The First World Championship Game: AFL vs NFL

The First World Championship Game
by Rob Holecko

When the NFL Champion Green Bay Packers and the AFL Champion Kansas City Chiefs met 45 years ago today in the first game that would grow to be annual spectacle that we now know of as the Super Bowl, it was little more than an afterthought.  The Packers had just wrapped up their 10th NFL Championship against the Dallas Cowboys and were heavily favored to beat the underdog Chiefs.  The AFL Champion Chiefs were hoping to show that an AFL team deserved to be on the same field as the NFL Champion.

The Packers dominated the Chiefs and won 35 to 10.  They would win the following Super Bowl as well, but the AFL's Jets and these very Chiefs would Super Bowls III and IV, and the merger became complete with the former AFL teams gaining full acceptance as equal and full competition for their more established NFL counterparts.

For more in-depth information on this game, you can read the Wikipedia entry on it here.

Also January 15 is the anniversary of one of the best Super Bowls ever played, the 1978 season's Super Bowl XIII.  The Pittsburgh Steelers and Dallas Cowboys met for the second time in four Super Bowls, and both teams were in their third Super Bowl in the past five years.  The game went back and forth, a key drop by Cowboys TE Jackie Smith in the end zone was the difference in a 35-31 Steeler victory.

We are proud to add these two games, the first ever "Super Bowl" and one of the most exciting Super Bowls, to our collection of matchups in the Gridiron Uniform Database.  We plan on rolling out a new feature in the coming days showcasing all of the Super Bowl matchups, so stay tuned for that.

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Also, we are closing in on 100,000 visitors (not unique visitors -- I know it's many of the same visitors who keep coming back, but still) -- thank you for the continued interest in our site.  Speaking of which, we wouldn't have been able to do this without Uni Watch, and this morning I clicked my shortcut to uni-watch.com, and this came up:

I don't know if I'm just navigating wrong or something happened to their site.  I hope they didn't get hacked or anything.  Maybe some right-wing nut job just is having some fun, who knows?  Anyway, if anyone knows anything, or they get it fixed, let us know in the comments.  (This just in, Uni Watch's front page is back up.)

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Steve Young threw six touchdowns
in Super Bowl XXIX, a mark that
Tom Brady tied yesterday

Of the two games yesterday, the only real question was would the Saints come out in white-over-black or white-over-gold.  Tim Brulia & I guessed the white-gold, while Bill Schaefer went with white-black.  They did go with white-gold, but it wasn't enough to defeat the 49ers, who prevailed on a play eerily similar to "The Catch II", the 1998 playoff game against the Packers which featured Terrell Owens catching a touchdown down the middle of the field between defenders and coming off the field in tears, hugging coach Steve Mariucci.  Yesterday Vernon Davis caught a touchdown down the middle of the field between defenders and came off the field in tears, hugging coach Jim Harbaugh.

In the other came, Tebow-mania finally came to an end as the Patriots routed the Broncos.  Tom Brady tied Steve Young and Daryl Lamonica's postseason record of six touchdown passes in a game.

Enjoy the Texans-Ravens and Giants-Packers games today! These both should be pretty predictable matchups, the Texans always go white-over-navy wearing white on the road, and the Ravens, considering it's a day game, we expect will be in purple-over-white, as Tim said, "BAL likely in Purple/white, but I'd be thrilled if 'the team I love to hate' went purple/black."  (Added: This just in, Ravens are in purple/black -- see picture to the right -- so I guess we can color Tim thrilled!)
  
The Giants and Packers should, of course, have no uniform surprises, either, as they re-stage the 2007 NFC Championship Game today. Unfortunately for the Giants, they won't be able to count on Brett Favre throwing a critical late-game interception this time.  If the Giants should pull off the upset, we'll be looking at re-match of the 1990 Giants-Niners NFC Championship that bigbluelarry told us about earlier in the week.  Otherwise we'll see another classic Niners-Packers playoff game.