Super Bowl LIX is coming up this Sunday between the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles, and for those of you who are terrible at Roman numerals like myself, that’s Super Bowl 59. If you’re equally terrible at math, that means the first-ever Super Bowl was back in 1967.
It’s a relatively young game, and it was almost called something else entirely. Thankfully, that didn’t work out.
How the Super Bowl got its name
In the summer of 1966, the NFL and AFL (two separate football leagues) merged to become one. That’s when they decided they’d have a championship game between the two, who continued to have separate regular-season schedules until 1960. That game is what we now know as the Super Bowl.
The story of how that name came about, however, is pretty anticlimactic. In fact, there was no official naming until the game was in its third year.
The first NFL championship game was played on January 15, 1967. In the beginning, it was simply called the “AFL-NFL Championship Game”and while that was obviously too boring, it’s how the league referred to it for the first two years. The NFL also considered the names “Merger Bowl” and “The Game”. It’s quite fortunate that “Merger Bowl” didn’t catch on, although the Super Bowl is still commonly referred to as “The Big Game” as well these days, which isn’t far off from the second option.
Still, Super Bowl has a much better ring to it, and it began when the owner of the Chiefs at the time, Lamar Hunt, coined the term. The “Bowl” part of the name was a pretty easy one to come up with, as college football had already been using the term for many years for its big games like the Rose Bowl. The “Super” part came about when Hunt said his kids had been playing with a toy called the “Super Ball”. In its first year, Hunt wrote a letter to NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle, saying, “I have kiddingly called it the ‘Super Bowl,’ which obviously can be improved upon.”
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It was not improved upon, but it did end up sticking. For its first two years, the NFL did not officially give it the name Super Bowl, but the term caught on with media outlets. By its third year in 1969, the name “Super Bowl” was used so commonly that it finally became officialwith the league giving it the name Super Bowl 3 – Super Bowls 1 and 2 were considered the two previous games, despite that they were unofficially named so at the time. Imagine calling the game this Sunday “Merger Bowl LIX” – definitely doesn’t have the same feeling.
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