When Was the First Super Bowl? The Complete Story of Super Bowl I (1967)

When Was the First Super Bowl? The Story Behind the Game That Started It All

On January 15, 1967, roughly 63,000 people filed into the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum — leaving nearly 30,000 seats empty. Two television networks broadcast the same game simultaneously, an arrangement that has never happened since. The Green Bay Packers destroyed the Kansas City Chiefs 35–10. And almost nobody called it the Super Bowl.

The first Super Bowl year was 1967, but the name itself was a placeholder, the venue wasn’t sold out, and the game was technically called something else entirely. The story of how a thrown-together championship between rival leagues became the most-watched annual television event in American history is messier and more interesting than the official mythology suggests.

Why the Super Bowl Exists at All

The short answer: a rival league forced the NFL’s hand.

In 1960, Lamar Hunt — a young Texas oil heir who had been rebuffed when he tried to buy an NFL franchise — founded the American Football League with seven other investors. The NFL’s leadership largely dismissed the upstart league. That was a mistake. The AFL signed major television contracts, began poaching top college talent, and started a bidding war for players that was draining both leagues financially.

By 1966, the situation was untenable. NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle and Hunt met secretly in Dallas — with Tex Schramm of the Cowboys as an intermediary — to negotiate a merger. On June 8, 1966, the AFL and NFL announced they would formally combine into one league by 1970. As a bridge, the champions of each league would meet annually starting in January 1967.

The Super Bowl wasn’t created because someone had a grand vision for American sports culture. It was a contractual compromise between two leagues that couldn’t afford to keep fighting each other.

Where the Name “Super Bowl” Actually Came From

This is the detail I find most underrated in every retelling of this history, so I want to give it the space it deserves.

During merger negotiations, Hunt used the phrase “Super Bowl” in a memo as a casual stand-in — he’d apparently watched his daughter playing with a Wham-O Super Ball toy and the phrase stuck in his head. He assumed it was a throwaway label. Both he and Rozelle agreed it sounded too silly to be the permanent name. They were actively looking for something better.

They never found it. Sportswriters ran with “Super Bowl” in their coverage before the first game, and the public adopted it instantly. The NFL held firm on the official title — “AFL-NFL World Championship Game” — for the first two years. But by Super Bowl III in January 1969, the league gave up and made the name official. Roman numerals were adopted at the same time, which is why the games are numbered rather than named by year: because the season and the game fall in different calendar years, and “the 1967 Super Bowl” creates genuine confusion about which season it caps.

The retroactive renaming of the first two games as Super Bowl I and Super Bowl II came after the fact. This is one of the things people most commonly misunderstand — many assume there was a clear, intentional “Super Bowl I” branding from the start. There wasn’t. The NFL was embarrassed by the name well into the late 1960s.

Super Bowl I: What Actually Happened on January 15, 1967

The game was, by modern standards, a strange event. Two broadcast networks — CBS (which held NFL rights) and NBC (which held AFL rights) — simulcast it simultaneously, each with their own announcers. The game was blacked out in the Los Angeles area because it hadn’t sold out. The ticket price was $12.

Roughly 51 million Americans watched on television — a number that sounds modest until you remember the U.S. population was about 200 million at the time.

Green Bay, led by head coach Vince Lombardi, entered the game under enormous institutional pressure. The entire NFL establishment expected — and needed — the Packers to prove the old league’s superiority. By Lombardi’s own account (relayed by CBS broadcaster Frank Gifford), he was physically shaking before kickoff.

The Chiefs nearly made things uncomfortable. Kansas City kept pace in the first half, trailing only 14–10 at the break. The turning point came early in the third quarter: Packers safety Willie Wood intercepted a Len Dawson pass and returned it 50 yards to the Kansas City five-yard line. Green Bay scored on the next play and never looked back, outscoring the Chiefs 21–0 in the second half. Final score: 35–10.

Quarterback Bart Starr completed 16 of 23 passes for 250 yards and two touchdowns and was named the first Super Bowl MVP. Wide receiver Max McGee, who had reportedly stayed out until 7 a.m. the night before the game, caught seven passes for 138 yards and two scores after starting receiver Boyd Dowler went down with an injury in the first quarter. That detail — a hungover backup becoming the game’s breakout performer — belongs in the story but usually gets cut.

Super Bowl I at a Glance

The Game Nobody Fully Recorded

For decades, the complete broadcast of Super Bowl I was considered lost. The NFL owned the copyright but had no full recording. Only two brief clips — Max McGee’s opening touchdown and Jim Taylor’s touchdown run — survived in known archives and were shown on HBO in 1991.

In 2011, a man named Troy Haupt discovered a two-inch color videotape of the CBS broadcast in a Pennsylvania attic. The recording was largely complete, missing only the halftime show and most of the third quarter. Haupt tried to sell it to the NFL; the league refused and blocked its distribution, citing copyright. He remained anonymous for five years before identifying himself to The New York Times in 2016.

The Paley Center for Media eventually restored and digitized the footage, and it was shown publicly for the first time on February 10, 2024 — 57 years after the game was played. NFL Films separately reconstructed all 145 plays from Super Bowl I using footage sourced from more than two dozen disparate archives.

I’d argue this is the most quietly extraordinary part of the whole story. The single most historically significant game in NFL history nearly disappeared entirely. The institution that benefited most from its legacy spent years fighting to suppress the only recording that existed.

From Super Bowl I to the Modern Era: The Critical Early Years

Green Bay won the first two AFL-NFL championship games — Super Bowl II over the Oakland Raiders (33–14) in January 1968 — confirming what the NFL had hoped: the established league was simply better. Then Super Bowl III happened.

On January 12, 1969, New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath publicly guaranteed a victory over the heavily favored Baltimore Colts. The Jets won 16–7. That upset — more than any game before or since — legitimized the AFL, changed the public perception of the merger, and gave the Super Bowl its first genuine drama. The name was officially adopted for that game. The timing was not coincidental.

Super Bowl IV in January 1970, with Hunt’s Kansas City Chiefs defeating the Minnesota Vikings 23–7, was the AFL’s final game before the full merger took effect. It was a meaningful punctuation mark: the league Hunt built because the NFL wouldn’t return his calls had won the last championship before being absorbed into the NFL permanently.

By 1970, the merger was complete. The AFL’s teams were absorbed into a new American Football Conference; NFL teams formed the National Football Conference. The Super Bowl became what it is today — not an inter-league exhibition, but the league’s actual championship.

Frequently Asked Questions

What year was the first Super Bowl?
The first Super Bowl was played on January 15, 1967. It capped the 1966 NFL and AFL seasons.

Who won the first Super Bowl?
The Green Bay Packers defeated the Kansas City Chiefs 35–10. Quarterback Bart Starr was named MVP.

Where was the first Super Bowl held?
At the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles, California.

Why is it called the Super Bowl?
Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt coined the phrase informally during merger negotiations, inspired by his daughter’s Super Ball toy. Neither Hunt nor NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle liked the name, but media adopted it and it stuck. The NFL made it official starting with Super Bowl III in 1969.

Was the first Super Bowl sold out?
No. Roughly 63,000 fans attended in a stadium that held approximately 93,000. The game was blacked out in the Los Angeles market because of the unsold seats — a detail that feels almost impossible to imagine today.

When did the Super Bowl get its Roman numeral system?
Roman numerals were adopted in 1969, starting with Super Bowl III. Games I and II were retroactively renamed. The numerals exist because the Super Bowl is played in a different calendar year from the season it concludes, making year-based naming confusing.

Is the original Super Bowl I broadcast available?
A largely complete recording of the CBS broadcast was discovered in 2011 and publicly shown for the first time in February 2024 at the Paley Center for Media. The NFL controls the copyright and has not made it widely available.

Frankly, what’s most striking about Super Bowl I isn’t the game itself — the Packers were better, and it showed. The striking part is how provisional everything was: the name was a joke that stuck, the venue wasn’t full, the broadcast nearly ceased to exist, and the two leagues involved weren’t even sure the arrangement would last. Sixty years later, a 30-second commercial during the Super Bowl costs around $7 million. Lamar Hunt’s throwaway word is now the most valuable brand in American sports.