The National Football League has got a major problem in one of their major markets. Football in New York with both the Giants and Jets is at an all time low.
And that is saying a lot, because there have been a lot of lows for these two long-suffering franchises.
It wasn’t always that way.
The Jets won professional football one of their most important games in Super Bowl III. The NFL had negotiated a merger with the upstart American Football League, and they were set to begin play as one league in 1970. The formation of two conferences with three divisions in each one required three NFL teams move over to the newly established American Football Conference. Those three teams were the Baltimore Colts, Pittsburgh Steelers and Cleveland Browns.
There was little debate that the NFL had more talent and that appraisal was verified when the two leagues, the NFL and AFL, met in a head-to-head championship game to complete the 1966 season. In that first game between the two leagues, before it was even dubbed the Super Bowl, the Green Bay Packers blew out the Kansas City Chiefs. Same result in the second of these head-to-head contests between the soon-to-be merged leagues when Vince Lombardi’s Packers dominated the overmatched Oakland Raiders.
While the merger of the two leagues was going to be completed for the 1970 season, the powers to be did not want to go into the 1970 season with either the perception or reality that the American Football Conference was inferior. That was the case until the New York Jets pulled off the biggest upset in NFL history with a win over the 19-point favored Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. The following season, 1969, the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Minnesota Vikings in the Super Bowl, and the 1970 merger now had two conferences that had each won a pair of titles when the two competing leagues had head-to-head battles.