NFL History | Miami Orange Bowl Site — Four Months Later, Three Clubs Changed Conference

The merger was already settled when the two leagues met here. What was not settled was the shape of the league that would come out of it.

The stadium was a federal public works project. The Public Works Administration built it in 1936–1937 as Roddey Burdine Stadium; Clio dates the groundbreaking to 1936 and the opening to late 1937. It was renamed the Miami Orange Bowl in 1959, demolished in 2008, and the Miami Marlins' ballpark now stands on the ground.

On 12 January 1969 the New York Jets of the American Football League beat the Baltimore Colts 16–7 in the third AFL–NFL championship game, numbered Super Bowl III in the league's retrospective count. Baltimore had been favoured by somewhere between seventeen and a half and twenty points, depending on the account. The Jets put the attendance at 75,377; other accounts print 75,389.

Three nights before the game, at the Touchdown Club of Miami's awards dinner, Joe Namath answered a heckler by saying the Jets would win and that he would guarantee it. The wording is not settled — the Jets' own account and the Pro Football Hall of Fame's print two different sentences — which is why it appears here without quotation marks. He completed 17 of 28 passes for 206 yards and was the game's most valuable player.

None of this created the merger. The two leagues had agreed to combine in June 1966, and Congress had made that lawful by amending the Sports Broadcasting Act the same year. The problem left over was arithmetic: sixteen established clubs against ten from the newer league do not make two equal halves.

On 17 May 1969, four months after this game, Baltimore, Cleveland and Pittsburgh agreed to join the ten American Football League clubs in what became the American Football Conference. Baltimore, the club beaten in this stadium, was one of the three that crossed.

Whether the crossing followed from the result is an interpretation, and this entry does not make it. The sequence is the fact.

Coordinates 25.778050, -80.219808, from Wikidata's entity for the demolished stadium. OpenStreetMap's way for the ballpark now on the site sits 26 m away, which is what establishes the two as the same ground rather than neighbours. The US Census geocoder places the old postal address, 1501 NW 3rd Street, 192 m south. Precision ±60 m.

Cover: *Miami Orange Bowl (Super Bowl V)*, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons, photographed 17 January 1971. It shows the stadium on the game day of the fifth Super Bowl, two years after the game described here.