INTO THIN AIR, Part I: Why It’s (Nearly) Impossible to Win Three Straight Super Bowls
INTO THIN AIR, Part I: Why It’s (Nearly) Impossible to Win Three Straight Super Bowls
Michael MacCambridge, one of the nation's greatest football writers, authors this three-part series on the treacherous pursuit of three straight Super Bowl titles. Can the Chiefs pull it off in 2024?
Editor’s note: We welcome one of the nation’s best pro football writers for this three-part series. Michael MacCambridge chats at length with several of the greatest players, coaches and execs ever to see why it’s so unbelievably difficult to win three Super Bowls in a row.
Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs will give it their best shot in 2024… but it’s a mountain to climb.
Enjoy.
By Michael MacCambridge
I | THE CHALLENGE
Forty-three years after hanging up his helmet for the final time, Joe Greene still moves with a quiet authority. He is no longer the fully chiseled 6-foot-4 and 275 pounds of muscle — some contents may settle during shipping — but he continues to exude a formidable presence. You can sense him entering a room. To see his stately gait and his weathered hands, one can easily envision the country-strong force of nature that he was during the heyday of one of pro football’s great dynasties.
For much of the 1970s, Greene and the Pittsburgh Steelers were the standard, the empire, the dream-killers. The Steelers’ dominance directly altered the franchise histories of the Baltimore Colts and Oakland Raiders, the Dallas Cowboys and the Houston Oilers. Contenders would enter Steeler showdowns full of swagger and attitude, and leave thoroughly defeated. The Raiders’ John Madden, after the 1974 AFC Championship Game, could only say of Greene and the Steelers, “They beat our butts.”
The Steelers won four Super Bowls in six seasons — back-to-back titles in 1974 and 1975, and again in 1978 and 1979, the only team ever to do it twice. Greene looks back on those days with a justifiable measure of pride. But now the subject at hand — the one challenge that eluded the Steelers and every other team that encountered it — sends him into regretful lament.
Sitting in his trophy room in a gated community in north suburban Texas, the heart and soul of the “Steel Curtain” defense grows contemplative as he ponders the physical, emotional and psychological toll of trying to win three straight Super Bowls. He vividly recalls a moment from nearly half a century ago that sticks with him as much as any of his triumphs. And as he begins to address the subject, Greene sighs—and for an instant he looks every bit of his 77 years.
“I missed the tackle in the fourth quarter on the stunt,” he says softly. “I came around to hit Ken Stabler, and if I'd have made that tackle the game was over. Stabler ducked and completed a pass for a first down.”
Left unsaid was what followed. It was a single play in the first game of the 1976 season, but it was part of a team-wide breakdown that saw the Steelers squander a 14-point fourth-quarter lead to the Raiders, piercing their aura of invincibility in the process. Three and a half months later, Pittsburgh’s quest to win three straight Super Bowls would end on the same field. Greene remembers the glory of the four Super Bowl wins and the long road to each, but decades later, he’s still rankled by the one that got away.
A fact that you have heard often, and will hear more frequently in the coming weeks and months: The Kansas City Chiefs this season will endeavor to become the first team to win three straight Super Bowls. It’s not merely that the elusive three-peat hasn’t been done before; no one’s come close, leading some to believe that it’s virtually undoable, now more so than ever. In the 58 years of the Super Bowl era, eight teams prior to the Chiefs won back-to-back Super Bowls. None of them got back to the Super Bowl the next season; only three got as far as the conference championship game.
Beyond the immediate challenge, the Chiefs’ quest sheds light on a profound if rarely-discussed fact: It’s objectively more difficult to build a dynasty in the NFL than any other major professional sports league. And it always has been.
Since the Super Bowl era began in the 1966 season, every other major American sport has witnessed multiple three-peats — teams winning a league title for three years running or more. The NBA in the ’60s saw the conclusion of the Boston Celtics dominant run of eight straight titles, and later witnessed back-to-back-to-back championships twice from the Michael Jordan-led Chicago Bulls (’91-’93, ’96-’98) and once from the Los Angeles Lakers in the post-Jordan aftermath (2000-2002). Major League Baseball has seen a pair of three-peats: the Oakland A’s from 1972-’75 and the New York Yankees from 1998-2000. The NHL has seen two different teams run off a string of four consecutive titles — the Montreal Canadiens (’76-’79) and the New York Islanders (’80-’83).
But since the inception of the Super Bowl at the end of the 1966 season, it has yet to happen in the NFL.
Why is it so much harder to win three straight in the NFL? What happened to the eight predecessors of the Chiefs in the Super Bowl era? Can any lessons be learned from the experiences of those teams that might provide insight into Kansas City’s epic quest in the season ahead? A summer spent talking with former players, coaches and administrators cast some light on those questions, and underscores one incontrovertible truth: The NFL is constructed to avoid long runs by one dominant team. The same elements that offer hope to every one of the league’s 32 fan bases — the draft, free agency, the salary cap and salary floor, the scheduling system and playoff structure — encourage competitive balance and make it difficult to dominate for long stretches. The National Football League is an anti-dynasty machine.
And yet here we are.