Editor’s note: This post was published in 2019.
This is another one of those questions that might come up on Super Bowl Sunday, a query you may not have ever considered: Why is the NFL championship game called the Super Bowl?
For the answer to that, we have to go all the way back to the first Super Bowl. Only it wasn’t call the Super Bowl then. “Super Bowl I” is a retroactive name. Back then, after the NFL and AFL merged in 1966, it was called the AFL-NFL World Championship Game.
The third Super Bowl was officially given that name thanks, famously, to former Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt. According to legend, Hunt knew his daughter played with a toy called the Super Ball, and it stuck in his head when the league was looking for a less cumbersome name for the event.
But the “Super Bowl” name was already being used before what would be known as Super Bowl III (Roman numerals were also Hunt’s idea, and those started two years later at Super Bowl V). From The Washington Post in 2011:
When the established National Football League merged with the upstart American Football League in June 1966, football fans finally got their wish – a showdown was planned between the two league champions, billed as the AFL-NFL World Championship Game. Later that summer, AFL founder Lamar Hunt sent a memo to NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle suggesting that the merged leagues should coin a phrase for the new game. “I have kiddingly called it the Super Bowl,” Hunt wrote, “which obviously can be improved upon.”
Rozelle, with his background in journalism and PR, never cared for the name, deeming it unsophisticated. But even before the first game was played, Hunt’s title swept through the football, news media and advertising worlds. By the end of 1966, network executives were referring to the day of the first game as “Super Sunday.” After Hunt’s Kansas City Chiefs defeated the Buffalo Bills in the AFL Championship Game, the next day’s Kansas City Star headline declared that the Chiefs were “Super Bowl Bound.” In Los Angeles, on the morning of Jan. 15, 1967, an NFL Films crew member could be heard giving a sound cue – “Super Bowl, reel one” – before shooting the first pregame footage at the Los Angeles Coliseum.
The league held out for a few years before Rozelle conceded. “Super Bowl” first appeared on the program cover of the third game and on the tickets of the fourth game. Few fans noticed; they’d been calling it the Super Bowl since the first one was played.
There’s also a slightly different account from Hunt himself published by The Atlantic in the publication’s attempt to figure out if the Super Ball legend was true. Here’s what he told The New York Times in 1986:
According to Hunt, after Los Angeles was selected as the site of the first game and it was agreed that two networks would broadcast the game, the owners’ committee “continued to have those conversational problems regarding the post-season games and the newly created title game,” and “one day, the words flowed something like this: ‘No, not those games – the one I mean is the final game – you know the Super Bowl.'” Accounting for his outburst, Hunt explained that “my own feeling is that it probably registered in my head because my daughter Sharron and my son Lamar Jr. had a children’s toy called a Super Ball and I probably interchanged the phonetics of “bowl” and “ball.”
But that same Atlantic deep-dive goes on to point out the media was using the term “Super Bowl” before that meeting about the Los Angeles championship game site:
On September 4, 1966 the Los Angeles Times recorded that the season ending game was being “referred to by some as the Super Bowl” and that day’s the lead story in The New York Times sports section was headlined “NFL Set to Open Season That Will End in Super Bowl.”
That conflicts with the account of Hunt’s summer of 1966 letter with the phrase in it. So perhaps the timing of when the Super Bowl name was coined is, well, lost in time.
But at least it’s no longer a mouthful to say.
