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Joe Namath guaranteed the biggest upset in Super Bowl history

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The Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles will meet in the 59th Super Bowl on Sunday. Counting down to the NFL title game, AL.com is spotlighting a Super Bowl hero with Alabama football roots daily through Sunday. The series started Monday with Bart Starr and continues with Alabama alumnus Joe Namath:

After the NFL champion Green Bay Packers dominated the second half in each of the first two Super Bowls against their AFL opponent, hardly anyone seemed to see any reason the Baltimore Colts would not maintain the NFL’s superiority in third Super Bowl.

The Colts had lost once in 16 games on their way to the AFL-NFL World Championship Game and had avenged that 30-20 setback to Cleveland on Oct. 20, 1968, by beating the Browns 34-0 in the NFL Championship Game.

At 18 points, Baltimore remains the biggest favorite in Super Bowl history. But instead of a rout, Super Bowl III was a revelation.

The New York Jets beat the Colts 16-7 on Jan. 12, 1969, at the Orange Bowl in Miami – just as Joe Namath guaranteed they would three nights before.

“I try to explain that it wasn’t an arrogant line; it was an angry one,” Namath said almost 40 years after the game. “I was at the Miami Touchdown Club dinner at the Miami Springs Villa, and I was up at the mic, and someone yelled something nasty from the back, and I said, ‘Wait a minute, let’s hold on. You Baltimore guys have been talking all week, but I’ve got news for you, buddy: We’re going to win the game. I guarantee it.’”

Namath completed 17-of-28 passes for 206 yards with no touchdowns and no interceptions in Super Bowl III. He followed fellow Alabama alumnus Bart Starr as the winner of the Super Bowl MVP Award.

It was the second time that Namath had put the American Football League on the map. The day after his final game for the Crimson Tide, Namath signed a three-year, $427,000 contract with the New York Jets rather than join the St. Louis Cardinals, who had picked him at No. 12 in the 1965 NFL Draft. The highest-paid player in the NFL in the 1964 season had been Cleveland running back Jim Brown at $60,000. Namath’s contract was the most lucrative to that point in pro football history.

Four years later, Namath and Jets provided validation for the AFL – and for the coming merger of the two pro football leagues, a process that had been agreed upon in 1966.

Namath’s final pass in Super Bowl III went for a 39-yard completion to end George Sauer. It came on the next-to-last snap of the third quarter. With Jets leading 13-0, Namath, as New York’s play-caller, handed off 16 times in the fourth quarter without dropping back to pass once.

“We had a system called ‘check with me,’ which meant I called most of the plays at the line,” Namath told the Pro Football Hall of Fame. “We got in and out of the huddle in a hurry so I’d have more time to look things over. If you look at the films, you’ll see how many times I made a call, saw something and changed off. It looks like we’re up there over the ball forever, but that’s where we made our calls.

“Another thing you’ll notice is I kept my hands under center the whole time. I wanted to keep the pressure on the defense. I wanted them to think the ball could be snapped at any time. It was a subtle thing, but it was one more thing to keep them off-balance. If they had a blitz on, I’d see the linebackers and safeties edging up, trying to get a jump, getting frustrated.

“I felt we had an advantage because the Colts were in a Catch-22 situation. They had this defense that had killed the whole NFL that season. Why should they change for one game against a nineteen-point underdog? So I knew they were going to stick with the same fronts, the same coverages, the same blitzes. It was like having all the questions for an exam two weeks before you actually take it. By the time we played, I knew those guys inside out.”

Baltimore’s chances to live up to its billing were sidetracked by turnovers – four interceptions, including two in the end zone (one with the Colts on the Jets 6-yard line), and a fumble on the first snap of the second half – field goals missed from 27 and 46 yards and a failed fourth-down try at the New York 9 in the fourth quarter.

Namath never returned to the Super Bowl – and the Jets still haven’t. When Namath retired after the 1977 season, his average of 197.6 passing yards per game was the best in NFL history, and he entered the Pro Football Hall of Fame with the Class of 1985. Namath (and Roger Staubach, who was in the same class) joined when there were only 10 quarterbacks in the Pro Football Hall of Fame — Sammy Baugh, Bob Waterfield, Sid Luckman, Otto Graham, Bobby Layne, Norm Van Brocklin, Y.A. Tittle, Bart Starr, Johnny Unitas, George Blanda and Sonny Jurgensen.

In 2019, as part of its celebration of its centennial season, the NFL named Namath as the “greatest character” in league history.

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Mark Inabinett is a sports reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on X at @AMarkG1.