Super Bowl 0 - What if?

[Jay Z]

One thing that hurt the AFL in its early years was the weaker situations in Denver, New York, and Oakland. Since the AFL wasn't raiding the NFL veterans, no one should expect the 1960 AFL to be of equal strength. The falloff perhaps wasn't as bad because I think all sports had seen a postwar expansion in available talent; Unitas wasn't the only one to fall through the cracks in the second half of the 1950s.

So the veteran base isn't going to be the same, but average player's career only lasts 4 years, you're effectively turning over a lot of roster in 4 years. The AFL having weaker rosters to start with arguably ought to have more rookies making the teams and contributing. But until Oakland, New York, and Denver got shored up, the league as a whole was a bit behind the NFL in bringing in top rookie talent. I think in 1963 this was still something of an issue.

[ShinobiMusashi]

Count me as somebody that doesn't believe any AFL team stood a chance against NFL Champions pre-Super Bowl. The 66 Chiefs to me were better than any AFL Champion before them and look how they did in Super Bowl I(same for 67 Raiders in II, who were even better than the previous year's Chiefs and somehow lost even worse to an older more tired/beat up Packer team). I'm sure the 63 matchup would have been the closest, the Chargers were a bigger stronger football team than the Bears, but the Bears had a far more advanced and smarter/tighter defense. Looking at some of the AFL teams that beat San Diego in 63 I just can't picture them beating Chicago. Also as much as I want to say the 64 Bills would have made a game against 64 Browns it's the coaching matchup that is glaring to me, I believe that would have been very similar game to Super Bowl I where Buffalo keeps it close in first quarter before Browns would have ran away with it on turnovers.

The last 2 years of AFL 68-69 were something else though. It was an iron sharpens iron effect going on with Jets, Raiders, Chiefs, coaches copying each other's ideas and making them better, the competition between those 3 teams reached a point where whoever came out of that was too tough for the NFL champion to deal with those years.

My hottest take as a fan of old school football and what I've learned about the AFL vs NFL in the 60's is I truly believe had the merger not happened and they kept competing against each other through the 70's the AFL would have passed the NFL up and possibly even put them out of business depending on how the NFL reacted to it and what decisions that would have led to them making(most likely them shooting themselves in the foot trying to catch up), similar to a Myspace to Facebook type effect in public consciousness. I know that seems absurd but I don't think it was too far fetched and could have easily been a real possibility had things went different(could have been a snowball effect type of deal where one break here and there in AFL's favor turned into an avalanche series of events where the NFL started to fail).

[Ten Minute Ticker]

My hottest take as a fan of old school football and what I've learned about the AFL vs NFL in the 60's is I truly believe had the merger not happened and they kept competing against each other through the 70's the AFL would have passed the NFL up and possibly even put them out of business depending on how the NFL reacted to it and what decisions that would have led to them making(most likely them shooting themselves in the foot trying to catch up), similar to a Myspace to Facebook type effect in public consciousness. I know that seems absurd but I don't think it was too far fetched and could have easily been a real possibility had things went different(could have been a snowball effect type of deal where one break here and there in AFL's favor turned into an avalanche series of events where the NFL started to fail).

Disagree. And I’ve always disagreed with the premise that the AFL reached parity with the NFL at the merger.

The AFL undoubtedly made progress as it went along and winning two Super Bowls altered its perception forever.

But two games does not parity make even if some like to make it so. The truth, and it was proven on the field particularly in 1970 and a bit in 1971 too, is that the AFL teams were really behind when the merger took place.

First? Remove the Bengals and Dolphins from the equation. They both built through a common draft and aren’t analogous to the other AFL teams. Without the merger, who knows which of the post-1965 franchises would exist or which league they would have been in without the merger? If the NFL is on war footing, maybe they’re more aggressive about expansion? Maybe the AFL is too?

Among the original eight AFL teams, only the Raiders and Chiefs had winning seasons in 1970. The other six were abysmal upon joining the NFL and the Chiefs faded into that status too by the mid 1970s. Among the other six, the first winning NFL seasons were as follows: Bills (1973), Broncos (1973), Patriots (1974), Oilers (1975), Chargers (1978) and Jets (1981).

Off the field, the AFL never really had to confront labor issues. How would that have gone in the 70s? The TV contract would have been interesting both for the AFL and NFL in the 70s. The NFL still dominated the major TV markets after all. Would the AFL moved into Chicago, Philly, Detroit, et al, to try to directly compete?

If the two leagues remained on war footing, who had the deeper pockets to sustain it? Probably neither to be honest.

I just don’t see a scenario where the AFL moves past the NFL if they stayed apart. I think they both would’ve been weaker apart.

[Brian wolf]

Though not as experienced and established as the NFL ... the AFL had deeper pockets and would have bled out the NFL had the merger not happened. Led by Al Davis, the AFL was ready to sign major NFL players and they knew the NFL teams werent going to keep them. Some, like John Brodie and Jim Ninowski got paid for years after the merger agreement.

In 1967, former Brown, Bernie Parrish, tried to persuade players from both leagues to form a more powerful union independent from the NFLPA--who basically took whatever scraps the owners gave them--with support from the International Brotherhood Of Teamsters, but the players shot it down, declaring the NFLPA as its own union but didnt try to collectively bargain with the NFL, which might have happened alot quicker without the merger fortifying the NFL's position.