The Super Bowl: How Football's Biggest Game Grew
Two Leagues at War
The Super Bowl was born out of a business fight. In 1960 a group of owners led by Texas oilman Lamar Hunt launched the American Football League after being turned away by the established NFL. For six seasons the two leagues competed for players, television money and fans, driving salaries up and forcing the older league to take its rival seriously. In June 1966 the leagues agreed to merge, with a full combination of schedules to take effect in 1970. As part of the deal, the champions of each league would meet in a season-ending championship game.
The first of those games was played on January 15, 1967 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Officially it was the AFL-NFL World Championship Game, and it was carried by two networks at once, CBS and NBC. Vince Lombardi's Green Bay Packers beat Hunt's own Kansas City Chiefs 35-10, and quarterback Bart Starr was named Most Valuable Player. Green Bay won the second game as well, and it took the New York Jets' upset of the heavily favored Baltimore Colts in the third game, famously guaranteed in advance by Joe Namath, to convince the public that the AFL belonged.
The Name and the Trophy
The name came from Hunt himself. During merger meetings he began referring to the game as the "Super Bowl," a phrase he later admitted was probably inspired by the Super Ball, a bouncy rubber toy his children were playing with. The nickname stuck, and starting with the third game in January 1969 it became the official title. The Roman numerals followed soon after, a bit of gravitas that has survived every game except the 50th, which the league branded as Super Bowl 50 rather than Super Bowl L.
The prize is a sterling silver football made by Tiffany & Co. It was originally known simply as the world championship trophy. After Lombardi died of cancer in September 1970, the NFL renamed it the Vince Lombardi Trophy in honor of the coach who had won the first two games. Unlike the Stanley Cup, a new trophy is produced every year and the winning franchise keeps it.
Dynasties by Era
Every decade of the Super Bowl has had a team that defined it. The Miami Dolphins capped the only perfect season in NFL history by winning Super Bowl VII to finish 1972 at 17-0. The Pittsburgh Steelers then won four titles in six seasons, taking Super Bowls IX, X, XIII and XIV with a defense nicknamed the Steel Curtain and a roster stocked with Hall of Famers. The 1980s belonged to the San Francisco 49ers, who won four championships with Joe Montana and a fifth with Steve Young in Super Bowl XXIX, giving the franchise five in all.
The Dallas Cowboys of the 1990s won three titles in four seasons behind Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith and Michael Irvin, while John Elway's Denver Broncos went back-to-back in Super Bowls XXXII and XXXIII. The longest run of all came in New England, where Tom Brady and Bill Belichick won six Super Bowls between the 2001 and 2018 seasons. The Kansas City Chiefs, with Patrick Mahomes, were the dominant team of the early 2020s, winning Super Bowls LIV, LVII and LVIII before losing 40-22 to the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl LIX in February 2025.
The Record Book
The Patriots and Steelers share the record for most Super Bowl wins with six apiece. New England also holds the record for appearances with 11. Brady is the individual leader by a wide margin: he won seven Super Bowls, six with the Patriots and one with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and played in ten. The Buffalo Bills own the most painful record, four consecutive Super Bowl losses from XXV through XXVIII. The most lopsided result remains San Francisco's 55-10 win over Denver in Super Bowl XXIV.
The most recent champion is the Seattle Seahawks. In Super Bowl LX, played on February 8, 2026 at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California, Seattle beat New England 29-13. Running back Kenneth Walker III was named MVP after carrying 27 times for 135 yards, and the Seahawks claimed their second championship to go with their Super Bowl XLVIII win.
The Halftime Show and the Television Event
For its first quarter-century the Super Bowl halftime was filled by marching bands and variety acts. That changed in January 1993, when Michael Jackson performed at Super Bowl XXVII and the audience actually grew during the break. Since then the halftime slot has become one of the most-watched live music performances in the world, with acts ranging from Prince and Beyoncé to Rihanna and Usher. At Super Bowl LX the headliner was Bad Bunny, who was joined on stage by Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin.
Television is the engine behind all of it. Super Bowl LX drew an average of 125.6 million viewers in the United States, according to Nielsen, and the game routinely fills the top spots on the list of the most-watched American broadcasts of all time. Advertising has kept pace: NBC charged a base rate of roughly $8 million for a 30-second commercial in 2026, and several premium spots reportedly sold for more than $10 million. The commercials themselves have become a genre, previewed and ranked as closely as the game.
How the Game Fits the Season
The Super Bowl is the last of four playoff rounds. Fourteen teams qualify, seven from each conference, and every round is single elimination. The top seed in each conference skips the wild-card round, then the survivors play the divisional round and the conference championship games. The AFC and NFC champions meet on the first or second Sunday in February at a neutral site chosen years in advance, which is why a Super Bowl can be held in a stadium that neither participant has ever played in. Because it is one game rather than a series, a single turnover or a missed kick can decide a championship, and that fragility is a large part of why the country stops to watch.
From Half-Empty Stands to a National Holiday
The first game did not sell out, and the tape of its broadcast was famously not preserved in full. Sixty years later the Super Bowl is as close as the United States comes to a secular holiday, with parties, betting pools and food traditions built around a single Sunday evening. The two-league rivalry that created the game is a distant memory, but the format it produced, one winner-take-all game between conference champions, turned out to be perfectly suited to television and to a country that likes its endings decisive. That is how a merger compromise became the biggest annual event in American sports.
