Taking Away Jets Fans’ Only Excuse For Even Talking About The Super Bowl

The two most important games in professional football history, without a doubt really, are the 1958 NFL Championship and Super Bowl III.  The former essentially cemented the game as a mass marketable television product, and the second made the AFL-NFL merger start to look more like a union of equal entities rather than "a 26-team league with ten 'last-place' teams".  

While also inarguable that the ’58 game was better on its merits, it remains arguable as to which one actually had more impact after the fact.   After trying and discarding several loose cultural and historical analogs to illustrate the point—Red Sea vs Revelation, Magna Carta vs Westphalia, Revolutionary vs Civil War, 13th vs 19th Amendment—I finally settled on a much simpler one:  

’58 is Pro Football’s Bar Mitzvah.  SB III is Pro Football getting engaged.  [Mazel Tov.  It's a ball.]

[Inspired on the one hand by my impending nuptials and my poor beloved’s already having resigned herself to long-suffering football widowhood, and on the other by my years in Yeshiva having prepared me for the inevitable suffering involved in rooting for the Jets.]

However, after another season of enduring the apparently endless record-setting domination of Tom Brady [which followed waiting for Dan Marino to retire, sandwiched around Jim Kelly’s unrepeatable run of Super Bowl appearances], one would wonder what keeps Jet fans like me watching Super Bowls. 

A lot of it has to do with SB III, and the extra pangs of nostalgia on those occasions where Joe Namath trots out onto the field to toss the coin, present the trophy, or another honor.  We are continually reminded of the franchise’s one moment of fleeting glory as well as its perpetual, if distant, relevance.  And that’s precisely the problem.

While there have been several “curse” labels attached to the team because of Super Bowl III—Joe Namath selling his soul to the Devil; the Jets’ partners forcing out Sonny Werblin—neither of those are as trenchant or identifiable as, say, Babe Ruth, or the Billy Goat, or Bobby Layne.  [With all respect due Sidney Zion, Werblin was cashiered before the 1968 season began.]

As a psych professor at Penn explained to me, the curse is the actual win itself.  The Jets can never top that moment again.  [In contrast, the Colts in theory could top ’58, as it occurred in the pre-Super Bowl era.]

Which brings me back to my Yeshiva HS education.  In one of his asides during a senior year Jewish Philosophy class, the rabbi opined that the only real Super Bowls were the first four, as the game was designed to match the top team from the AFL and NFL.  All the games from V on were/are “AFC-NFC Championship Games.”

I think the evidence supports turning that theory on its head: the game wasn’t even officially called the "Super Bowl" until V; III unofficially got the label, but if you ever see a broadcast of IV, note that the CBS graphic reads “AFL-NFL Championship Game.”  And V was the first one where the winner was awarded the Lombardi Trophy.  Which, in effect, renders the first four Super Bowls as a series of very important postseason exhibition games, but exhibition games nonetheless.  Which means—they don’t count as "Super Bowl wins".

“SBIII doesn’t count” may seem like the ultimate heresy to Jets fans, but if you look at what happened to the other two pre-merger SB winners in the long term, the theory might be more salient: the Packers [winners of I and II] made the playoffs twice between 1968 and 1993 [one of those appearances during the strike season of 1982] before Brett Favre made them a powerhouse again; the Chiefs also made the playoffs only twice in the next two decades after winning IV, and they haven’t been back to the game since.  In contrast, the Colts shook off their disastrous showing in III quickly enough to win V [and only made a mess of themselves after Robert Irsay bought the team in 1972].

For Jets fans, watching the game year after year—more painful when Brady keeps getting in, horrifically worse when Eli Manning and the Giants show up to knock him off—brings back the days of the Guarantee every time, keeping the franchise relevant, but only as a relic.

Jets fans must let go of III.