Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame the Baltimore Colts for Losing Super Bowl III

Earl Morrall, January 12, 1969

January 12, 1969, 50 years ago: The New York Jets win Super Bowl III, beating the Baltimore Colts 16-7 at the Orange Bowl in Miami, Florida. It is one of the most stunning upsets in the history of sports.

How could the Colts lose? Maybe the AFL wasn't vastly inferior to the NFL. Maybe the Jets were a very good team.

But the Colts had gone 13-1. They had played the NFL Championship Game away to the one team that had beaten them, the Cleveland Browns, and had not merely avenged that defeat, but had clobbered the Browns.

The Colts should have won the game. Why didn't they? Can they possibly not be blamed for losing?

Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame the Baltimore Colts for Losing Super Bowl III

First, a couple of reasons that didn't make the cut: The Best of the Rest.

The Green Bay Packers. In the 1960s, Vince Lombardi built what might have been the greatest team in football history. In a span of 8 seasons, they reached 6 NFL Championship Games, winning 5 of them, and then winning the 1st 2 Super Bowls.

The Packers had lulled the NFL into a false sense of superiority. It wasn't that the NFL was so much better than the AFL, it was that the Packers were so much better than the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl I and the Oakland Raiders in Super Bowl II.

Had the Packers lost either of those games -- or had they lost to the Dallas Cowboys in the NFL Championship Games, and the Cowboys had lost either of those Super Bowls -- the Jets' win over the Colts wouldn't have seemed so shocking.

Had the media of the time, and the Colts themselves, treated those 1st 2 Super Bowls as Packers wins, not NFL wins, they would have understood that maybe the Jets had a good chance after all.

The Weather. Putting the game in the neutral site of the Orange Bowl in Miami, a city known for its warm weather all year long, should have been an equalizer, giving both teams a good chance to play their best game. Although playing the game in a cold-weather city shouldn't have mattered: Both New York and Baltimore are Northeastern cities that get very cold in January.

Sure enough, at kickoff at 3:05 PM, the temperature was a nice 66 degrees, with a mostly overcast sky, and a wind of 12 miles per hour -- a wind that was noticeable, but not enough to wreak havoc with either team's passing game.

But at a key moment, the Sun broke through the clouds. This was in the 2nd quarter, when Jimmy Orr was wide open with a clear path to the end zone, and Earl Morrall didn't see him. Instead, he saw Willie Richardson, and his pass to Richardson was intercepted at the 2-yard line by Jim Hudson. Just like that, a great chance for the Colts was gone.

Had the clouds blocked the Sun for one more play, Morrall could have seen Orr, and, presuming Lou Michaels (who missed 2 field goal attempts in the 1st half) had successfully kicked the extra point, the game would have gone to halftime tied 7-7. The Colts would have had the momentum, and the ball to start the 2nd half. And you might be reading very different articles on this event today.

Now, the Top 5:

5. Broadway Joe. When Namath said, "There are 4 or 5 quarterbacks in the AFL that are better than Morrall," he wasn't just blowing smoke. There was himself, Len Dawson of Kansas City, Daryle Lamonica of Oakland, John Hadl of San Diego, and Jack Kemp of Buffalo.

In contrast, That season, with Unitas injured, how many of the NFL's 16 starting quarterbacks were as good as Namath was that year? Possibly Bart Starr of Green Bay, and maybe Sonny Jurgensen of Washington, and maybe John Brodie of San Francisco, and maybe Fran Tarkenton, then with the Giants. But not Morrall, not Joe Kapp of Minnesota (who got the Vikings into Super Bowl IV), not Roman Gabriel of Los Angeles, or anybody else.

4. The Guarantee. I don't think Namath understood the definition of the word "guarantee." Had the Jets lost, was he going to refund the ticket price for all 75,389 paying customers inside the stadium?

But that guarantee did 2 things: It boosted the Jets' confidence, and it got into the Colts' heads. It allowed the Colts to think, hey, maybe we can lose this game after all. Maybe that's all the Colts needed to actually lose it.

Maybe that means that, as Arsène Wenger (then a 19-year-old sweeper for his hometown team, FC Duttlenheim in Alsace, France) would later say, the Colts did not have "the mental strength." But, if Wenger were to ever watch the film of this game, he would admit that the Jets "had the quality" and that Namath was "a special guy."

3. The Jets' Defense. Trivia time: How many touchdown passes did Joe Namath throw in Super Bowl III? The answer is none. In fact, the Jets only scored 1 touchdown in the game. It was on a run by Matt Snell. All their other points were scored by Jim Turner: The extra point to that touchdown, and 3 field goals.

Here's another trivia question. How many teams have scored 16 or fewer points in the Super Bowl, and still won? Only 3 out of 52: The '68 Jets, the '72 Dolphins (with Earl Morrall as backup to starting quarterback Bob Griese), and the '74 Steelers. And, between them, those 3 teams allowed only 20 points. (UPDATE: Shortly after I posted this, Super Bowl LIII was won by the New England Patriots, 13-3.)

To put it another way: Of the 1st 52 Super Bowls, the losing teams in 27 of them scored more points than the Jets did in winning Super Bowl III.

Casual fans went nuts over Namath, but, in this rare case, the cliché was true: Defense wins championships. The Colts could have scored 2 touchdowns instead of the 1, and it still would have been 16-14 Jets, and still a tremendous upset.

The defensive coordinator was Walt Michaels, who would be the next Jet head coach to get them to an AFL or AFC Championship Game, in the 1982 season. His assistant on that '68-'69 Jet defense? Buddy Ryan, who would build the 1985 Chicago Bears into one of the best defenses ever, and whose son Rex Ryan would also get the Jets to an AFC Championship Game -- 2, in fact, in the 2009 and 2010 seasons.

But, like his father, Rex didn't understand that defense doesn't win championships all by itself. You gotta score, too. Who did understand that?

This guy.

2. Weeb Ewbank. He had coached the Colts to victory in the NFL Championship Game in 1958, and did so again in 1959. He was no wonder boy, as Don Shula of the Colts was at the time. He was what Shula would later become: And old master of the craft. By winning the AFL Championship Game over the Oakland Raiders, Weeb became the only coach to win an NFL title and in AFL title.

In an interview, Namath showed his Super Bowl ring. Weeb had insisted on two words being inscribed on the Jets' rings, one on each side, "POISE" and "EXECUTION." "Poise and execution" could have been his theme. He had a team with both when he had Unitas. He had a team with both when he had Namath 10 years later.

For all his flashiness, flamboyance and star quality, Broadway Joe was all business when he came onto the gridiron, and that made him Weeb Ewbank's kind of guy. Would Namath have come close to a Super Bowl with any other coach? Maybe. But, with Lombardi out of the picture at the moment, Ewbank was the best coach in the business.

Shula would eventually become one of the best -- in 1972 and '73, he was the best. In a career as an NFL head coach that lasted from 1963 to 1995, he won 347 games, more than anyone ever has. (The old record was 324, by George Halas, and that was over 40 seasons to Shula's 33.) Some of them were big games: After coaching 1 more season in Baltimore, he was fired, then was hired to coach the Miami Dolphins, and got them into 5 Super Bowls, and won 2 of them, VII and VIII.

Morrall and Shula. That looks like the arched "peristyle"

of the Los Angeles Coliseum in the background.

But he also lost a bunch of big games over the next 25 years. It's worth pointing out that they were usually against coaches at least on his level: Tom Landry in Dallas (Super Bowl VI), John Madden in Oakland (the AFC Divisional Playoff of 1970 and 1974), Chuck Noll in Pittsburgh (the 1979 AFC Divisional Playoff), Joe Gibbs in Washington (Super Bowl XVII), Bill Walsh in San Francisco (Super Bowl XIX).

Wilbur "Weeb" Ewbank, a fellow Ohioan with X's and O's in his DNA, was certainly on that level; Shula was on his way, but he wasn't there yet. He got outcoached, not for the first time, and certainly not for the last.

1. Johnny Unitas' Injury. When Johnny U, 35 years old, came on in the 2nd half for his 1st appearance of the season, and directed the Colts' touchdown drive, he showed that he still had it. Had he been able to play from the kickoff, it seems highly unlikely that Namath would have been able to outduel his idol.

Johnny Unitas and John Mackey

Super Bowl III would have been Unitas' masterstroke, making even his 1958 NFL Championship Game heroics look tame by comparison. And any pretensions by another quarterback -- be it Joe Montana, Tom Brady, or anyone else -- to the title of "The Greatest Quarterback of All Time" would be gone.

VERDICT: Not Guilty. Yes, the Colts played about as badly as any favored team has ever played in a postseason round in any sport. But the Jets should never have been 18-point underdogs. Underdogs? Yes. By nearly 3 touchdowns? No.

The Jets winning this game should have been a surprise. But not a big surprise. Certainly, not a shock. Like the Mets' World Series win 9 months later, and the U.S. hockey team's defeat of the Soviet team at the 1980 Winter Olympics, it was less of a "miracle" than it appeared at the time.