Who Won the First Super Bowl? Packers 35, Chiefs 10
The Green Bay Packers won the first Super Bowl, beating the Kansas City Chiefs 35-10 in Los Angeles on January 15, 1967, as NFL champion against AFL champion.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished NFL History & Records23 min read
- Final score
- Packers 35, Chiefs 10
- Date
- January 15, 1967
- Venue
- Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum
- Attendance
- 61,946
The pass was thrown behind him. Max McGee, 34 years old and in the game only because the receiver ahead of him had wrecked a shoulder, reached back with one hand, pinned the ball against his hip and jogged the last twenty-odd yards into the end zone of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Thirty-seven yards from Bart Starr, midway through the first quarter, on January 15, 1967. Nobody in the building would have called it the first touchdown in Super Bowl history, because the game did not officially have that name yet.
The Green Bay Packers won the first Super Bowl. They beat the Kansas City Chiefs 35-10, the champion of the National Football League pulling away from the champion of the American Football League after leading by only 14-10 at halftime. Starr was named the most valuable player. The event was billed as the AFL-NFL World Championship Game, and "Super Bowl I" is a label the league attached afterward.
Green Bay 35, Kansas City 10: the first Super Bowl result
The game was a clause in a peace treaty. On June 8, 1966, after six seasons of bidding against each other for college players and raiding each other's rosters, the NFL and the AFL announced that they would combine into one league, with a common draft at once and a single schedule from 1970. Until then each league would keep playing its own season, and the two champions would meet in January. The fight that produced the agreement is told in our history of the AFL-NFL merger.
Green Bay came in as the older league's best argument. Vince Lombardi's team had gone 12-2 and then beaten Dallas 34-27 in the NFL Championship Game on New Year's Day, sealing it with an interception in the end zone in the last minute. Kansas City, coached by Hank Stram and owned by Lamar Hunt, the Texan who had founded the AFL in 1960, finished 11-2-1 and won its league title 31-7 at Buffalo the same afternoon.
Two weeks later they were in Los Angeles.
| Quarter | Scoring play | Score after |
|---|---|---|
| First | Max McGee 37-yard pass from Bart Starr | Packers 7-0 |
| Second | Curtis McClinton 7-yard pass from Len Dawson | 7-7 |
| Second | Jim Taylor 14-yard run | Packers 14-7 |
| Second | Mike Mercer 31-yard field goal | Packers 14-10 |
| Third | Elijah Pitts 5-yard run | Packers 21-10 |
| Third | Max McGee 13-yard pass from Bart Starr | Packers 28-10 |
| Fourth | Elijah Pitts 1-yard run | Packers 35-10 |
Don Chandler kicked the extra point after each of Green Bay's five touchdowns. Mercer kicked Kansas City's one.
- 35Green Bay points
- 10Kansas City points
- 61946Attendance
- 12Top ticket price in dollars
Figures recorded for the AFL-NFL World Championship Game of January 15, 1967. The ticket figure is the highest face value, in dollars.
Seven scores, five of them by one team. The final margin read like proof of what NFL people had been saying about the junior league since 1960, and for a long time that was how the game was remembered. It is a fair description of the second half and a poor one of the first.
From 14-10 at halftime to 21 unanswered points
For thirty minutes Kansas City was the better offense. The Chiefs gained 181 yards before the break to Green Bay's 164, and they did it with football the Packers rarely saw in their own league: backs and tight ends shifting before the snap, a quarterback who rolled the pocket to one side, play-action built on a quick-hitting run game. Stram liked to say he was coaching the offense of the 1970s. In the second quarter Len Dawson found Otis Taylor for 31 yards and then Curtis McClinton for seven and the tying touchdown.
Green Bay answered the way it usually did, with a 73-yard march that ended in Jim Taylor running the power sweep 14 yards behind his pulling guards. That was the Lombardi play, the one every opponent knew was coming, and it produced the first rushing touchdown the game ever had. Mercer's 31-yard field goal late in the half cut it to four.
Fourteen to ten. In the Packers' locker room nobody was comfortable.
Lombardi's defense almost never blitzed. In the NFL it had not needed to, because the front four of Willie Davis, Henry Jordan, Ron Kostelnik and Lionel Aldridge reached the quarterback without help. Against Dawson's moving pocket that patience had not worked, and at halftime the coaches decided to send linebackers.
The Willie Wood interception
Kansas City had the ball first in the third quarter and moved it to midfield. On third down the blitz came. Dawson, hurried, floated a pass toward tight end Fred Arbanas in the flat. Free safety Willie Wood stepped in front of it and ran 50 yards along the sideline before halfback Mike Garrett dragged him down from behind at the Chiefs' 5-yard line.
Elijah Pitts scored on the next snap. An eleven-point game, and a different one.
Starr called it the biggest play of the afternoon, and Stram said nearly the same thing from the other sideline. Dawson spent the rest of the day throwing from behind against a rush that no longer waited for him, which is the situation the Chiefs' offense was least built for. The mechanics of why an extra rusher changes a quarterback's arithmetic are set out in our piece on how blitz packages work.
After the interception Kansas City crossed midfield once, for a single play. Green Bay added McGee's second touchdown late in the third quarter and a 1-yard Pitts run in the fourth, and the Packers finished with 361 yards to the Chiefs' 239.
There is a reasonable case that the two leagues were closer than 35-10, and the first half is the evidence for it. What the second half showed was depth. Green Bay had a second way to play defense and the players to run it for thirty more minutes, and Kansas City, on that day, had one plan.
Max McGee, the backup who caught seven passes
Four catches. That was McGee's whole 1966 regular season, four receptions for 91 yards. He had been one of Lombardi's best receivers at the start of the decade and by that winter he was a veteran reserve near the end of his career, behind Boyd Dowler and Carroll Dale and not expecting to move.
Dowler had hurt a shoulder two weeks earlier, upended in the end zone at the Cotton Bowl after scoring against Dallas. He started in Los Angeles anyway. Within the first few minutes the shoulder went again, and Lombardi shouted for McGee.
The version McGee told for the next forty years is that he was in no state to answer. By his account he had assumed he would spend the day on the bench, had broken curfew the night before, and got back to the team hotel about the time his teammates were coming down to breakfast. He also said he had left his helmet in the locker room and had to borrow a teammate's. All of this rests on McGee's own telling, backed up by roommates who enjoyed the story as much as he did. It should be read as a good storyteller's account and not as a deposition.
The box score needs no hedge. Seven catches for 138 yards and two touchdowns.
Why a 34-year-old got open
Kansas City's cornerbacks played off the receivers and guarded the sidelines, and the Chiefs' odd defensive front put a linebacker stacked behind a lineman, which left the short middle of the field soft. Starr found it early. McGee was no longer quick, but he ran exact inside routes and caught whatever he could touch, and that was precisely the receiver the coverage could not handle. The first touchdown came on third down, on an inside route with the ball thrown so far behind him that the one-handed stab was the only way to catch it. The second, 13 yards late in the third quarter, he juggled before pulling it in.
Between those two he had the long gains that kept other drives alive. A reserve had the best receiving day on either team because the game happened to ask for the one thing he still did well.
McGee played one more season and caught a 35-yard pass in the second championship game, his last reception as a professional. His name has outlasted those of far better players from that roster. It is the answer to the first trivia question the Super Bowl ever produced.
Bart Starr, the first Super Bowl MVP, and eleven third downs
Starr and Dawson completed the same number of passes. Sixteen each.
| Measure | Green Bay | Kansas City |
|---|---|---|
| Quarterback's passing | Starr, 16 of 23 for 250 yards | Dawson, 16 of 27 for 211 yards |
| Touchdown passes and interceptions | 2 and 1 | 1 and 1 |
| Total yards | 361 | 239 |
| Rushing yards | 133 | 72 |
| First-half yards | 164 | 181 |
| Third downs converted | 11 of 15 | 3 of 13 |
The last row is the game. Green Bay converted 11 of its 15 third downs and Kansas City 3 of 13, and no other line in the statistics explains the afternoon as completely.
Lombardi's offense was built to run, and for most of the first half it could not. Buck Buchanan and the rest of the Chiefs' front held the Packers' backs to short gains on early downs, so Green Bay kept arriving at third-and-medium. Starr kept completing passes there. McGee's first touchdown came on third down. The long drive to Taylor's score was kept alive by third-down completions as well, and the pattern held after halftime.
Starr called his own plays, as nearly every quarterback of the 1960s did. Much of his work that day was diagnosis: noticing the open middle, going back to McGee until the Chiefs adjusted, throwing on downs when a team with Green Bay's reputation was expected to run. He was never the strongest arm in his league. He was accurate, he was patient, and he almost never put the ball where it could hurt his own team, which against an opponent nobody on his sideline had played before counted for more than velocity. What that job involves from huddle to whistle has changed a great deal since, and our guide to the Super Bowl MVP award follows how often it has gone to the quarterback.
He won it again twelve months later, when the Packers beat the Oakland Raiders 33-14 in Miami. The road to that second title ran through a championship game played at 13 below zero, described in our account of the Ice Bowl against Dallas.
One famous Packer did not play at all. Paul Hornung, the leading scorer of Lombardi's early teams, was in uniform with a pinched nerve in his neck and never left the bench.
Two networks, one game, and a kickoff kicked twice
CBS held the television rights to the NFL. NBC held the rights to the AFL. Neither league could hand its championship to one network without breaking a contract with the other, so both showed the game, live and at the same time. It is the only Super Bowl carried by two competing broadcast networks with their own announcers.
The arrangement was uncomfortable from the first production meeting. CBS, as the senior league's partner, supplied the cameras and the pictures. NBC had to take that feed and lay its own voices over it: Curt Gowdy and Paul Christman in the booth, against Ray Scott, Jack Whitaker and Frank Gifford for CBS. The two crews spent the week treating each other as the leagues had for six years. By several accounts a fence was put up between the networks' trucks in the Coliseum parking lot.
Together that was about 51 million people. CBS won the head-to-head, as the network of the established league would be expected to, but the gap was narrow. NBC's number said the AFL had built a national audience of its own, which was a large part of why the NFL had agreed to merge with it.
The kickoff that half the country missed
The teams lined up to start the third quarter. NBC was not there. The network had not come back from its halftime break when Green Bay's kicker put the ball in the air. The usual telling has it still showing a sideline interview with Bob Hope; other accounts say a commercial.
The officials whistled the play dead and ordered the kickoff taken again.
It is easy to file that under charming mishaps. It was closer to a statement of priorities. In its very first edition a championship game was restarted for the benefit of a television network. The Super Bowl was a broadcast property from its opening afternoon.
Why a third of the Coliseum sat empty
No Super Bowl since has had an unsold seat. The first had about 30,000 of them.
The Coliseum held more than 90,000 for football, and the announced attendance was 61,946. In the surviving film the upper rows and the sections behind the east end zone are bare concrete, with the peristyle arches looking down on empty benches.
| Item | 1967 figure |
|---|---|
| Attendance | 61,946 |
| Top ticket price | $12 |
| Middle ticket price | $10 |
| Lowest ticket price | $6 |
| Winning player's share | $15,000 |
| Losing player's share | $7,500 |
Several causes ran together, and they are worth separating.
The late announcement. Los Angeles was not confirmed as host until December 1, 1966, which left less than seven weeks to sell a stadium of that size for an event nobody had attended before. Host cities are now chosen years in advance, through a process laid out in our guide to how Super Bowl host cities are picked.
The price. Twelve dollars was well above what a seat at a regular-season game cost in 1967. Local columnists complained about it in print during the week.
The matchup. Los Angeles had the Rams. Asking Southern California to pay a premium to watch a team from Wisconsin play a team from Missouri was asking for something new, and the idea of traveling across the country to a neutral-site football game had not yet taken hold.
The blackout. NFL policy at the time barred a telecast in the home market of any game, sold out or not, and Commissioner Pete Rozelle applied the rule to a neutral-site championship. Viewers within the blackout zone could not watch on CBS or NBC. Some resented it enough to stay home on principle, and others drove far enough out of town to pick up a signal from another city.
A fifth cause sat under the other four. A good share of the public believed the result was settled before kickoff. The NFL had spent six years describing the AFL as a lesser league, and on this one occasion its own publicity worked against its gate.
Two leagues, two footballs and six officials in neutral stripes
Nothing shows how separate the leagues still were as clearly as the equipment. They did not use the same ball.
The NFL played with Wilson's football, known as "The Duke." The AFL played with a Spalding model, the J5-V, a quarter-inch longer and slightly narrower, a shape quarterbacks in the pass-first younger league preferred. Neither side would give up its own. The compromise was that each offense used its league's ball: when Green Bay had possession the Wilson was in play, and when Kansas City took over the Spalding came on.
| Element | NFL side | AFL side |
|---|---|---|
| Football used on offense | Wilson "The Duke" | Spalding J5-V |
| Officials supplied | Three, including the referee | Three |
| Television partner | CBS | NBC |
| Two-point conversion in league play | Not available | Available since 1960 |
| Champion and record | Green Bay, 12-2 | Kansas City, 11-2-1 |
The officiating crew was divided the same way. Six men worked the game, three from each league, with the NFL's Norm Schachter as referee and the AFL's George Young as umpire. The leagues dressed their officials differently, so a neutral uniform was made for the day and no one on the field wore either league's shirt.
Which rulebook was in force
The two rulebooks were close relatives with a few well-known differences, and the largest was the two-point conversion. The AFL had allowed it from its first season. The NFL did not have it and would not until 1994. For the championship game the option was left out, so every touchdown was followed by a kick. How the play eventually reached the older league is covered in our explainer on NFL two-point conversion rules.
It changed nothing in a 25-point game. It does show the terms on which the merger was conducted. Where the leagues differed, the senior league's practice usually won on the day, and the AFL's ideas, including names on the backs of jerseys and a stadium clock that was the official time, were absorbed over the following years and decades.
What the NFL and the AFL each had riding on the afternoon
Lombardi had more to lose than any coach in the game has had since, because he was coaching for a whole league.
NFL owners had told the public since 1960 that the AFL played inferior football. A Green Bay defeat would have made that claim absurd overnight, and the owners made sure Lombardi understood it. In the days before the game he heard from several of them, and the message was that winning would not be enough; the margin mattered too. Frank Gifford, who interviewed him on the field for CBS before kickoff, said later that Lombardi held onto his arm and was shaking.
Lombardi did not often show nerves. He did that day.
Afterward the reporters pressed him again and again to compare the two leagues. He praised the Chiefs as a good, well-coached team and tried to leave it there. They kept asking, and he gave in: Kansas City did not match the best teams in the NFL, he said, and Dallas was better. He is reported to have regretted the remark almost immediately. It was accurate about that afternoon and ungenerous, and Kansas City carried it for three years, until Stram's Chiefs beat the NFL champion Minnesota Vikings 23-7 in the fourth of these games.
Fred Williamson's week
For the AFL the stake was respect, and one Chief turned that into a personal campaign. Cornerback Fred Williamson called himself "The Hammer," after the forearm he swung at receivers' heads, and he spent the week telling reporters which Green Bay players he intended to knock out of the game.
In the fourth quarter Williamson came up to tackle running back Donny Anderson, caught Anderson's knee with his helmet and was knocked cold. A teammate then fell across him and broke his arm. He left on a stretcher.
The Packers' bench, by more than one account, was not sympathetic. Williamson went on to a long career in film, and the episode has outlived everything else he did in football. It remains the standard illustration of the sport's oldest advice about what to say before a big game.
$15,000 a man and a trophy that did not yet carry Lombardi's name
Each Packer was paid $15,000 for winning. Each Chief got $7,500 for losing. Both checks came on top of the shares the players had already earned for their league championship games two weeks earlier.
In 1967 that was serious money. Professional football salaries were a small fraction of what they became, most players held offseason jobs selling insurance or cars, and a winner's share that size could match what a lineman earned for the whole regular season. It is not cynical to suppose the checks were discussed in both locker rooms more than history was. No one on either roster knew he was playing in the first edition of anything that would matter sixty years later.
The trophy was new as well. Tiffany & Co. made it: a regulation-size football in sterling silver, set in kicking position on a tapered three-sided base. Rozelle presented it to Lombardi in the locker room afterward. Its inscription called it the World Professional Football Championship trophy, a name as awkward as the game's.
The design has its own small legend. Oscar Riedener, a Tiffany vice president, is said to have sketched it on a napkin over lunch with Rozelle in 1966, by the usual account knowing very little about football. The finished piece stands 22 inches tall and weighs about seven pounds, and unlike the Stanley Cup it is not passed along. A new one is made every year and the winner keeps it.
It got a better name for a sad reason. Lombardi left the Green Bay sideline after the following season, coached Washington in 1969, and died of cancer on September 3, 1970, at 57. The league renamed the trophy for him, and it was first handed over under his name after Super Bowl V in January 1971. The design has barely changed since. How a new one is made each year, and who gets to keep it, is in our guide to the Vince Lombardi Trophy.
So the coach who won the first one never held a Lombardi Trophy. He won the thing twice before it was his.
A game everyone called the Super Bowl except its own ticket
The ticket read "AFL-NFL World Championship Game." So did the program cover. Newspapers, broadcasters and nearly everyone else called it the Super Bowl.
The name is credited to Lamar Hunt. During the merger meetings in 1966 the Chiefs' owner needed a shorthand to distinguish the proposed final from the two league title games, and he started calling it the "Super Bowl," a phrase he later connected to the Super Ball, a hard rubber toy his children were bouncing around the house that year. He offered it half as a joke and assumed something better would replace it. In a letter to Rozelle that summer he wrote that he had been "kiddingly" calling the game the Super Bowl and that the name could obviously be improved upon. Rozelle agreed with the second part. He thought "super" was slang without much dignity and wanted something with more weight. One of the Hunt family's Super Balls now sits in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton.
The press did not wait. Headline writers needed two short words, and by game week the unofficial name was in common use from coast to coast. The league gave way within two years, and by the third game "Super Bowl" was the official title.
The numeral came later still. Roman numerals were first used for the fifth game, in January 1971, and the four before it were numbered after the fact. "Super Bowl I" is therefore retroactive twice over, since neither the words nor the numeral appeared on anything official in Los Angeles that day. The reasoning behind the numbering, which was meant to stop a season being confused with the calendar year in which its final is played, is explained in our piece on why the Super Bowl uses Roman numerals.
Anyone asking who won the first Super Bowl is, strictly, asking about a game that was not called that when it was played. The answer is Green Bay either way.
Marching bands, rocket belts and pigeons: pregame and halftime in 1967
There was no headliner, and the idea of one would have puzzled everybody involved.
The people staging the day had a single model for what a big football occasion looked like, and it was the college bowl game. Pasadena, a few miles up the freeway, had been putting on a parade and a pageant around the Rose Bowl for half a century. So the pregame and the halftime were built from the same parts as a Rose Bowl or an Orange Bowl, by people who assumed that was simply what one did between halves of an important game. The marching bands of the University of Arizona and Grambling College played before kickoff and again at the half. Al Hirt, the New Orleans trumpeter who was then about as popular as an instrumentalist could be in America, performed at midfield. A high school drill team from Anaheim marched. The producer was Tommy Walker, who had run entertainment at Disneyland, and the show had a theme-park sensibility: large formations, bright colors, a map of the United States laid out on the grass.
A great deal went up into the air. Three hundred pigeons were released, and ten thousand balloons.
Then came the part that people who were there still bring up. Two men wearing Bell rocket belts, hydrogen-peroxide packs strapped to their backs, lifted off, flew over the field on jets of steam and set down near the 50-yard line. In January 1967, with the Apollo program at full stretch, a flying man was a bigger attraction than any singer would have been.
It was pageantry, and charming pageantry. It was also made for the people in the seats. No one yet thought of those minutes as the most valuable stretch of television in the American year, and nothing in the show was designed for a camera. That change took another quarter century, and the road from Grambling's band to stadium-scale pop productions is traced in our history of the Super Bowl halftime show.
The lost broadcast and the tape from a Pennsylvania attic
No complete recording of either telecast is known to exist. CBS erased its copy. NBC erased its copy too.
That was ordinary practice and not an act of vandalism. Broadcast videotape in the 1960s cost hundreds of dollars a reel and could be used again, and a football game that had already aired was not thought to have any future value. Both networks recorded over their tapes within months, as they recorded over nearly everything else from the period.
- January 1967CBS and NBC televise the game live and tape their own broadcasts.
- Months laterBoth networks reuse the tapes, erasing the only professional recordings.
- Decades laterA recording of the CBS telecast, made off the air in Pennsylvania, comes out of a family attic.
- RestorationThe Paley Center for Media restores the tape, which lacks halftime and most of the third quarter.
- January 15, 2016NFL Network airs a complete reconstruction built by NFL Films from its own film.
The sequence as documented by the Paley Center for Media and NFL Films. The home recording has never been shown in full on television.
For most of four decades the moving pictures of the game were NFL Films' sideline footage and a few seconds of broadcast tape that had survived by accident. Then a recording surfaced. A man named Martin Haupt had taped the CBS broadcast in Scranton on professional two-inch reels, and the reels spent years in an attic in Pennsylvania before his family brought them out. It is the fullest broadcast copy known. It is also incomplete, missing the halftime show and most of the third quarter.
The owner of the reels and the league never agreed on a price or on terms. One side held the physical tape and the other held the copyright in what was on it, and neither could do much without the other. The standoff has kept the recording off the air.
NFL Films solved the problem from a different direction. Its cameramen had shot the game on film for the league's own archive, from several positions and never continuously. The company went through its reels, located all 145 plays, put them in order, restored and color-corrected the footage, and matched it to the surviving NBC radio call by Jim Simpson and George Ratterman. NFL Network broadcast the result on January 15, 2016, forty-nine years to the day after kickoff.
It leaves the most-watched annual event in the United States in a strange position. Its first edition can be seen only as a reconstruction, play by play, with a radio announcer describing pictures he was never looking at.
Green Bay's win was the fourth of five championships in seven seasons under Lombardi, a run measured against the others in our ranking of the great NFL dynasties. The rest of the section is collected on the USA hub.