Miami Dolphins Perfect Season: How 17-0 Was Won
The Miami Dolphins' perfect season of 1972, game by game: 14-0, two playoff wins and Super Bowl VII, and why no NFL team has matched 17-0 since.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished NFL History & Records24 min read
- Final record
- 17-0
- Regular season
- 14-0
- Super Bowl VII
- Miami 14, Washington 7
- Head coach
- Don Shula
Garo Yepremian picked up his own blocked field goal and tried to throw it. The ball slid off his hand, went straight up, and came down to Washington cornerback Mike Bass, who ran 49 yards the other way for a touchdown. There were two minutes and seven seconds left in Super Bowl VII at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, and a game the Miami Dolphins had controlled all afternoon was suddenly 14-7. It ended that way. It was the closest the season came to going wrong at the finish.
The Miami Dolphins' perfect season is the 1972 NFL season, in which they won every game they played: 14-0 in the regular season, a 20-14 divisional playoff win over Cleveland, a 21-17 win at Pittsburgh in the AFC Championship Game, and that 14-7 victory over Washington on January 14, 1973. Seventeen wins, no losses, no ties. Through the 2025 season no other NFL team has finished a year unbeaten and untied as champion.
The 1972 Miami Dolphins record: 14-0, then three more
Start with what "perfect" means here, because the word gets used loosely. An unbeaten regular season is not a perfect season. Four NFL teams have gone through a regular season without losing since the league adopted a championship game in 1933, and three of them then lost the game that mattered most. Miami is the one that did not.
- 14Regular-season wins
- 3Postseason wins
- 385Points scored
- 171Points allowed
Regular-season and postseason totals for the 1972 NFL season. Points are for the fourteen regular-season games only.
The numbers underneath the record are nearly as tidy as the record. Miami scored 385 points, the most in the league, and allowed 171, the fewest. It also led the NFL in total yards gained and in fewest yards allowed, a four-way sweep of the basic team rankings that is very rare. The running game gained 2,960 yards, a league record at the time. Three games were shutouts, two of them against Baltimore.
Six players from the roster were later elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame: Larry Csonka, Bob Griese, Paul Warfield, Larry Little, Jim Langer and Nick Buoniconti. So was the head coach. That is a strong count and not an overwhelming one, and several of the champions that never went unbeaten can list more. The 1972 team's distinction was never that it had the most great players.
It did all of this with a backup quarterback for more than half the year, a defense whose own nickname advertised that nobody knew who was on it, and a schedule that critics have been picking at for five decades. Each of those gets its own section below. So does the argument about the schedule, which deserves a fairer hearing than either side usually gives it.
The coach was Don Shula, in his third season in Miami. The year before, his team had reached Super Bowl VI and lost it 24-3 to Dallas without scoring a touchdown. That defeat is where the 1972 season really begins, and where the other great runs in league history tend to begin too, a pattern followed in our comparison of the greatest NFL dynasties.
The 1972 Dolphins schedule and scores, game by game
The season opened on September 17 in Kansas City, in the first regular-season game ever played at Arrowhead Stadium. It ended on a Saturday in mid-December with a shutout of Baltimore at the Orange Bowl.
| Week | Opponent | Site | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kansas City Chiefs | Away | Won 20-10 |
| 2 | Houston Oilers | Home | Won 34-13 |
| 3 | Minnesota Vikings | Away | Won 16-14 |
| 4 | New York Jets | Away | Won 27-17 |
| 5 | San Diego Chargers | Home | Won 24-10 |
| 6 | Buffalo Bills | Home | Won 24-23 |
| 7 | Baltimore Colts | Away | Won 23-0 |
| 8 | Buffalo Bills | Away | Won 30-16 |
| 9 | New England Patriots | Home | Won 52-0 |
| 10 | New York Jets | Home | Won 28-24 |
| 11 | St. Louis Cardinals | Home | Won 31-10 |
| 12 | New England Patriots | Away | Won 37-21 |
| 13 | New York Giants | Away | Won 23-13 |
| 14 | Baltimore Colts | Home | Won 16-0 |
Eleven of the fourteen were decided by ten points or more. The 52-0 win over New England in week nine was Shula's 100th regular-season victory as a head coach. The other three are the games that could have ended the story.
16-14 at Minnesota
Week three, at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, was the nearest thing to a loss. Fran Tarkenton hit John Gilliam for a 56-yard touchdown early, and the Vikings led 14-6 in the fourth quarter with Miami's offense reduced to two Yepremian field goals. Yepremian then made a third from 51 yards. On the drive that followed, a roughing-the-passer penalty against Minnesota kept Miami alive, and Bob Griese found tight end Jim Mandich from 3 yards out in the final two minutes.
Two points. Had that flag stayed in the official's pocket, there is no perfect season to write about.
24-23 over Buffalo
Three weeks later Earl Morrall made his first start, at home against a Bills team that would finish 4-9-1. Buffalo led 13-7 at halftime. Larry Csonka scored from 10 yards in the third quarter, Yepremian kicked a 54-yard field goal that was then the longest in franchise history, and Mercury Morris ran 15 yards for what became the winning touchdown in the fourth. The Bills scored late and kicked the extra point, the NFL having no two-point conversion in 1972, and Miami ran out the clock one point ahead.
28-24 over the Jets
The third scare came in week ten. Joe Namath threw a touchdown pass to Wayne Stewart to put New York ahead 24-21 in the third quarter. Dick Anderson recovered a fumble at the Jets' 27, and Morris ran 14 yards for the lead in the fourth. Earlier in the game Morrall, 38 years old and never a runner, had scored on a 31-yard run. The win clinched the AFC East with four games still to play.
Week five: Bob Griese's broken leg and a $100 quarterback
October 15, at the Orange Bowl, first quarter. San Diego defensive linemen Ron East and Deacon Jones reached Griese at the same moment, one high and one low. He was carried off with a broken right leg and a dislocated ankle.
Miami was 4-0 and had just lost a quarterback who would end up in the Hall of Fame. What it had on the bench was the reason the season survived.
Earl Morrall was 38. He had been in the league since 1956 and had played for five other teams, mostly as the man behind someone more famous. In 1968, with Shula as his coach in Baltimore, he had replaced an injured Johnny Unitas, won the league's MVP award and taken the Colts to Super Bowl III, which they lost to the Jets. When Baltimore put him on waivers in the spring of 1972, Shula claimed him. The waiver fee was $100. How a claim like that works today, and who gets first call on a released veteran, is set out in our explainer on the NFL waiver wire.
It turned out to be the most valuable hundred dollars any team has spent.
Morrall finished the San Diego game and then started the last nine of the regular season and the first two playoff games. Miami won all of them. He did not have to be Griese. He handed off, threw accurately off play-action to Paul Warfield and Marlin Briscoe when defenses crowded the line, and avoided the mistakes that lose games for a team with a great defense. He was voted first-team All-Pro.
- Weeks 1 to 4Bob Griese starts and Miami opens 4-0.
- Week 5Griese breaks his leg against San Diego; Earl Morrall finishes the win.
- Weeks 6 to 14Morrall starts nine straight games and Miami wins them all.
- Divisional playoffMorrall starts the 20-14 win over Cleveland.
- AFC ChampionshipMorrall starts in Pittsburgh; Griese takes over at halftime of a 7-7 game.
- Super Bowl VIIGriese starts and completes 8 of 11 passes in the 14-7 win.
The sequence of quarterback changes across the regular season and the three postseason games.
Griese was back in uniform by December and played briefly in the final regular-season game. That left Shula with a decision most coaches never face, and it is taken up further down.
Csonka, Morris and Kiick: two 1,000-yard backs and a third
Miami ran the ball because it could, and because nobody could stop it. The 2,960 rushing yards came from three backs with nothing in common except the uniform.
Larry Csonka was the fullback, and in 1972 a fullback was a team's principal runner between the tackles. He ran upright, with a forearm out in front of him, and he was known for hurting the men who tackled him. He gained 1,117 yards. Mercury Morris was the opposite kind of back, a sprinter who took the pitch outside and led the league with 12 rushing touchdowns. Jim Kiick, who had started ahead of Morris the year before, became the third-down and short-yardage back and scored the deciding touchdowns in the playoff wins over Cleveland and Pittsburgh.
The nine yards Morris got back
Morris's total is exactly 1,000, and it was not 1,000 when the regular season ended. The statistics after the last game showed him short. The Dolphins asked the league to look again at a play from earlier in the year, a botched pitch on which Morris had been charged with a loss of yardage. On review it was rescored as a fumble by the quarterback, the lost yards came off Morris's line, and he had his thousand.
That made Csonka and Morris the first pair of teammates in NFL history to run for 1,000 yards each in one season. In a fourteen-game schedule, which is what the league played then, as our guide to how many games are in an NFL season explains.
The line nobody else wanted
The blockers were assembled the way the rest of the roster was, from other teams' leftovers. Right guard Larry Little came in a trade with San Diego. Center Jim Langer had been cut by Cleveland, and he played every offensive snap of the 1972 season. Left guard Bob Kuechenberg had failed to stick with two other teams and had spent a year in semi-pro football. Tackles Norm Evans and Wayne Moore completed the group, coached by Monte Clark. Little and Langer are in the Hall of Fame.
What they ran was not complicated. Traps and leads for Csonka inside, tosses and sweeps for Morris outside, misdirection to keep linebackers from guessing. The vocabulary is broken down in our guide to football running plays. Miami's version worked because the two guards could pull and reach a linebacker before he had read the play.
The No-Name Defense and the man wearing 53
The nickname was an accident. Before Super Bowl VI, a reporter asked Dallas coach Tom Landry about Miami's defense, and Landry said he could not recall the players' names but that they were a big concern to him. He meant it as praise for a unit that played well together. The players took the first half of the sentence and wore it.
It was accurate enough. Middle linebacker Nick Buoniconti, 5-foot-11 and acquired from the Patriots in a 1969 trade, was the only member of the group eventually voted into the Hall of Fame. Around him:
- Line: ends Bill Stanfill and Vern Den Herder, tackles Manny Fernandez and Bob Heinz
- Linebackers: Buoniconti in the middle, Doug Swift and Mike Kolen outside
- Secondary: safeties Jake Scott and Dick Anderson, cornerbacks Tim Foley, Curtis Johnson and Lloyd Mumphord
No famous pass rusher and no cornerback with a reputation. What the unit had was two safeties who were among the best in football, a nose for the ball, and a coordinator who was ahead of the league.
Bill Arnsparger's 53 look
Bill Arnsparger ran the defense. His contribution to the 1972 season, and to the sport afterward, was a package named for the jersey number of the player it was built around.
Bob Matheson, number 53, was a linebacker acquired from Cleveland who was big enough to play defensive end. Arnsparger took a lineman off the field and put Matheson on it, standing up at the edge of the line. On any snap Matheson might rush the passer as a fourth lineman or drop into coverage as a fourth linebacker, and the offense did not know which until the ball moved. A quarterback who counted four rushers found three and an extra man in his throwing lane. One who counted three got four.
That is, in outline, the 3-4 defense that spread through the NFL over the next decade, a history covered in our comparison of the 4-3 and the 3-4. In 1972 it was new, and it let a defense short on elite pass rushers produce pressure by confusion instead.
The playoff road: Cleveland, then a title game in Pittsburgh
Regular-season perfection would mean little if it ended in December. It nearly did, on Christmas Eve.
Miami 20, Cleveland 14
The Browns were 10-4 and nobody's idea of a threat. Miami scored first when Charlie Babb blocked a punt and returned it for a touchdown, then added two field goals and led 13-7. In the fourth quarter, Mike Phipps threw a 27-yard touchdown pass to Fair Hooker and Cleveland was ahead 14-13.
Morrall took the offense 80 yards, with two long completions to Warfield, and Kiick scored from 8 yards out. The defense intercepted Phipps five times on the day, the last of them to end Cleveland's final drive.
There is a small irony in the names. Miami had acquired Warfield from Cleveland in 1970 for the draft pick the Browns used on Phipps.
Why 14-0 Miami played at 11-3 Pittsburgh
The AFC Championship Game was played on December 31 at Three Rivers Stadium, and a modern fan looking at the records will wonder why. The answer is that records did not decide it. Until 1975 the NFL assigned home playoff games by a rotation among the divisions, set in advance. In 1972 the rotation favored the AFC Central champion. So an unbeaten team went on the road to face a team it had finished three games ahead of. Seeding by record, the system described in our guide to NFL playoff seeding, came in three years later.
Pittsburgh was eight days removed from Franco Harris's catch against Oakland, the play examined in our piece on the Immaculate Reception, and the building believed. The Steelers scored first when Terry Bradshaw fumbled near the goal line and a teammate recovered in the end zone.
Then came the play that turned it. Miami's punter, Larry Seiple, lined up to kick in the second quarter, saw the Steelers' rushers turn their backs and run downfield to block for the return, and simply kept the ball. He ran 37 yards to the Pittsburgh 12. Nobody on the Miami sideline had called it. Morrall threw a short touchdown pass to Csonka soon after and it was 7-7.
At halftime Shula made the change. Griese, who had not started a game in eleven weeks, opened the second half. With Miami behind 10-7 he threw a 52-yard pass to Warfield, and Kiick finished that drive, and a later one, with short touchdown runs. Bradshaw, who had been hurt on the fumble, came back to throw a late touchdown pass. Two interceptions in the last minutes ended it at 21-17.
Super Bowl VII play by play, from Twilley to Yepremian
Washington was 11-3, coached by George Allen, and built around running back Larry Brown, the league's most valuable player that year, and a veteran roster nicknamed the Over-the-Hill Gang. The game was played two weeks later at the Coliseum in Los Angeles, the stadium that had staged the first Super Bowl six years earlier. This time it was full: 90,182.
Miami's defense decided it early and kept deciding it.
First quarter. Griese found Howard Twilley on a 28-yard touchdown pass with one second left in the period. Twilley turned cornerback Pat Fischer around at the 5 and dragged him across the goal line.
Second quarter. A 47-yard touchdown pass from Griese to Warfield was wiped out by a penalty for an illegal formation. Late in the half Buoniconti intercepted Billy Kilmer at the Miami 41 and returned the ball 31 yards. Kiick scored from the 1 with 18 seconds left. 14-0.
Third quarter. No scoring. Washington moved the ball for the first time and missed a field goal.
Fourth quarter. Washington drove to the Miami 10. Kilmer threw for Charley Taylor in the end zone, and Jake Scott intercepted and ran it back 55 yards. It was his second interception of the game, and the Dolphins' third.
Scott was voted the game's most valuable player. Defensive backs almost never are, a point taken up in our guide to the Super Bowl MVP award. A fair case exists that the award belonged to Manny Fernandez, the tackle who was credited with 17 tackles from the middle of the line, 11 of them unassisted. Griese threw only 11 passes and completed 8. Csonka ran for 112 yards.
The kick that would have made it 17-0
With a little over two minutes left Miami lined up for a 42-yard field goal. Shula has said he liked the symmetry: a 17-0 final score to finish a 17-0 season.
The kick was low. Washington's Bill Brundige blocked it, and the ball bounced back toward Yepremian, a 5-foot-8 former soccer player born in Cyprus who was not on the roster to throw passes. He picked it up. He could have fallen on it. He tried to throw instead, the ball came out of his hand as if it were wet, he batted at it, and Bass caught it in stride.
Washington kicked deep, used its timeouts and got the ball back with about a minute left. The drive ended on fourth down when Stanfill and Den Herder sacked Kilmer. Shula was carried off the field. Yepremian said afterward that he had wanted to hide.
Don Shula, Super Bowl VI and the handling of two quarterbacks
Shula arrived in Miami in 1970 from Baltimore, where his Colts had lost a Super Bowl III they were widely expected to win. The Dolphins were an expansion team that had begun play in 1966 and had gone 3-10-1 the season before. He took them to 10-4 at once and to the Super Bowl in his second year.
That Super Bowl, the sixth, was a humiliation. Dallas won 24-3 in New Orleans, ran for more than 250 yards, and Miami became the first team to go through the game without a touchdown. Shula now had two Super Bowl defeats on his record, with two different franchises. His players have said he raised it on the first day of training camp in 1972 and did not stop raising it. The unbeaten record was never the stated aim. Getting back and winning was.
His most delicate work that year was with the quarterbacks. Morrall had won eleven straight starts and had done nothing to lose the job. Griese was the better player and was healthy. Shula stayed with Morrall through the first two playoff games, changed at halftime in Pittsburgh when the offense stalled, and then went to Morrall privately to tell him Griese would start in Los Angeles. Morrall said he disagreed and that he would be ready if needed. It was handled without a public word from either man, which is harder than it sounds.
1973: proof it was not one year
The best answer to anyone who calls 1972 a fluke is the season that followed. Miami went 12-2, won its playoff games comfortably and beat Minnesota 24-7 in Super Bowl VIII, with Csonka running for 145 yards. Across the two seasons the Dolphins were 32-2 including the postseason. They had reached three Super Bowls in a row and won two.
Then it came apart quickly. Oakland beat them in the 1974 playoffs on a last-minute touchdown, and Csonka, Kiick and Warfield left together for the new World Football League. Shula coached Miami for two more decades and retired with 347 wins, the most by any head coach in league history through the 2025 season. He did not win another championship.
The strength-of-schedule argument, taken seriously
Here is the case against. Miami's fourteen regular-season opponents finished with a combined record of 70-122-4, a winning percentage of .367. Only two of them, Kansas City and the New York Giants, ended above .500, and both were 8-6. None of the fourteen games was against a team that reached the playoffs. Six were against Buffalo, New England and Baltimore, whose three final records add up to 12-29-1.
All of that is true. Several things have to be set beside it.
The first is arithmetic. Those opponents' records include their losses to Miami. Remove the fourteen games against the Dolphins and the same teams were 70-108-4, still poor but less so.
The second is that Miami did not choose its schedule. The division was weak that year; a team can only beat what is put in front of it, and this one beat all of it, which other great teams handed soft schedules have not managed.
The third is the playoffs, and this is the part that answers the criticism most directly. The three postseason opponents were 10-4, 11-3 and 11-3, a combined 32-10. One of those games was on the road, in a stadium where the home team had just won on the most famous play in league history. Miami trailed in the fourth quarter against Cleveland and at halftime was level in Pittsburgh. It won anyway.
| Opponent group | Games | Combined 1972 record, counted per game |
|---|---|---|
| Regular-season opponents, all | 14 | 70-122-4 |
| Regular-season opponents above .500 | 2 | 16-12 |
| AFC East rivals, played twice each | 8 | 38-72-2 |
| Postseason opponents | 3 | 32-10 |
Our judgment is that the schedule argument is sound as far as it goes and stops short of where its users want it to. It shows the 1972 Dolphins were not tested much before Christmas. It does not show they would have failed the test, and the only evidence on that question, three playoff games, points the other way.
Has any NFL team gone undefeated since? The near misses
No. Several have come close enough to make the old Dolphins nervous, and one came within a single defensive stop.
| Team | Unbeaten start | First loss | How the season ended |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1985 Chicago Bears | 12-0 | At Miami, 38-24 | Won Super Bowl XX, finished 18-1 |
| 1998 Denver Broncos | 13-0 | At New York Giants | Won Super Bowl XXXIII |
| 2007 New England Patriots | 18-0 | Super Bowl XLII, 17-14 to the Giants | Finished 18-1 |
| 2009 Indianapolis Colts | 14-0 | To the New York Jets | Lost Super Bowl XLIV |
| 2011 Green Bay Packers | 13-0 | At Kansas City | Lost in the divisional round |
| 2015 Carolina Panthers | 14-0 | At Atlanta | Lost Super Bowl 50 |
The 1985 Bears are the entry Miami enjoys most. Chicago was 12-0 and steamrolling the league when it came to the Orange Bowl on a Monday night in December. Shula's Dolphins, with Dan Marino throwing quickly against the Bears' blitz, won 38-24. Members of the 1972 team stood on the sideline. It was Chicago's only defeat.
Did the 2007 Patriots go undefeated?
In the regular season, yes: 16-0, the only team to do it since the schedule went to sixteen games in 1978. They then won two playoff games. At 18-0, they met the Giants in Super Bowl XLII in Glendale, Arizona, on February 3, 2008, and led 14-10 inside the last three minutes.
Eli Manning escaped a sack and threw downfield to David Tyree, who pinned the ball against his helmet. Four plays later Plaxico Burress caught the winning touchdown with 35 seconds left. New England finished 18-1, which is one more win than Miami had and one more loss.
The Colts of 2009 are a different kind of case. At 14-0, with home field secured, they removed their starters in the second half of a game against the Jets and lost it. The decision was debated for weeks. They reached the Super Bowl and lost that too.
It is harder now, purely on count. The regular season has been seventeen games since 2021. A team without a first-round bye would need 21 straight wins.
Unbeaten regular seasons before 1972
Miami was not the first NFL team to finish a regular season unbeaten. It was the first to finish the job.
| Team | Regular season | What happened next |
|---|---|---|
| 1920 Akron Pros | 8-0-3 | Named champion; no title game existed |
| 1922 Canton Bulldogs | 10-0-2 | Champion by standings |
| 1923 Canton Bulldogs | 11-0-1 | Champion by standings |
| 1929 Green Bay Packers | 12-0-1 | Champion by standings |
| 1934 Chicago Bears | 13-0 | Lost the title game 30-13 to the Giants |
| 1942 Chicago Bears | 11-0 | Lost the title game 14-6 to Washington |
| 1948 Cleveland Browns | 14-0 | Won the AAFC title game 49-7 |
The four teams from the 1920s were unbeaten but tied, in years when the champion was simply the club with the best record. That is why the phrase "unbeaten and untied" matters in describing Miami.
The two Bears teams are the cautionary tales. The 1934 club was beaten on a frozen field at the Polo Grounds after the Giants changed into basketball shoes at halftime for traction, the afternoon remembered as the Sneakers Game. The 1942 team, whose coach George Halas had left for the Navy at midseason, lost to a Washington side it had beaten 73-0 in the title game two years before.
Then there are the 1948 Browns. Paul Brown's team went 14-0 and won its championship game by 42 points, a 15-0 season. It did so in the All-America Football Conference, a rival league. For 75 years the NFL kept that league's numbers out of its own book; in April 2025 its owners voted to add AAFC statistics to the official record. The Browns' unbeaten year is therefore now in the NFL record book, as an AAFC season, and Miami's is still the only one achieved in the NFL itself. Whether that team was as good as the 1972 Dolphins is unknowable. The Browns did join the NFL in 1950 and win its title in their first year, which says the AAFC champion was no impostor.
The champagne story, and what the 1972 team actually does
The legend goes like this. Every autumn the surviving 1972 Dolphins keep champagne on ice, and on the day the last unbeaten team in the league loses, they gather and open it.
It is a good story. Shula spent years playing it down.
What happened is smaller and more human. Shula's own explanation was that Dick Anderson and Nick Buoniconti lived near each other and, when the season's last unbeaten team lost, sometimes shared a toast. Neighbors, not a team. By the players' accounts even that was occasional. Somewhere it was retold as an annual rite involving forty men, and sportswriters have repeated it every November since because it fits the picture of old champions guarding their record.
The picture has some truth to it. Members of the team have never pretended to be indifferent. Morris spent years as the group's loudest spokesman whenever a contender reached 10-0, and Csonka has been known to raise a glass in public on the day the last unbeaten team falls. They are proud of the thing and would prefer to keep it. That is not the same as a secret ceremony.
The closest call tested the good humor. In November 2007, with New England unbeaten and already penalized by the league for videotaping an opponent's signals, Shula said in an interview that the episode had diminished what the Patriots were doing and that an unbeaten season by them would carry an asterisk. He softened the remark within days and said that a team that won them all would deserve the credit. It was a rare moment in which the keeper of the record sounded worried about it.
One postscript belongs here. Champions are invited to the White House, and in 1973 the Dolphins never were. The visit finally took place in August 2013, forty years late, with the players in their sixties and seventies. Through the 2025 season, nobody has matched their record. More on the franchise's two titles and where they sit among the league's 32 clubs is on our American football hub.