Chiefs fall short of Super Bowl history; Packers still last NFL three-peat champ
The Kansas City Chiefs fell short of modern NFL history, ensuring that the Green Bay Packers remain — for now — pro football’s last club to win three consecutive world titles.
While few if any Champagne corks popped in Wisconsin on Sunday night, there were surely some smiles across Packers Nation as Green Bay’s ancient NFL and NFC rivals the Philadelphia Eagles did them a solid.
“I’m not sad, let’s just put it that way,” Pro Football Hall of Fame member Dave Robinson, a former Green Bay linebacker, wryly told NBC News on Monday as his Packers’ place in history stayed undisturbed.
Robinson, 83, played on the mid-1960s Green Bay teams that won the final NFL title before the Super Bowl era, then Super Bowls 1 and 2.
Before it won the first two Super Bowls, Green Bay won the last pre-Super Bowl NFL title, defeating Jim Brown and the Cleveland Browns on Jan. 2, 1966. That was the final NFL title before the inaugural “AFL-NFL Championship Game,” as the Super Bowl was humbly known, came into being on Jan. 15, 1967, in Los Angeles.
But because the 1966 NFL title didn’t come with a Super Bowl, those Packers teams don’t get “three-peat” recognition like the Chiefs would have received had Kansas City won Sunday night.
The three-peat debate can wait another day, as the mid-1960s Packers can still make their claim without challenge.
“I’m doing great today, feeling like a three-time world champion because [the Eagles] took care of business,” 1960s Green Bay lineman Jerry Kramer, 89, another Hall of Fame member, said Monday.
“I watched [the Super Bowl] with glee, joy, giggles and all kinds of happiness. I’ve been watching Kansas City like a hawk all season, and I felt like they were probably going to win,” he said.
Two weeks of Super Bowl hype playing up the chances of a Chiefs three-peat clearly got under the skin of Packers faithful and football historians who know the sport was played before January 1967.
The Packers went as far as to remind fans of their overlooked three-peat in a not-so-subtle social media post and article titled “The NFL is slowly forgetting it played football before Super Bowl.”
“Just because it wasn’t ‘the Super Bowl’ doesn’t mean that we didn’t have the best players,” 1960s-era Packers tight end Marv Fleming said Monday with dramatic, comical emphasis on “the,” “Super” and “Bowl.”
Fox broadcasters who televised Sunday’s game paid tribute to those Packers teams, flashing a graphic calling Green Bay’s mid-1960s clubs the “last 3-peat NFL champions.”
That photo illustration brought a smile to Robinson’s face.
“It reinforced what I’ve been telling people all along,” he said. “You know that this is not the first three-peat team?”
The only other pro football team that could possibly make a three-peat claim would be the Otto Graham-, Lou Groza-led Cleveland Browns, who won all four championships of the old All-America Football Conference from 1946 to 1949.
“When we won in in ’65, there wasn’t a Super Bowl, as the Super Bowl didn’t start to the next year,” Robinson said. “But there was nobody in the country that would tell you … that Green Bay wasn’t the best team, right? So really, it was a three-peat.”
Sunday’s Eagles win also ushered Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes into an elite club that he’d probably rather not belong to — the multiple Super Bowl loser club. Mahomes led the Chiefs to the 2021 Super Bowl, which was won by Tom Brady and his Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Of course, just having played in five Super Bowls, winning three and now losing two, is a testament to Mahomes’ greatness.
The few QBs who have started and lost more than one Super Bowl are all among the game’s greatest signal callers: Brady, Peyton Manning, Kurt Warner, Jim Kelly, John Elway, Roger Staubach and Fran Tarkenton.
“There’s no way around it — any time you lose a Super Bowl … it’ll stick with you the rest of your career,” Mahomes told reporters late Sunday in New Orleans.
“Those will be the two losses that’ll motivate me to be even better the rest of my career, because you only get so few of these. You have to capitalize on these. They probably hurt more than the wins [feel good].”
