Stumblin' Along 2/8 '26
San Francisco
San Francisco
- The History of the Super Bowl
- YouTube Rabbithole
Alright @YouTheReader,
Today’s tune is Scott McKenzie’s San Francisco.
San Francisco was written by John Phillips from The Mamas And The Papas as the unofficial anthem for the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival.
The lyrics clearly fit the spirit of the Summer of Love. This song peaked at #4 on the US Billboard Hot 100. The official song name, San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair), is the longest title of any UK #1 chart topper.
(Source: SongFacts)
1967 was also the first year of the Super Bowl. I’d be surprised if this song isn’t referenced or used for a commercial at some point.
On to…
The National Football League was established in 1920 in Canton, Ohio, with Jim Thorpe as the first president. The Native American All-American was not only a gold medalist at the 1912 Olympic Games and a .252 hitter during his 6-year stint in the MLB, but he starred at running back on Sundays 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…
-5 teams from Ohio (Akron Pros, Canton Bulldogs, Cleveland Tigers, Columbus Panhandlers, and Dayton Triangles).
- 4 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).
- 2 from Indiana (Hammond Pros and Muncie Flyers).
- 2 from New York (Buffalo All-Americans and Rochester Jeffersons).
- 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 settling in Arizona, and the Decatur Staleys moved to Chicago, taking on the name “Da Bears.”
(Source: Britannica)
During the Roaring 20s, baseball was busy becoming America’s Pastime. Football’s popularity went hot & cold, meaning teams would go defunct, and other new teams 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 TV, the NFL’s popularity grew, making it the premier professional football league in America.
Every now and then, another football league would try to compete with the NFL but would ultimately fail. In 1960, the American Football League was formed. The teams involved in the AFL were the New York Titans, Boston Patriots, Buffalo Bills, & Houston Oilers in the Eastern Division, 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 drafting college players and would lobby the players to play for them by bribing them with more money. For instance, in their first year of existence, 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 improved, they wanted to test the waters with a championship game against the NFL. On January 15, 1967, the first-ever “AFL-NFL World Championship” occurred between the NFL Champion Green Bay Packers and the AFL Champion 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 legendary Vince Lombardi coached the Packers. Born in Brooklyn in 1913, Lombardi, despite being only 5’8” and 180 pounds, received a football scholarship at Fordham University to play on their offensive line. When he was too small for the NFL, Lombardi turned to the Xs & Os. He was the offensive coordinator of the New York Giants from 1954 to 1958 before ending up with the Packers. While in Green Bay, Lombardi won 3 NFL Championships in the 1960s. In the 2nd Super Bowl in 1968, the 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 named the Super Bowl Trophy after him, hence, 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 biggest jokes 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 named Joe Willie 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 also 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 Super Bowl III 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 the 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 gotten its 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. Namath would prove to be correct by leading the Jets to a 16-7 upset. To this day, it is still considered one of the greatest upsets in sports history. After the game, Namath told reporters, “We overcame our critics. Most people predicted a 42-13 loss.” While the legend of Broadway Joe would only grow, the Jets still haven’t returned 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 main takeaway and moral of this whole story is that people forget that without the Jets, we would have no Super Bowl.
In the 1972 season, the Miami Dolphins went undefeated, becoming the only team to have a Perfect Season. After losing Super Bowl III with the Colts, Don Shula 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 1971 to 1973, 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, in 1983, they would draft Dan Marino. Shula coached Miami from 1970 to 1995, winning many football games with Marino at the helm, but they could never get over the hump. To this day, Shula is still the winningest regular-season head coach ever. 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 were also beneficiaries 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 from 1974 to 1979. My own mother 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. Dallas went to the Super Bowl 5 times in the ‘70s, winning in 1971 and 1977. Nonetheless, the Cowboys also gained popularity because they played football on Thanksgiving and competed 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 won their first Super Bowl. With head coach Bill Walsh and his West Coast Offense, the Niners were led by Joe Cool Montana. Known as the Comeback Kid from his college days at Notre Dame, Montana won the Fightin’ Irish the 1977 National Championship by completing five comebacks, where he brought the Irish back from down 20 points. With Walsh and Montana, San Francisco changed how NFL teams throw the football. Their signature West Coast Offense 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 Francisco named Tom Brady.
I know I’m skipping a bunch here or there, like the late John Madden’s 1976 Super Bowl with the Raiders, but I gotta include Da 1985 Bears. Their head coach, the late Mike Ditka, was just as legendary as their defense. That season, Chicago allowed the fewest points (198) and yards (4,135) while also leading the NFL in takeaways (54). They just brutalized opponents’ offenses. Speaking of legendary head coaches, the 1986 Giants also had one in Bill “Big Tuna” Parcells. The NFL during the 1980s had a lot more parity, 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, an oil salesman named Jerry Jones purchased the lousy Cowboys. He picked Jimmy Johnson to take the reins 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. 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) emerged. Favre 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 returned to the Super Bowl the following season, playing 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 defeat Favre, which got the monkey off of Elway’s back. Denver would then win back-to-back Super Bowls as Elway’s career drifted off into the sunset of retirement. Elway credits a ton of his success to Terrell Davis. TD are great initials for football, am I right?
The New England Patriots were good, blah, blah, blah.
