With another Super Bowl soon upon us, I’ve decided to break open the forty-disc DVD set I bought off eBay a little while back of the NFL Network’s “America’s Game: The Super Bowl Champions” documentary series that originally ran from November 2006 through April 2007 (which covered the first forty Super Bowls), and then with new episodes airing annually after that spotlighting of the following year’s winners. (Super Bowls 41 and up are not in this DVD set. From what I can tell, of the annual special episodes only the Super Bowl 45 Green Bay Packers episode has been released on DVD).
I’m watching these in the order the games were played (not the order originally aired*). So far over the last couple days I’ve watched the 1966 Green Bay Packers (Super Bowl I), 1967 Green Bay Packers (Super Bowl II), 1968 New York Jets (Super Bowl III), and 1969 Kansas City Chiefs (Super Bowl IV).
Highlights of these episodes for me have included watching about Vince Lombardi’s last two years coaching the Packers. The famous “Ice Bowl” NFL Championship Game of 1967 between the Cowboys and the Packers. Joe Namath and sudden rise to fame with the Jets (and how his partying lifestyle off the field and inconsistent play caused friction within the team). The infamous “Heidi Game” in 1968 where with sixty-five minutes left in a critical game between the Jets and the Raiders, the Jets leading, NBC switched away from the game at 7:00 pm Eastern on the east coast to air the movie “Heidi”, causing the Jets fans at home and viewers all along the eastern seaboard to miss the Raiders come-from-behind win over the Jets, the Raiders scoring two touchdowns in like eleven seconds. And the Chiefs winning not only the last Super Bowl of the 1960s but also what proved to be the last one pairing the champions of the separate National Football League and American Football League against each other. (The following year, the NFL and AFL merged, the NFL teams becoming the National Football Conference, the AFL teams becoming the American Football Conference, and the subsequent Super Bowls pitting the two conference champions against each other.)
(* The NFL Network aired the first twenty episodes from November 2006 to February 2007 in a countdown order of their top twenty ranked Super Bowl championship teams as determined by a 53-person “Blue Ribbon” panel. They followed that with the remaining non-ranked Super Bowl champions episodes aired in a seemingly random order from February 2007 to April 2007.)
The four episodes I’ve watched so far—or rewatched; I watched many of these back when they first aired—originally aired on:
December 8, 2006 - Super Bowl IV Kansas City Chiefs (ranked #18)
January 30, 2007 - Super Bowl I Green Bay Packers (ranked #6)
April 2, 2007 - Super Bowl III New York Jets
April 16, 2007 - Super Bowl II Green Bay Packers
—David Young