Here’s your one-stop place to learn about Super Bowl history.
There have also been six Super Bowls held at college-campus stadiums–three at Tulane (4, 6, 9) and one each at Arizona State (30), Rice (8) and Stanford (19). The warmest Super Bowl was 7 (Miami-Washington) at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum (84 degrees at kickoff) – the game two years ago in Los Angeles came close, with an 82-degree reading – and the coldest was 6 (Dallas-Miami) in New Orleans, an outdoor game at Tulane University Stadium, played in 39-degree chill.
This year’s Super Bowl will be the 22nd to be played in the month of February, and the 21st consecutive game to be pushed into the calendar year’s second month. The first February Super Bowl was 36 (Rams-Patriots), which was moved back by necessity, as that season’s Week Two slate of games was postponed due to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and made up in early January.
Due to fewer playoff rounds and fewer teams in the league then, the earliest Super Bowl by date was 11 (Raiders-Vikings), played on January 9, 1977. The latest game occurred on February 13, when Super Bowl 56 occurred.
The Super Bowl was dead even between the conferences until the last three years, when Tampa Bay and the Los Angeles Rams both won, and Kansas City answered back to leave the NFC with a 29-28 lifetime edge over their AFC counterparts; however, the AFC representatives have won 16 of the last 25 games. The NFC representatives include those that were, prior to 1970, the pre-merger NFL champions). The AFC representatives include those teams that were, prior to 1970, the pre-merger AFL title-holders. Actually, it has been rather even lately, with the two conferences splitting the last 16 games (8-8).
Only six Super Bowls have featured comebacks of ten or more points by the winning team: Washington over Denver (22), New Orleans over Indianapolis (44), New England over Seattle (49), Kansas City over San Francisco (54), the Patriots’ record 25-point rally over Atlanta in Super Bowl 51 and Kansas City’s ten-point rally over Philadelphia last year.
New England leads all franchises, having participated in 11 Super Bowls (6-5); four years ago, it broke its own record for the most by any franchise, further relegating Dallas (5-3), Pittsburgh (6-2) and Denver (3-5) to second place with eight each. San Francisco, the Super Bowl 54 runner-up, is close behind with seven (5-2), but it has lost in each of its last two appearances. However, the Patriots have five losses in the big game, tied for the most with Denver. Buffalo and Minnesota are tied for the second-most defeats (0-4 each). This year, Kansas City is participating in its sixth Super Bowl (1, 4, 54, 55, 57, 58), and San Francisco is appearing in its eighth (16, 19, 23, 24, 29, 47, 54, 58).
Since the current postseason seeding format was instituted in 1990, only eight Super Bowls, including last year’s, have featured the No. 1 seeds from each conference. Seven years ago, Atlanta was the No. 2 NFC seed, breaking a streak of three Super Bowls that saw the top seeds square off. Super Bowl 56 featured two seeds that were fourth or lower for the first time ever; Cincinnati and the Los Angeles Rams were the No. 4 in their respective conferences.
The first 54 Super Bowls in league history did not feature a team playing in the game in its home stadium, although a few teams played close to their home base. But as was the case with Tampa Bay three years ago and Los Angeles the year after that, there will not be a stadium full of their own screaming season-ticket holders since the league controls Super Bowl ticket distribution, not the host team. Furthermore, the game in Tampa only permitted a maximum of 30,000 fans to enter due to COVID-19. Due to Super Bowls being mostly played at neutral sites, the last NFL champion to win a title on its home field before the Buccaneers won their title was the 1965 Green Bay Packers, who beat Cleveland.
As the designated home team, Kansas City will have its logo painted in the right-side end zone and occupy the near-side bench at Allegiant Stadium (closest to the main television camera). San Francisco, the designated visiting team, will have its logo painted in the left-side end zone and occupy the far-side bench (furthest away from the main television camera). The NFL shield logo will be painted at midfield, and the official Super Bowl 58 logo will appear on the 25-yard lines at both ends of the field.
Teams that win the coin toss are 24-33 in Super Bowls and had lost the last eight straight games before Kansas City broke the streak last year. Ever since deferring the choice became an option, teams that have done so have lost the game ten of 14 times. In Super Bowl 44, New Orleans became the only team so far to elect to receive in the deferral era; it won the game over Indianapolis in Miami.
Teams that have led at halftime of the Super Bowl are 41-12. Four games have been tied at the half: Super Bowl 54 (San Francisco-Kansas City, 10-10), Super Bowl 49 (New England-Seattle, 14-14), Super Bowl 39 (New England-Philadelphia, 7-7), and Super Bowl 23 (Cincinnati-San Francisco, 3-3).
Teams that trail by double-digit margins at halftime of a Super Bowl are 2-25, with only New England’s rally over Atlanta at Super Bowl 51 and Kansas City’s comeback against Philadelphia in Super Bowl 57 being the exceptions. Teams that score first are 37-20 in Super Bowls. The eventual winner has scored first in nine of the last 13 Super Bowls, although Kansas City lost three years ago after doing so, as did Philadelphia last year. Also, teams that win the turnover battle are 39-6 in the Super Bowl, which means a surprising 12 Super Bowls have ended up with an even turnover ratio. Moreover, Cincinnati played to a plus-2 in its most recent appearance but lost 23-20 to the Los Angeles Rams at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles.
There have been ten kick-return scores in Super Bowl history, but only four by members of the eventual winning team, including two by the Ravens (Desmond Howard, Super Bowl 31; Jermaine Lewis, 35; Jacoby Jones, 47; Percy Harvin, 48). In Super Bowl 41 in Miami, Chicago’s Devin Hester became the only player to run back the Super Bowl’s opening kickoff for a touchdown. Two players have run back the second-half kickoff for a score, Baltimore’s Jones and Seattle’s Harvin; those took place in consecutive years.
Surprisingly, there has never been a punt-return touchdown in a Super Bowl. The longest such runback was 65 yards by Kansas City’s Kadarius Toney in Super Bowl 57 against Philadelphia. There has also never been a shutout or scoreless first half in a Super Bowl, and there had never been an overtime Super Bowl until just seven years ago when New England outlasted Atlanta, the only overtime Super Bowl to date.
There have been seven safeties in Super Bowl history, the most recent coming on the first scrimmage play of Super Bowl 48, when a shotgun-formation snap sailed over Peyton Manning’s head and out through the back of the end zone only 12 seconds into the game. Teams that have scored safeties in Super Bowls are 5-2.
There have been only five field goals of 51 or more yards in Super Bowl history, but each team kicked one in the game four years ago (the first time that had ever happened), and the teams that have kicked them are 2-3 in the title game. The longest is a 54-yarder kicked by Buffalo’s Steve Christie against Dallas in Super Bowl 28 in Atlanta’s Georgia Dome.
Only two of 57 Super Bowls have been completely free of turnovers: Super Bowl 25 (Bills-Giants) and Super Bowl 34 (Titans-Rams). The fewest combined penalties in any Super Bowl were the two committed by Dallas and Pittsburgh in Super Bowl 10, and the most is the 20 that Dallas and Denver committed in Super Bowl 12. Four teams have played an entire Super Bowl without being flagged: Miami in Super Bowl 6, Pittsburgh in Super Bowl 10, Denver in Super Bowl 24, and Atlanta in Super Bowl 33. However, those teams are 1-3 in those games, with only Pittsburgh winning.
Five non-quarterbacks have thrown touchdown passes in Super Bowls, the most recent being when Cincinnati’s Joe Mixon did so against the Los Angeles Rams in Super Bowl 56. Some of the others include Dallas’ Robert Newhouse against Denver in Super Bowl 12, the Los Angeles Rams’ Lawrence McCutcheon against Pittsburgh in Super Bowl 14, and the Steelers’ Antwaan Randle-El against Seattle in Super Bowl 40.
With the league becoming more pass-oriented, sack numbers are also up. Von Miller and Charles Haley share the Super Bowl career record with 4.5 sacks in the big game; Miller was the MVP of Super Bowl 50, and Haley has been on the winning side of five Super Bowls with San Francisco and Dallas. The team sack record in a single Super Bowl is seven, first set by Pittsburgh against Dallas in Super Bowl 10 in Miami and equaled by the Los Angeles Rams against Cincinnati in Super Bowl 56 in Los Angeles.
In Super Bowl 56, the Rams’ Eric Weddle became the sixth safety in Super Bowl history to add a championship to a resume with at least six Pro Bowls. The list includes former Ravens such as Weddle, Earl Thomas, and Ed Reed.
With five wins in eight Super Bowls, the Dallas Cowboys hold the Super Bowl record for best cumulative turnover ratio in Super Bowl games at plus-20. The Buffalo Bills, losers in all four appearances, have the all-time worst mark at minus-13. Four franchises have never thrown an interception in a Super Bowl, but the Baltimore Ravens are the only ones who have never done so while appearing in more than one game. Six teams have never lost a fumble in a Super Bowl, but only Seattle and Kansas City have done so while appearing in multiple games.
There have been 14 missed extra points during Super Bowls and 11 successful two-point conversions; one bad snap doomed a PAT in Super Bowl 56 (Rams-Bengals), and two failed in Super Bowl 52 (Patriots-Eagles). There have been seven fumble returns for Super Bowl touchdowns (including two by Dallas in Super Bowl 28 in Atlanta). Teams are 5-2 when accomplishing that feat, including wins by the last five straight teams that have done so.
There have been 15 interception returns for scores in Super Bowls (including two by Tampa Bay’s Dwight Smith in Super Bowl 37). Still, only one by a member of the eventual losing team. Atlanta’s Robert Alford did it against New England in Super Bowl 51. The aforementioned Smith’s scores were two of three interception-return scores in Super Bowl 37, the only time any team has done it three times in one Super Bowl; no other team has done it more than once.
There have been 69 players to win the Super Bowl with more than one team. They include Baltimore Colts linebacker Ted Hendricks, quarterback Earl Morrall, and center Bill Curry, as well as Ravens players Terrell Suggs, Robert Bailey, Billy Davis, Dannell Ellerbe, Corey Graham, Marcus Nash, Shannon Sharpe, Torrey Smith, and Harry Swayne. In fact, Ellerbe, Graham, and Smith were all on the Philadelphia team that won Super Bowl 52.
22 pairs of fathers and sons have played in Super Bowls, and 32 sets of brothers. The relatives include Ravens defenders Peter Boulware (Michael, with Seattle), Cornell Brown (Ruben, with Buffalo), Ma’ake Kemoeatu (Chris, with Pittsburgh), Jamie Sharper (Darren, with Green Bay) and Arthur Jones (Chandler, with New England).
Last year, Philadelphia center Jason Kelce and Kansas City tight end Travis Kelce became the first-ever set of brothers to play in the same Super Bowl. Ironically, that occurred ten years after Super Bowl 47, which saw two brothers coach against each other for the first and only time in the game’s history, San Francisco’s Jim Harbaugh and Baltimore’s John Harbaugh.
Former Tampa Bay quarterback Tom Brady has seven championship rings, more than any Super Bowl-era NFL player. At 44 years old, he is the oldest player to ever appear in a Super Bowl; previously, that distinction was held by ex-Ravens kicker Matt Stover, who played for Indianapolis at the time of Super Bowl 44 (42 years, 11 days). The youngest player in Super Bowl game-day history is Baltimore running back Jamal Lewis, a rookie who was 21 years and 155 days old at Super Bowl 35 (also played in Tampa). Lewis is also the youngest to run for 100 or more yards and score a touchdown in a Super Bowl.
New England’s Bill Belichick’s six Super Bowl wins are the most among any head coach. Pittsburgh’s Chuck Noll won it four times, and Washington’s Joe Gibbs and San Francisco’s Bill Walsh each won three Super Bowls. All of those coaches pulled off multiple wins with the same franchise. Ten head coaches have won two Super Bowls each, including Hall of Fame coaches Vince Lombardi, Bill Parcells, Tom Landry, Don Shula, Jimmy Johnson, Tom Flores, and the currently active Andy Reid. Tampa Bay’s Bruce Arians, at 68, became the second-oldest Super Bowl head coach in Super Bowl 55, and Los Angeles’ Sean McVay (36 years, 20 days) became the youngest to coach in and win a Super Bowl in the 56th edition of the game.
With Nick Sirianni taking Philadelphia to last year’s game, there have now been eight head coaches to take their teams to a Super Bowl in their first season coaching that team. The other seven are Don McCafferty (Baltimore, Super Bowl 5), Red Miller (Denver, 12), George Seifert (San Francisco, 24), Jon Gruden (Tampa Bay, 37), Bill Callahan (Oakland, 37), Jim Caldwell (Indianapolis, 44) and Gary Kubiak (Denver, 50). Those first-time Super Bowl head coaches went 5-4 in those games.
Two years ago, the Los Angeles-Cincinnati Super Bowl featured the youngest-ever pair of Super Bowl head coaches; neither Sean McVay nor Zac Taylor had yet reached 40 years old. This year’s coaches, Andy Reid and Kyle Shanahan have a combined age of 109, with Reid at 65 years of age and Shanahan at 44.
Before the Super Bowl was born, the NFL Championship Game featured the Western Conference winner hosting the game in odd-numbered years, with the Eastern champ hosting in even-numbered years, regardless of record. That practice continued through the 1969 season, then disappeared after the merger took effect.
To debunk a long-held myth about the Super Bowl, seven Super Bowls were played just one week after the conference title games, and those games have had an average final margin of 11.4 points. The other 50 Super Bowls, played after a two-week break, have not been drastically less competitive, as many believe, for they have had an average margin of just under 15 points. There are no plans in the future to reduce the gap between the conference title games and the Super Bowl to one week; the last time there was such a short break was before Super Bowl 37 (Raiders-Buccaneers). Nine of the last 13 Super Bowls, all with a two-week break beforehand, have been decided by eight or fewer points.
In 57 previous Super Bowls, quarterbacks have been named the game’s Most Valuable Player 32 times, including after 12 of the last 17 games. Two years ago, the Super Bowl MVP was a wide receiver for just the eighth time, the Rams’ Cooper Kupp, who caught two touchdowns in the win over Cincinnati, including the game-winner late in the fourth quarter. The MVP trophy was named after late commissioner Pete Rozelle starting with Super Bowl 25 (Bills-Giants, in the old Tampa Stadium), the first Super Bowl to occur after his death.
Before Super Bowl 5 (Colts-Cowboys), the winners’ trophy was affixed with the name of late Green Bay and Washington head coach Vince Lombardi, who died just before the start of the 1970 season. The trophy is a sterling silver trophy created by Tiffany & Company, featuring a regulation-size silver football mounted on a tee, sitting on a pyramid-like stand of three sides. The trophy stands 20.75 inches tall, weighs 107.3 ounces, and is worth over $25,000. The words “Vince Lombardi Trophy” and “Super Bowl LVIII” are engraved on the base, along with the NFL shield logo.
Retired referee Jerry Markbreit holds the official record with four Super Bowl assignments. Vinovich, Norm Schachter, Jim Tunney, Pat Haggerty, Bob McElwee, Carl Cheffers, and former Howard County high school ref Terry McAulay have done three Super Bowls each. Two Super Bowls were assigned to Ben Dreith, Tom Bell, Ed Hochuli, Red Cashion, Jerry Seeman, Gerry Austin, Bernie Kukar, and John Parry.
NBC’s Dick Enberg called eight Super Bowls, and Curt Gowdy did seven, also for NBC. Ray Scott had the call for four Super Bowls for CBS, while Greg Gumbel has done two big games on the same network. Frank Gifford (ABC) and Jack Buck (CBS) each called one. Gowdy and Scott called Super Bowl 1, working on separate broadcasts with separate networks, as NBC had the AFL contract then, while CBS held the NFL rights.
In the current Super Bowl rotation, the re-emergence of ABC, in conjunction with ESPN, has slightly changed the order of the televising networks. CBS has this year’s game before it returns to Fox next year. NBC returns and gets Super Bowl 60, followed by ABC/ESPN. ABC has not televised a Super Bowl since Super Bowl 25 following the 1990 season, while ESPN has never aired the big game and only recently has begun airing Wild Card Weekend and Divisional playoff games.
The highest-rated Super Bowl was 16 (49ers-Bengals), which posted a 49.1 reading for CBS. Super Bowl 10 (Cowboys-Steelers) pulled a Super Bowl-record 78 percent share on CBS, indicating how many television sets in the country were used for the entire game. But the highest number of average viewers were tuned in during Super Bowl 51 (Patriots-Falcons) on Fox, during which over 172 million fans watched at least a part of the broadcast. A sign of the times: the 38.2 rating for Super Bowl 55 (Chiefs-Buccaneers) on CBS was the lowest-rated Super Bowl in 31 years, accounting mainly for the numbers of many varying platforms on which the game aired. Super Bowl 56 (Los Angeles Rams-Cincinnati) saw the number dip further, to 36.9, before last year’s Kansas City-Philadelphia game posted a rebound to just over 40.
Over 4.3 million fans have watched Super Bowls in person. In the COVID year four years ago, the crowd was projected to be well under 30,000, less than half of the expanded capacity in Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium, already making it the smallest-ever Super Bowl crowd due to COVID restrictions (actual crowd: 24,835). The largest crowd was 103,985 at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena to watch Pittsburgh and the Los Angeles Rams (14).
The smallest non-virus Super Bowl crowd (61,946) showed up for the first Super Bowl between Green Bay and Kansas City at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Interestingly, the second-smallest showed up just four years ago (62,417) to see the San Francisco-Kansas City battle at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens.
A popular theory states that when the NFC representative wins the Super Bowl, the Dow Jones Industrial Average will end that calendar year higher, and an AFC win will send the market lower by year’s end. That theory has been correct after 41 of 57 previous Super Bowls, yet it has been wrong for six of the last seven years and nine of the last 12.
Next year’s game (Super Bowl 59) will be broadcast on Fox and take place on Sunday, February 9, 2025, at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, the home of the New Orleans Saints, which will be hosting its eighth Super Bowl, most of any individual stadium. It will also be the 11th played in New Orleans, which will tie it with Miami for the most of any host city. This Super Bowl will likely feature Kevin Burkhardt and Tom Brady in the booth (Fox’s new No. 1 team, starting this fall) with Erin Andrews and Tom Rinaldi on the sidelines. Since it is an odd-numbered Super Bowl, the NFC champion will be the designated home team and have jersey choice.
