The 30 Greatest Sports Conspiracy Theories of All-Time - Elliott Kalb [30]
Tuohy: So with Super Bowl III looming, and the juggernaut Baltimore Colts most likely to be the NFL’s representative in it, the owners knew that something had to be done to help legitimize the AFL. The solution? The AFL had to win that game. How to ensure that happens? Fix it.
Was it possible to get all the owners to agree to this? It wouldn’t [have been] necessary to do so (like a good CIA plan, only certain people might have been on that “need to know” basis), but I believe it was possible. Their football was also their business, and the owners were businessmen, first and foremost. If you want to get ultra-conspiratorial, two owners—Clint Murchison of the Cowboys and H.L. Hunt, father of Lamar Hunt of the Chiefs—have both been linked to the JFK assassination as financiers. NFL owners who weren’t crazy about the merger to begin with realized that they had reached the point of no return by year three. They couldn’t un-merge the leagues. The fail-safe point had been passed, and the owners had to not only make the merger work, but also make the expanded league both profitable and competitive.
Look at what might have happened had the Colts won Super Bowl III. Besides the obvious negative fan and media reactions, the new NFL would have faced serious internal strife. There was only one more year left on the existing TV deals that created what had become known as the Super Bowl. This “Super Bowl” might have died before it had a chance to fly. And realignment would have been horrific if teams had to become AFC teams to balance out the two new conferences.
Once motive has been established, you have to figure out how to fix a football game. First off, while the AFL team had to win the game, they didn’t have to be told of the plan. That may seem unnatural, but it takes half of the worry out of it. And I truly believe that the Jets didn’t know they were going to be given that game. I actually wonder if the Raiders laid down in the AFL Championship Game to let the Jets (the biggest market team in the AFL) with Joe Namath (the biggest star in the AFL) get into the Super Bowl to begin with.
EK: Sorry, Brian. No can do here. I know Al Davis, and I’m sure that he and his small staff at the time would have rather died a gruesome death than lay down and lose for the good of the merger. The Raiders probably were better than the Jets that year. Hell, the Raiders had a better record that year than the Jets, but played the AFL Title game in a cold, raw afternoon in New York because championship games alternated home sites by Eastern and Western champions, not by best records. Even at that, Namath needed to come from behind in the final minutes and did so, finding Don Maynard in the end zone for the game-winner. Trust me, the Raiders would have loved to have been the ones to give the NFL its comeuppance in Super Bowl III.
Tuohy: I don’t believe Namath’s famous “guarantee” was made with some foreknowledge of the game’s outcome. Having the Jets in on the fix would have made for some bad football. Two boxers can dance their way through a fight, but two football teams cannot.
So, the fix has to be made by convincing those on the Colts to lay down. The 1968 version of the team was one of the best in football history. That year, the Colts