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CONCLUSION:

#6

AFL gains credibility with victory in Super Bowl III

One of the leading sports conspiracists, Brian Tuohy, gives us his version of the conspiracy theory that Super Bowl III was a fixed game. I talked to Brian about his theory and present it here as it was recorded.

Brian Tuohy: In my mind, the two questions one has to ask when talking about the Super Bowl III conspiracy are not “if” and “how could” but “why” and “how easily” it was fixed. In fact, the “why” is barely a question at all.

The AFL was a young league in 1968, not even ten years in existence, when finances forced the two leagues to make the deal to merge. Even though the AFL/NFL merger was a done deal prior to Super Bowl III, questions remained—not only in the fans’ minds, but in some of the players’ and owners’ minds as well—about what kind of competition the AFL really offered the NFL.

EK: By the mid-1960s, the war between the leagues was getting out of hand. According to author and historian Jeff Davis, the stakes were so high for coveted draft picks that the two leagues kept moving their drafts up earlier and earlier, and both leagues employed babysitters to stash away their draftees, often at out-of-the-way locations and incommunicado, to keep them out of contact with the teams from the rival league that had also drafted them. Don Weiss, who worked in the NFL offices in 1965 and who later became the executive director of the league, said “they were dubbed babysitters, but body snatchers would have been just as appropriate.” Even though television revenues went up for both leagues, most of the money was being spent on securing good players.

As for the kind of competition the AFL offered, maybe the NFL wolves were only as strong as the Pack (excuse the pun). Even though the Packers won the first two Super Bowls convincingly, the first game was only 14-10 at halftime. The Packers defeated the Raiders by nineteen points in Super Bowl II, but they had also beaten the Los Angeles Rams (11-1-2 during the season) by twenty-one points in the playoffs a few weeks earlier.

Tuohy: To put a modern spin on it, think about what might have happened if the XFL managed to make it through that first year, and then started to sign some of the bigger talent coming out of college, and by doing so, make a name for itself as a true rival league to the NFL. How would modern-day fans have taken to an XFL/NFL merger? Would they have accepted it?

EK: I only wish the XFL had made it past their initial season. I’m all for choice, for opportunity, for additional jobs, and excitement. But a better example, Brian, would be the USFL; a league that actually did compete with the NFL for the top college players in the 1980s. I wonder what would have happened if that league had deeper pockets, or had been awarded millions in their lawsuit against the NFL. I do believe that a certain few teams would likely have merged into the league, with the rest folding—similar to when four ABA teams merged into the NBA in the mid-1970s. I guess what you’re saying is that you were afraid that unless the ten AFL teams provided real competition for the sixteen NFL teams, the merger would fall apart, with only some of the teams surviving to join the NFL; and that without competitive championship games, the popularity of the new combined league would wane.

Tuohy: The first Super Bowl (then called the NFL-AFL Championship Game) was really an after-thought of the merger. Even the owners didn’t take that first game very seriously. But when Super Bowl II came, with the NFL team again winning big, all the owners came to realize the significance of their proposed 1970 merger. Would the deal they fought so hard to make die in front of football fans every Sunday on national television?

EK: Sorry to disagree, but the fact that the leagues would play a world championship game following the 1966 season was one of the key points of the merger; along with the fact that Pete