NFL
The Green Bay Packers’ ‘forgotten’ three-peats
The Kansas City Chiefs are going for the first ever Super Bowl ‘three-peat,’ although the Packers have won three successive NFL championships twice before.
The 2024 NFL season gets underway on Thursday (5 September) with the opening game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Baltimore Ravens. Much of the preseason talk has centred around whether Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce and Co can further strengthen their dynasty by winning a third successive Super Bowl.
The Chiefs’ Super Bowl dynasty
The Chiefs had only won one championship in 60 years until 2019, when Mahomes led the team to the Super Bowl in just his second season as starting quarterback.
They were comfortably beaten by Tom Brady’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the showpiece game 12 months later, but secured their second and third rings against the Philadelphia Eagles and San Francisco 49ers in 2022 and 2023 respectively.
Kansas City are many people’s favourite to win a third championship in a row, a feat which has never been achieved before. At least not in the Super Bowl era...
What’s the closest a team has come to a Super Bowl three-peat?
The Chiefs are one of eight teams to have won back-to-back Super Bowls. The closest any team has come to a three-peat is losing either the AFC or NFC Championship game in the third season, which the Pittsburgh Steelers (1976), the 49ers (1990) and the Dallas Cowboys (1994) have all done.
And spare a thought for the Buffalo Bills, who lost four straight Super Bowls between 1991 and 1994.
Packers’ pre-Super Bowl successes
The Green Bay Packers, though, can claim to have done not one but two three-peats. But their achievements (or at least most of them) came before the Super Bowl era, which makes it difficult to compare them to current champions.
The National Football League (the current NFL) was known as the American Professional Football Association (APFA) up until 1922. Between 1921 and 1931, the APFA/NFL decided its champion by win-loss record rather than playoff games, as is the norm nowadays. The Packers won three straight championships under that system, between 1929 and 1931.
Green Bay one year away from Super Bowl three-peat
Green Bay were champions five more times between then and 1962, and then won another three straight championships between 1965 and 1967.
Before the merger between American Football League (AFL 1960-1970) and the NFL in 1970, the winners of the two leagues met four times, billed the AFL–NFL World Championship Game. It wasn’t until the 1968 season that the term Super Bowl was coined, although it was retrospectively applied to the 1966 and 1967 championship games.
That means the Packers are recognised as having won the two first Super Bowls, but their 1965 victory isn’t counted when it comes to Super Bowl ‘three-peats’.