Why Super Bowl Superiority? There’s a Four-Part Answer

NEW ORLEANS — Even though the NFL is divided into two distinct conferences, AFC and NFC, the teams all get their players from the same college football pool.

Then they all coach them in much the same way.

So that raises two questions about the Super Bowl series:

--Why did AFC teams win most of the first 15 games?

--Why have NFC teams won most of the last 15--including all of the last 12?

Here’s a four-part answer.

Each of the NFL’s most recent champions:

--Has been defensively excellent.

--Has been relatively injury-free.

--Has had few personnel weaknesses.

--Has represented the conference that was at the time the more creative.

In those four ways, pro football’s champions have for 28 years most obviously differed from the teams they outscored in regular-season games.

The 1967-68 Green Bay Packers had been a little different. During the first two of the NFL’s 30 Super Bowl seasons, their coach, Vince Lombardi, stressed traditional rather than innovative values. Lombardi liked to run the ball.

But even in the late ‘60s, AFC teams were opening up the game. Soon they took over. And since 1969, the decisive difference almost every season has been made by creative leadership.

Other explanations, such as the one that football is cyclical, are wrong or meaningless. Football isn’t a sport of cycles. It’s a sport of innovation.

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The game-changing year, 1969, brought in a brash quarterback named Joe Namath, whose bold play selection, in an era when many quarterbacks called their own, was a weapon comparable to his passing.

The pre-merger NFL had dominated football through the 1960s until the Namath game, Super Bowl III, when, as the New York Jets won in a 16-7 upset, he surprised the old Baltimore Colts with the plays he called even more than the passes he threw.

That game launched the AFC’s 1969-81 era, in which, as the NFC lost 11 of 13 Super Bowls, AFC teams played the more inventive football.

Some of their more famous leaders, besides Namath, were Sid Gillman of San Diego, the first great passing coach; Hank Stram of Kansas City, inventor of the moving pocket, and Al Davis of Oakland, a three-time Super Bowl winner who was the first to win with long passes and in-your-face bump-and-run defense.

Not until Jan. 24, 1982, in Coach Bill Walsh’s first Super Bowl, did an innovative NFC team, the San Francisco 49ers, surface to end the years of AFC supremacy.

Simultaneously that 1982 day, NFC teams began a Super Bowl streak in which they have won 14 of the last 15.

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The difference in the 15 seasons since 1982 is that the more creative football has been played in the NFC:

--By the 49ers, whose quick, short passes in Walsh’s West Coast offense won five Super Bowls.

--By the Dallas Cowboys, who won three others with quick, short passes from West Coast formations.

--By Joe Gibbs’ Washington Redskins, who also won three times with a novel one-back system and multiple player movement.

--By the Chicago Bears, whose 1986 champions were led by another bold quarterback, Jim McMahon, and whose defensive coordinator, Buddy Ryan, revolutionized NFL defense. The game’s 1986 MVP was a defensive player, end Richard Dent of the Bears.

--And by Bill Parcells.

Disguising himself as a traditionalist, Parcells coached two Super Bowl winners for the New York Giants with game plans accenting downfield and ball-control passes. One day, one of his passers, Phil Simms, completed 22 of 25 for a Super Bowl record that still stands.

But in Game XXXI today, Parcells, now coaching New England, will be matched against another passing coach, Mike Holmgren, who learned the West Coast offense in San Francisco.

For the first time, two of a kind.

Thus, the one sure thing is that a Super Bowl tradition will continue. An innovative team will win it.