name of a local street], and Rock Island Independents), two from Indiana (Hammond Pros and Muncie Flyers), two from New York (Buffalo All-Americans and Rochester Jeffersons), and the Detroit Heralds from Michigan. If none of those teams sound familiar, only two of the originals today are still around and they have different names…the Cardinals would move to St. Louis before finding their home in Arizona and the Decatur Staleys moved to Chicago taking on the name “Da Bears.”
This was the middle of the Roaring 20s and MLB was becoming America’s Past Time so football’s popularity went hot & cold, meaning teams would go defunct and others would join. In 1921, the Green Bay Packers established themselves. Next was the New York Football Giants which formed in 1925. Then came the Detroit Lions in 1930, the Washington whatever you wanna call them in 1932, the Pittsburgh Steelers along with the Philadelphia Eagles in 1933, the LA Rams who started in Cleveland in 1937, and the Cleveland Browns who started in the NFL in 1950. With the rise of radio and even more so, TV, the NFL’s popularity started to sprout as they were the premier football league of America.
Now and then another football league would try to compete with the NFL, but would ultimately fail. Then came the American Football League which formed in 1960. The teams involved in the AFL were the New York Titans, Boston Patriots, Buffalo Bills, & the Houston Oilers, and a Western division of the Los Angeles Chargers, Denver Broncos, Oakland Raiders, & Dallas Texans. While the NFL was never too concerned with this new league, they got pissed off when the AFL started to have their own draft and lobby players to play for them as they would pay the players more. In 1960, the AFL signed about 3 quarters of the NFL’s 1st Round Draft picks, including the Heisman Trophy winner Billy Cannon. Eventually, as the new AFL’s quality of play started to improve they wanted to test the waters with a championship game with the NFL. On January 15, 1967, the first-ever “AFL-NFL World Championship” took place between the Green Bay Packers and Kansas City Chiefs.
The Green Bay Packers would win the game that would go on to be the 1st Super Bowl by a score of 35-10. The Packers were coached by Vince Lombardi. Born in Brooklyn in 1913, Lombardi despite being 5’8” and 180 lbs. would receive a football scholarship at Fordham University in the Bronx to play on their offensive line. When he was too small for the NFL, Lombardi turned to X’s & O’s. He was the offensive coordinator of the New York Giants from 1954 to 1958 before he went to Green Bay to become their head coach. While in Green Bay, Lombardi won 3 NFL Championships in the 1960s before winning this new “Super Bowl” in 1967. In the 2nd Super in 1968, Lombardi’s Packers would again beat the AFC’s best, this time it was the Oakland Raiders. Due to his excellence as a head coach of the NFL’s first 2 Super Bowls, the league decided to name the Super Bowl Trophy after him…The Lombardi Trophy.
At this point, the NFL looked at the AFL as if they were a laughingstock. The first 2 Super Bowls were blowouts. One of the laughingstock of the AFL in the 1960s was the New York Titans, so they decided to rebrand their name to the Jets. The New York Jets were so bad in the early 60s that by 1965, they earned the 1st pick of the AFL Draft. They selected a QB out of Alabama by the name of Joe Namath. It didn’t take long before Namath would earn the nickname “Broadway Joe.” Not only could the man sling the pigskin around the gridiron but he enjoyed himself as the franchise QB of the inferior football team of New York. During the year of the 1st Super Bowl in 1967, Namath made the Jets a respectable ball club as he threw for a league-high 4,007 passing yards with 26 TDs. Please ignore that he led the league in INTs with 28, in those days, QBs weren’t obsessed with their TD/INT ratio. He was great and in 1968, during the 2nd Super Bowl season, Namath won the AFL Player of the Year.
In 1969, the New York Jets made it to the Super Bowl to take on the Baltimore Colts. In the lead-up to the game, one unnamed NFL coach said, "Namath plays his first pro football game today." Broadway Joe responded with some headlines of his own when at Miami Touchdown Club while sitting on a pool chair he told reporters, “I've got news for you.We're gonna win the game.I guarantee it.” This sounded ridiculous at the time because the AFL had got their ass whooped in the past 2 Super Bowls and the Baltimore Colts that season were 15-1. The Jets entered the game as 18-point underdogs. The Jets would go on to win Super Bowl III by a score of 16-7, which is still to this day considered one of the biggest upsets in sports history. After the game, Namath told reporters, "We overcame our critics. Most people predicted a 42-13 loss." After winning the Super Bowl, the legend of Broadway Joe would only grow, however, the Jets still haven’t made it back to a Super Bowl since. Did he make a deal with the devil? Who knows, but because of this Jets’ win, the Super Bowl is still around today - the AFL and NFL merged after Super Bowl III.
In the 1972 season (Super Bowl played in 1973), the Miami Dolphins went undefeated, becoming the only team to have a Perfect Season. After losing Super Bowl III, Don Shula of the Baltimore Colts headed south and took the Miami Dolphins gig. The 1972 Dolphins went 14-0 in large part because of the excellent backfield of Larry Czonka and Mercury Morris. They also had the NFL’s best defense, allowing only 12.2 points per game. From 1972 to 1974, the Miami Dolphins went to 3 straight Super Bowls and won back-to-back titles after losing the first. While the Dolphins would never return to glory (Darius Rucker knows all about that from his Hootie & The Blowfish days), in 1983 they would draft Dan Marino. Don Shula coached Miami from 1970 to 1995, winning a ton of football games with Marino and coming oh so close with Dan Marino quite a few times. To this day, Don Shula is still the winningest regular season head coach of all time, and Bill Belichick can kick rocks. The Dolphins being elite in the 1970s along with Marino, meant they were on TV more often than most teams. So their popularity from these days stretches all over the US, not just Miami.
The Miami Dolphins weren’t the only team in the NFL during the 1970s that gained popularity due to the rise of the Super Bowl’s importance in American culture. The Pittsburgh Steelers and Dallas Cowboys also were benefactors of this cultural phenomenon. The Steelers led by Terry Bradshaw at QB, the acrobatic Lynn Swann at WR, and Mean Joe Greene on defense won 4 Super Bowls in the 1974-1979. My own mom was a total sellout in those days and decided to root for them, which I’m sure pissed off my Uncle Robby, a Jets fan. What must’ve pissed him off even more was that his younger brother, my Uncle Tommy, would become a Dallas fan because of the Roger Staubach-led Cowboys who were in the Super Bowl 3 times in the late 70s and winners of 1 Super Bowl. Nonetheless, the Cowboys were also gaining popularity because they played football on Thanksgiving and were competing with the annual Detroit Lions embarrassment. In a nutshell, that’s how the Cowboys would become “America’s Team” and the Pittsburgh Steelers would establish a nationwide fanbase…They were good at the perfect time when 70s kids didn’t have many options on what they could watch on TV.
In 1982 during Super Bowl XVI, the San Francisco 49ers would win their first Super Bowl. With head coach Bill Walsh and his West Coast Offense, the 49ers were led by Joe Cool Montana. Known as the Comeback Kid from his college days when in 1977 he led Notre Dame to a National Championship thanks to the 5 times he brought them back from down 20 points, San Fransico was changing the way NFL teams were throwing the football because it featured short passes and quick slanting pass routes instead of just running the ball every play before tossing up a deep ball on occasion. Joe Montana would win 4 Super Bowls as a 49er from 1982 to 1990. When he retired from the NFL he was considered the unquestionable GOAT. One of his biggest fans as a kid was a boy from San Fransico named Tom Brady.
I know I’m skipping a bunch here or there, but I gotta include Da 1985 Bears. Their head coach, the late Mike Ditka, was just as legendary as their defense. Their defense led the league in points allowed (198), yards allowed (4,135), and takeaways (54) as they just brutalized opponents offenses. Speaking of legendary head coaches, the 1986 Giants had one as well in Bill “Big Tuna” Parcells. The NFL during the 1980s had a lot more parody but the 49ers, Bears, and Giants emerged as the biggest headliners.
After Roger Staubach retired, the Dallas Cowboys experienced a bit of a lull in the 80s, never getting past the NFC Divisional Round before being awful in the late 80s. In 1989, a man who made his millions of oil named Jerry Jones, purchased the lousy Cowboys. He picked Jimmy Johnson to take the reigns as head coach. Johnson was a surprise selection because he was an extremely successful college football coach for the Miami Hurricanes but this was the pros, what did he know? Well, Dallas had just received a boatload of future draft picks because they stupidly traded away their only good player in RB Herschel Walker. Johnson, knowing all about the good players in college football at the time, chose QB Troy Aikman with the 1st selection of the 1989 NFL Draft. After the Cowboys were once again horrific in Aikman’s rookie season, their “future draft picks” would turn into real players like RB Emmitt Smith, WR Michael Irvin, and their Great Wall of offensive linemen. The Cowboys would go from being a joke in the late 1980s to the NFL Dynasty of the 90s.
After Dallas’ dominance, the Green Bay Packers led by Brett Favre would emerge. Favre almost played QB like a gunslinger in the backyard, fun to watch, and brilliant at times, but an absolute wild card. After winning Super Bowl XXI, the Packers made it back to the game the following season when they played John Elway and the Denver Broncos. Elway was a former #1 overall pick of the Dan Marino draft of 1983 and just like Marino was known for not being able to win the big one. The Broncos would beat Favre, which got the monkey off of Elway’s back. The Denver Broncos would then win back-to-back Super Bowls as Elway’s career would go into the sunset following their 1998 Super Bowl victory. Elway credits a ton of his success to Terrell Davis (I don’t think that TD and I are related). Elway’s coach was Mike Shanahan, the father of Kyle who is coaching in the Super Bowl today.
The New England Patriots were good, blah, blah, blah.
The David Tyree catch was insane. Giants fans I already was nice about Big Tuna, don’t rub it in. Of course, there are a ton of more recent Super Bowls I could write about ad nauseam, here are some cool Super Bowl facts to finish…
- Aside from Thanksgiving, it is the 2nd-highest eating day for the average American. 8 million pounds of guacamole is consumed on Super Bowl Sunday.
- Music has always been played at the Super Bowl halftime. In 1967 it was the University of Arizona Symphonic Marching Band so a bit different from today. The first real megastar artist to perform at halftime was Michael Jackson in 1993 during XXVII. His performance sorta changed the game and led us to the likes of Britney Spears, Aerosmith, U2, Shania Twain, Janet Jackson-Justin Timberlake (c’mon I had to include that), Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, Prince, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, The Who, The Black Eyed Peas, Madonna, Beyonce, Bruno Mars, Katy Perry, Coldplay, Lady Gaga, Maroon 5, Shakira & J-Lo, The Weeknd, Dr Dre-Snoop Dogg-Eminem-Kendrick Lamar, and last year’s Rihanna.
- The NFL does not pay the artist anything for the performance. While they do cover the expenses of production, the artists tend to make more than enough from the publicity. For instance, J-Lo and Shakira saw a Spotify spike of 335% and 230% for their ‘20 Halftime.
- Last, but not least, the Super Bowl last year was the most-watched TV sporting broadcast of all time with 115.1 million American viewers. The only American TV event that has it beat is the Apollo 11 Moon landing in the Summer of ‘69. Now that you read, or scrolled to the bottom, why not turn on CBS at 6:30 PM ET to witness history in real-time?