If We’re Going to Win One…
A legendary Bills upset comes with help from Joe Namath.
Super Bowl III is often cited as the greatest upset in NFL history. The first game to be officially called the Super Bowl (rather than the AFL-NFL World Championship Game), it pitted the NFL’s Baltimore Colts against the AFL’s New York Jets.
In each of the two previous seasons, the NFL champion Green Bay Packers easily handled their AFL opponent, beating the Kansas City Chiefs and Oakland Raiders by scores of 35–10 and 33–14, respectively. With the AFL not having led at any point in the first two games, the league was seen as far inferior to its much older counterpart.
The NFL would have likely been large favorites regardless of its representative, but the 1968 Colts were not an average champion — they were one of the strongest teams ever assembled.
Led by the NFL’s all-time winningest head coach in Don Shula, the Colts finished 13–1 and posted the 4th-best point differential in NFL or AFL history to that point (+258). A year after missing the postseason despite an 11–1–2 record, they had left no doubt.
In the NFL Championship Game, the Colts faced the Cleveland Browns, the only team to have beaten them in the regular season. Baltimore exacted their revenge 34–0.
The Jets had a strong regular season at 11–3 and similarly avenged one of those losses in the AFL Championship Game against the Raiders thanks to 3 pass TD from AFL Player of the Year Joe Namath. Still, they entered Super Bowl III as massive, 18-point underdogs to the Colts. It remains the second-largest spread in any playoff game in Stathead’s database (since 1952).
That didn’t matter to Namath, who publicly guaranteed a victory three days before the game and would later be named Super Bowl MVP after a 16–7 Jets triumph where Baltimore was held scoreless until the 3:19 mark in the 4th quarter.
To this day, people still refer to the Jets’ victory as the greatest upset in NFL history. The circumstances surrounding the game make that point difficult to argue, although the Giants’ win over the Patriots in Super Bowl XLII is certainly in the conversation.
Yet, by point spread, Super Bowl III wasn’t even the biggest upset in a Jets game that season.
It’s Week 4 of the 1968 AFL season and the Buffalo Bills are in absolute shambles. After winning back-to-back AFL titles in 1964 and 1965 and reaching a third-straight league championship game in 1966, what had been a dominant franchise took an immediate nosedive.
The Bills entered 1967 with hopes of winning the AFL once again and playing for a world championship. Instead, they finished 4–10, and starting quarterback Jack Kemp ended up on the broadcast team for the Packers’ win over the Raiders in what is now called Super Bowl II.
That was only the beginning. After the Bills lost 37–7 to the Oilers in a 1968 preseason game, head coach Joe Collier tried to toughen up his team with a 40-play scrimmage. Instead, Kemp suffered torn ligaments in his right knee that forced him to miss the season.
With veteran backup Tom Flores also dealing with a shoulder injury, this meant that rookie 13th-round pick Dan Darragh would begin the year as the Bills’ quarterback.
The Bills opened the 1968 AFL season with a 16–7 loss to the Patriots and followed it up with an embarrassing 48–6 defeat to the Raiders that still ranks among the five worst losses in team history and the franchise’s only game with negative passing yards (-19).
Collier was then fired and replaced by the team’s director of player personnel, Harvey Johnson. In Johnson’s first game at the helm, Buffalo threw a pair of second-half pick-sixes and fell 34–23 to the expansion Bengals, who would go just 3–11 in their debut season.
Through three games, the Bills had been outscored 98–36 and were being led by an interim head coach and an unheralded rookie quarterback.
Next up on the schedule were the 2–0 Jets, the only remaining undefeated team in the AFL East.
New York opened the year by handing the Chiefs what would be their only home loss of the season. That victory only looked more impressive as Kansas City bounced back by winning their next two games by a combined 82–5.
The Jets then hung 47 points on the Patriots in their second contest before heading to Buffalo for a third-straight road game to begin the year.
It was a matchup between a team with title hopes and a team that looked completely hopeless. Vegas agreed, and the Jets entered the game as 19-point favorites, a remarkable spread considering where the game was played.
Since 1952, visitors have only been favored by 19 points or more 15 times. It hasn’t happened at all since the 49ers were listed at -23 against the Falcons in 1987.
The road team won in each of the other 14 contests by an appropriate average of 19.5 PPG, but this one went a little differently.
Joe Namath was the real story of the game, as most of its points came from his passes one way or another. After Earl Christy returned the opening kickoff 87 yards for the Jets, Namath threw a TD pass to George Sauer on the third play from scrimmage.
Early in the second quarter, with the Bills now leading 10–7, Namath got on the other side of the board, as his pass to the end zone was intercepted by Buffalo’s Tom Janik (already his second pick of the day) and returned 100 yards for a score that made it 17–7.
By halftime, the Jets had regained a 21–20 lead following a 55-yard TD pass from Namath to Don Maynard, who would become the AFL/NFL’s all-time receiving yards leader later in the season and hold that mark until 1986.
A Namath fumble set up a Buffalo field goal to retake a 23–21 lead. Then, early in the fourth quarter, Namath threw pick-sixes on consecutive drives that ballooned the deficit to 37–21.
In doing so, the man who later in the season would win both AP AFL Player of the Year and Super Bowl III MVP became the first player to throw three pick-sixes in a game.
Yet, his day was somehow still far from over. Namath would add two more pass TD and a fifth interception before the Jets eventually fell 37–35
We’re going to take a moment to review Namath’s ridiculous performance. He threw for 280 yards and four scores while the Bills returned his interceptions for 235 yards and three scores.
While there have now been four players to throw three pick-sixes in a game, Namath is unique as the others only combined to throw a single TD pass in their outings.
Namath is one of 12 players to ever throw at least seven combined pass TD and pick-sixes in a game, and the only one to do so with multiple pick-sixes. However, Drew Brees still holds the crown in this category.
If we look at combined pass TD and INT in a game, Namath is tied for the known record.
It wasn’t quite as eventful a day for Bills starter Dan Darragh, who went 8–18 for 79 yards with 1 INT and a lost fumble in the midst of what I labeled in my book as one of the worst QB seasons in NFL history.
Yet, it was still good enough for what would be his only career win as a starter, despite the Bills being outgained by 230 yards, their worst such differential in a win until 2006.
The Jets became the only team on record to lose a road game when favored by at least 19 points, and incredibly, of the five AFL games played that week, they were the only road team to lose.
Following their Week 4 encounter, the teams went in completely opposite directions. The Jets lost just two more games on their way to the Super Bowl, although one of them happened to come as 19-point home favorites against the Broncos just two weeks later. This gives them two of the six largest upset losses since 1952 in a span of just three games.
Meanwhile, the Bills ended the season 1–12–1, joining the 1962 Raiders (1–13) as the only teams in AFL history to finish with just one win. Since the NFL standardized its schedule in the mid-1930s, they are the only team to record their sole victory of a season against the eventual league champions.
If you’re going to win just one all season long, that has to be the best way to do it. The 1968 Bills have transitive property supremacy, and no one can take that away from them.
The Jets and Bills did meet again in Week 9, five weeks after their initial encounter. Even though they had lost as 19-point favorites both the first time around and in a separate game since that day, New York was nevertheless favored by 20 points at home.
If we’re counting, Super Bowl III now had just the fourth-largest spread in a 1968 Jets game (and was the third-largest upset.)
There would be no second miracle for the Bills, but the game was again closer than anyone would have guessed. A pair of touchdowns early in the 4th quarter gave Buffalo a 21–19 advantage, but two late field goals from Jim Turner meant the Jets survived to win 25–21.
Turner was the hero of the day, making six of his AFL-record eight field goal attempts. The Jets finished with just one touchdown — it came on a pick-six.
I think it’s safe to say that Joe Namath probably enjoyed that.
Research for this story was primarily conducted using Pro Football Reference and Stathead. Additional sourcing comes from the NYT TimesMachine and episodes of “This Week in the AFL” from 1968 reposted to YouTube.
