Super Bowl III was the third AFL–NFL Championship Game in professional American football, and the first to officially bear the trademark name "Super Bowl".[6] The game, played on January 12, 1969, at the Orange Bowl in Miami, Florida, is regarded as one of the greatest upsets in American football history.[7] The heavy underdog American Football League (AFL) champion New York Jets defeated the National Football League (NFL) champion Baltimore Colts by a score of 16–7.
This was the first Super Bowl victory for the AFL. Before the game, most sports writers and fans believed that AFL teams were less talented than NFL clubs, and expected the Colts to defeat the Jets by a wide margin. Baltimore posted a 13–1 record during the 1968 NFL season before defeating the Cleveland Browns, 34–0, in the 1968 NFL Championship Game. The Jets finished the 1968 AFL season at 11–3, and defeated the Oakland Raiders, 27–23, in the 1968 AFL Championship Game.
Jets quarterback Joe Namath made an appearance three days before the Super Bowl at the Miami Touchdown Club and brashly guaranteed a victory. His team backed up his words by controlling most of the game, building a 16–0 lead by the fourth quarter off of a touchdown run by Matt Snell and three field goals by Jim Turner. Colts quarterback Earl Morrall threw three interceptions before being replaced by Johnny Unitas, who then led Baltimore to its only touchdown, during the last few minutes of the game. With the victory, the Jets became (and remain) the only winning Super Bowl team to score only one touchdown (either offensive, defensive, or special teams). Namath, who completed 17 out of 28 passes for 206 yards, was named as the Super Bowl's most valuable player, despite not throwing a touchdown pass in the game or any passes at all in the fourth quarter.
The game was awarded to Miami on May 14, 1968, at the owners meetings held in Atlanta
The National Football League (NFL) had dominated professional football from its origins after World War I. Rival leagues had crumbled or merged with it, and when the American Football League (AFL) began to play in 1960, it was the fourth to hold that similar name to challenge the older NFL. Unlike its earlier namesakes, however, this AFL was able to command sufficient financial resources to survive; one factor in this was becoming the first league to sign a television contract—previously, individual franchises had signed agreements with networks to televise games. The junior league proved successful enough, in fact, to make attractive offers to players. After the 1964 season, in fact, there had been a well-publicized bidding war which culminated with the signing, by the AFL's New York Jets (formerly New York Titans), of Alabama quarterback Joe Namath for an unprecedented contract.[8] Fearing that bidding wars over players would become the norm, greatly increasing labor costs, NFL owners, ostensibly[9] led by league Commissioner Pete Rozelle, obtained a merger agreement with the AFL, which provided for a single draft, interleague play in the pre-season, a championship game to follow each season, and the integration of the two leagues into one in a way to be agreed at a future date.[10] As the two leagues had an unequal number of teams (under the new merger agreement, the NFL expanded by one team to 16, and the AFL by one to 10),[11] realignment was advocated by some owners, but was opposed. Eventually, three NFL teams (Cleveland Browns, Pittsburgh Steelers, and the Baltimore Colts) agreed to move over to join the original AFL franchises of 1960 in what became the American Football Conference.[12]
Despite the ongoing merger, it was a commonly held view that the NFL was a far superior league. This was seemingly confirmed by the results of the first two interleague championship games, in January 1967 and 1968, in which the NFL champion Green Bay Packers, coached by the legendary Vince Lombardi, easily defeated the AFL's Kansas City Chiefs and Oakland Raiders. Although publicized as the inter-league championship games, it was not until later that the moniker for this championship contest between the now two conferences (National and American) began having the nickname of "Super Bowl" applied to it by the media and later began being counted by using Roman numerals, the creation of the term being credited to the founder of the AFL,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_III
