Why is it called the Super Bowl? AFL's Lamar Hunt, child's toy sparked NFL championship name
The world's most popular sporting event is here, as the San Francisco 49ers and and Kansas City Chiefs prepare to meet in the 2024 Super Bowl on Sunday, Feb. 11.
This year's Super Bowl is the 58th iteration in NFL history, and the first one to take place in Las Vegas. The game will be played at Allegiant Stadium, home of the Las Vegas Raiders.
The Chiefs, led by quarterback Patrick Mahomes, are aiming to become not only the first team to win back-to-back Super Bowls since New England in 2003-04, but also win their third Super Bowl in the last five seasons. Meanwhile, the 49ers — who defeated Detroit to clinch a Super Bowl berth — are looking for their first Super Bowl win since 1994.
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The NFL championship game has been called the Super Bowl since 1969, the third year of the annual championship game between the winner of the AFL and NFL professional football leagues, which later merged before the 1970 season to create what is now the NFL.
Why is the NFL championship called the Super Bowl? Here's why:
Why is it called the Super Bowl?
While the name seems pretty self-explanatory given the nature of the world's biggest football game, that wasn't always the case. Its origins are actually much less grandiose, and stem from a child's toy.
According to Michael MacCambridge's book, "America's Game," the Super Bowl's name stems from Lamar Hunt, the founder of the AFL. Ahead of the 1966 NFL season, Hunt — who also owned the Kansas City Chiefs — wrote a letter to then-NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle, inquiring whether his NFL champion would be willing to face the AFL champion after the former league's season had concluded.
Hunt had jokingly called the AFL-NFL Championship Game the Super Bowl, noting at the time that it was a name "which obviously can be improved upon." He later acknowledged that name likely popped in his head because his children had been playing with a "Super Ball" toy.
"If possible, I believe we should 'coin a phrase' for the Championship Game," Hunt reportedly wrote Rozelle, "I have kiddingly called it the 'Super Bowl,' which obviously can be improved upon."
Hunt's version of naming the Super Bowl is slightly different. In a 1986 op-ed for The New York Times titled, "Naming the Game," Hunt suggested the moniker was given almost on accident during a 1966 joint committee meeting as details were finalized for the postseason game.
"Then one day, the words flowed something like this: 'No, not those games — the one I mean is the final game — you know, the Super Bowl.'
In his telling, Hunt said the response to his name was "less than underwhelming," and that "we were really more interested in when the room service lunch would come." Still, he confirmed that the name's origin did in fact have its roots in a similarly named children's toy.
"I do not recall any predetermined thought relative to this rather unhistoric moment," Hunt wrote for the Times. "My own feeling is that it probably registered in my head because my daughter, Sharron, and my son, Lamar Jr., (ages 8 and 10) had a children's toy called a Super Ball and I probably interchanged the phonetics of 'bowl' and 'ball.'"
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Who won the first Super Bowl?
Technically, the first winner of the Super Bowl was the AFL's New York Jets, who — led by quarterback Joe Namath — shocked the heavily favored Baltimore Corts 17-6 in the 1969 championship game. (It was retroactively dubbed Super Bowl 3).
The first two championship games between the AFL and NFL in 1967 and 1968 were officially titled "The AFL-NFL World Championship Game," although the game already was being referenced by many as the "Super Bowl" — even before the game officially took on the moniker in 1969.
When is the Super Bowl in 2024?
The Super Bowl has been played on the second weekend of February since 2022, after the NFL extended the regular season another week. From 2004-21, the Super Bowl was played on the first weekend of the month.
This season, the Super Bowl kicks off at 6:30 p.m. ET on Sunday, Feb. 11, from Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Super Bowl name, explained: How NFL championship name derived from toy
