AWC is still at the Super Bowl, although they didn’t call it that when the Green Bay Packers and Kansas City Chiefs met in Los Angeles 48 years ago on January 15, 1967. It was the first time the champions of the two major football leagues had met to finish the season, and the name was still being hammered out. It was officially called the NFL-AFL World Championship Game, which doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

The Packers represented the old guard NFL, which was reluctantly accepting a merger with the upstart AFL, which it had been unable to squash. Both leagues wanted to win a share of pride in the new championship game, and on the first go-around, tradition beat innovation. With Vince Lombardi on the sidelines and Bart Starr under center, the Packers easily handled the Chiefs 35-10.

Off the field, the stadium was less than two-thirds full (plenty of empty seats in this shot), and college marching bands were the halftime entertainment. All in all, it was an inauspicious start for what would become America’s unofficial national holiday. The Packers won the next year’s game too, and it looked like the upstart AFL was in over its head against the NFL’s traditional powers.

Within two years, two big changes occurred. First, the name. Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt had been jokingly calling the new game the Super Bowl, riffing on college football’s bowl game tradition. He claimed he probably got the idea from watching his kids play with a Super Ball, and said he was sure the name could be improved. The leagues disagreed, and by 1969 it was official.

The second big change in 1969 was that the AFL started coming to play. The Packer dynasty had faded by then, and the New York Jets shocked the world with a win in Super Bowl III. The Chiefs won the last pre-merger Super Bowl the next year, and by the 1970 season, there was no question the absorbed AFL teams would be able to compete within the new, expanded NFL.

The hype around the game continued to grow. TV spots grew more expensive, halftime shows became more elaborate, and today even a dud of a game can set viewing records. (Seattle had wrapped up last year’s laugher by the third quarter, but it still drew 111 million viewers, making it the most-watched American telecast of all time.)

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