The Story of How the Super Bowl Came to Be

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Shop now for family favorites. And we continue with our American stories. Each year on Super Bowl Sunday, Americans eat 1.4 billion chicken wings, order 12.5 million pizzas, and drink 325 million gallons of beer. How did these turn of events come to be? Here to tell the story of the origins of the Super Bowl is Dennis Denninger, an Emmy Award-winning live sports producer and the author of The Football Game That Changed America, How the NFL Created a National Holiday.

Take it away, Dennis. Back in 1958, the booming post-war years, a young man named Lamar Hunt, who was only 26 years old, decided to put an expansion team in Dallas. There is no professional sports team of any kind in the state of Texas, and he had a lot of money.

H.L. Hunt was his father, and he was a multi-billion dollar oil tycoon, so Lamar Hunt goes to the NFL, and the answer he got was no. The NFL owners liked the fact that there were 12 of them, and they were splitting all of the dollars that the NFL made, and they didn't want to cut the pie into smaller pieces. The commissioner at the time, Burt Bell, said to young Lamar Hunt, Listen, if you can get Walter Wolfner, the owner of the Chicago Cardinals, to sell his team, we'll let you move it to Dallas. The Chicago Cardinals, they were the core stepsister to the Bears. They didn't win very many games.

They didn't get a lot of money. But Walter Wolfner really liked being an NFL owner. He says, listen, Sonny, I'm not going to sell my team to you or to any of the other of these rich guys that keep trying to buy my team, and he makes the mistake of naming names, rich people who have visited them.

He gets on the airplane heading back to Dallas, and the way he put it was a light bulb went off. If there are all these rich guys who all want to start teams in cities that do not have NFL franchises, why don't we just start a second league? The NFL arose just two years later.

They got a television contract with ABC. They started with a 14-game season, and the NFL only had 12, so the NFL controlled two weekends in the fall that the NFL did not have games. So they had a winning combination, and by 1966, just six years later, the NFL owners, they could not take the competition anymore, the competition for players. Great players now could, they could take bids from AFL, NFL, and the prices went up, and I think the tipping point was Joe Namath. Joe Namath got this $427,000 contract for four years from the New York Jets. The owners, they couldn't do this, so they said, look, we want to go back to the days when we could pay these guys a lot less than $100,000 a year. So anyway, the talks about a merger begin, and the general manager of the Dallas Cowboys, the team that the NFL started, hopefully to run Lamar Hudd out of town, and they did. He had a team in Dallas for three years, and then they moved to Kansas City, and they became the Chiefs, and they've been pretty successful as the Chiefs, you might say, but Tex Schramm reaches out to Lamar Hudd with the blessing of Pete Rozelle, who was then the commissioner. He said, don't tell anybody else.

We don't know where these talks are going to go, so we're not going to do this as a group of 12. You just go talk to Lamar Hudd. Well, Lamar Hudd was flying back from somewhere to Dallas, to Love Field, and Tex Schramm said, why don't we meet at the airport when you arrive if you'll meet me at old Texas Rangers statue, and then we can start talking. Well, they start talking and looking around, and this is kind of a public place.

So Tex Schramm says, why don't we go out to my car? So the talks about the merger of the AFL and the NFL started in an Oldsmobile in the parking lot of Love Field in Dallas, and they sat there and they talked for 45 minutes and pretty much sketched out what they would do if there was a merger. And Pete Rozelle announces in June of 1966 that the two leagues are going to merge, and at the end of the upcoming season, the 1966 season, they will have a world championship game, the NFL champion versus the AFL champion. The first Super Bowl wasn't called the Super Bowl. Pete Rozelle did not like the word super. This is the era of the 1960s.

He hated all of these empty superlatives like super and neat and keen and cool. It was called the AFL versus NFL World Championship. That was the official name. The media was calling it the Super Bowl. The public was calling it the Super Bowl because it was just a nice abbreviation. And that is how the Super Bowl came to be.

Pete Rozelle was a man of vision. He saw this Super Bowl as the greatest sporting event that would happen every year in the United States. This is going to rival the Kentucky Derby, the World Series, and it was going to be in January. So he wanted it always to be in a warm weather site where people would want to go that you could plan well ahead. When you think about it, baseball's World Series, you don't know where it's going to be until the final two teams are decided.

The NBA championship's the same way. Pete Rozelle also wanted to take advantage of any opportunity he had for public relations. All of the NFL championships up to that point had been one week after the end of the season. He wanted there to be two weeks so people would know about it.

He could promote it. And so Super Bowl week was born from his vision. They had very little time to get this together. In fact, tickets were $6, $10, and $12. And it wasn't a sellout.

There were 30,000 empty seats in the Coliseum for the first Super Bowl. But although they couldn't sell out in the stadium, NBC had been carrying the AFL games and CBS had been carrying the NFL games. They each paid the NFL a million dollars for this new content. So two of the three networks are promoting the hell out of Tune In to This Game. So the Green Bay Packers won the game. And the first Super Bowl was the most watched sporting event in the history of America up to that point. It was televised on both networks. Over 51 million viewers tuned in.

And that was the humble beginning, which really blossomed very quickly. The most recent Super Bowl halftime was viewed by 133 million people per minute. And that's far more than any entertainment show all year long.

And it wasn't always that way. The halftime shows started as, let's fill the field. We have a field that is 100 yards long, and let's turn it into a big variety show.

And let's have college bands marching all over and have floats come in. So it was very much G-rated and, you know, middle of the road. But that took a really sharp turn right after 1992. Fox Network had debuted, and they were trying to do anything they could to get folks to watch. And they had a great show called In Living Color that had Jamie Foxx. And they said to themselves, well, what if we tried to do a show at halftime on the Super Bowl and were promoted to get people away from this wishy-washy entertainment and have some fun, cutting-edge entertainment that we can offer them? So what Foxx did is, for weeks leading up to the Super Bowl, they said, at halftime of the Super Bowl, tune over to watch In Living Color.

We'll be live, we'll have fun, and we'll be joking about the Super Bowl. Well, 25 million viewers left the Super Bowl telecast to sample this Foxx show. And they had a countdown clock. The game was going to start at this point, so you can tune back. And the NFL, they blew their stat.

We cannot have this happen. We cannot have viewers tuning away from our premiere show to watch something else. So they set about getting the number one act for 1993, and they got Michael Jackson. It ended the era of people tuning away. And since 2012, it has been the highest-rated segment of the show. It's the biggest, most-watched entertainment event of the year. The halftime gets more viewers than any other event, any other entertainment show all year long. The Super Bowl has become a sports event that stands apart from all others. It's the most important advertising day of the year.

The economic impact on the United States is plus or minus $40 billion every year. It's the second largest food consumption day of the year. It's become winter's 4th of July. There are significant displays of patriotism, certainly. And sitting together, more people watch the Super Bowl than vote in presidential elections. There's this communal bonding around the Super Bowl that you don't get with other holidays. The Super Bowl has become America's secular holiday. And the rest, as they say, is history.

The story of the Super Bowl, the story of the halftime show, here on Our American Stories. Your dream getaway starts at the airport. With Amex Platinum, you get access to the Centurion Lounge where you can find space to send off that last work email, fill up on premium dining, and finally relax for up to three hours before takeoff.

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Make more of what's yours. The Chase mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply. J.P. Morgan, Chase Bank, N.A. Member FDIC. Copyright 2025, J.P. Morgan, Chase & Co. The wait is almost over. Get ready for the NFL season like never before with the highly anticipated 2025 NFL schedule release. Every rivalry, every rematch, every rookie debut, every game revealed. The dates will be set. Primetime matchups will be known, and the road to the Super Bowl starts here. The full NFL schedule release. Wednesday, May 14th.

Get all of the details at nfl.com slash schedule release. This episode is brought to you by Purina. This is Samantha from Stuff Mom Never Told You. May is National Pet Month. It's time to reimagine how you care for the cat you love. Petivity is powered by Purina and developed by pet experts. Petivity's smart litter box monitor and app track your cat's weight and litter box behavior, alerting you to changes you may not notice on your own, so you can act sooner if something is off. Shop the Petivity smart litter box monitor to try this game-changing technology. Petivity, powered by Purina.