Super Bowl Teams 2019

In 2019, Super Bowl LIII will take place at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, home of the Atlanta Falcons. This is the first Super Bowl hosted at the stadium, which opened in 2017, but this is the third Super Bowl that has been played in Atlanta. The Cowboys beat the Bills in the Georgia Dome in 1994 Super Bowl XXVIII. The Rams topped the Titans in 2000 in Super Bowl XXXIV.

This season's AFC Championship game was the New England Patriots versus the Kansas City Chiefs with the Pats coming out on top in overtime.

The NFC Championship game pitted the Los Angeles Rams against the New Orleans Saints in another overtime game where the Rams triumphed.

This year's Super Bowl is a rematch of Super Bowl XXXVI, in which the Patriots, led by second-year head coach Bill Belichick and backup quarterback Tom Brady, defeated the heavily favored Rams, who played in St. Louis at the time, on a last-second field goal.

Click each the team names on this post for origin stories on all these football teams.

Los Angeles Rams

The Los Angeles Rams are a professional American football team based in the Los Angeles metropolitan area and play their home games at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The Rams compete in the National Football League (NFL), as a member club of the league's National Football Conference (NFC) West division.



The franchise began in 1936 as the Cleveland Rams, located in Cleveland, Ohio. The team was founded by Ohio attorney Homer Marshman and player-coach Damon Wetzel, a former Ohio State star who also played briefly for the Chicago Bears and Pittsburgh Pirates.  The team's name choice - which sounds like it might be a team from a mountainous location rather than Cleveland - was rather arbitrary. Wetzel, who served as general manager, selected the "Rams", because his favorite college football team was the Fordham Rams from Fordham University, though Marshman also liked the name choice.

That team was part of the newly formed American Football League and finished the 1936 regular season in second place behind the league champion Boston Shamrocks.

After winning the 1945 NFL Championship Game, the franchise moved to Los Angeles, California in 1946, making way for the Cleveland Browns of the All-America Football Conference, and becoming the only NFL championship team to play the following season in another city.



The team made another move after the 1994 NFL season, leaving California and relocating in St. Louis, Missouri.

Five seasons after relocating, the team won Super Bowl XXXIV in a 23–16 victory over the Tennessee Titans. They appeared again in Super Bowl XXXVI, where they lost 20–17 to the New England Patriots.



At the end of the 2015 NFL season, the team filed notice with the NFL of its intent to move yet again. pursue a relocation back to Los Angeles. The move was approved by owners, and in January 2016 the Rams returned to Los Angeles for the 2016 NFL season.






The Rams franchise has won three NFL championships and is the only franchise to win championships while representing three different cities (Cleveland in 1945, Los Angeles in 1951, and St. Louis in 1999).

Atlanta Falcons

The Atlanta Falcons franchise began on June 30, 1965, when the NFL granted ownership to Rankin Smith Sr. who paid $8.5 million, the highest price in NFL history at the time for a franchise.

The Atlanta team received its nickname in August when Julia Elliott was selected from many people who suggested "Falcons" as the nickname for the new franchise. She wrote: "the Falcon is proud and dignified, with great courage and fight. It never drops its prey. It is deadly and has a great sporting tradition."

But professional football first came to Atlanta in 1962, when the American Football League (AFL) staged two preseason contests, and in 1964 when  the AFL held another exhibition game. In 1965, after the Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium (then known simply as Atlanta Stadium) was built, the city of Atlanta felt the time was right to start pursuing professional football.

Several groups independently applied for franchises in both the AFL and NFL. Some local businessmen were awarded an AFL franchise contingent upon acquiring exclusive stadium rights from city officials. That motivated the NFL to get serious and forced Atlanta officials to make a choice between the two leagues. They went with the NFL.

The NFL had planned to add two teams in 1967, but the competition with the AFL for Atlanta forced Atlanta to be added a year early in 1966. The second expansion team, the New Orleans Saints, joined the NFL as planned in 1967 as its sixteenth franchise.

New Orleans Saints

The New Orleans Saints are a professional American football team based in New Orleans, Louisiana. The Saints currently compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member of the league's National Football Conference (NFC) South division. The team was founded by John W. Mecom Jr., David Dixon, and the city of New Orleans on November 1, 1966.[7] The Saints began play in Tulane Stadium in 1967.

The name "Saints" is an allusion to November 1 being All Saints Day in the Catholic faith. The franchise was founded on November 1, 1966 and New Orleans has a large Catholic population. It also attributed to the spiritual song "When the Saints Go Marchin' In" which is associated with New Orleans jazz and is often sung by fans at games.

They played their home games in Tulane Stadium through the 1974 NFL season and then  moved to the new Louisiana Superdome (now called the Mercedes-Benz Superdome).


Except for minor modifications, the Saints' logo and uniforms have basically remained the same since the club debuted in 1967.

The team's logo is a fleur-de-lis which is a symbol of the City of New Orleans and of France's Royal Family, which included the House of Bourbon).

Their uniform design consists of gold helmets, gold pants, and either black or white jerseys.

How Team Names Travel: American Football

Since team franchises often are moved from one city to another, team names often move and are sometimes changed.

In 1936, Cleveland’s new AFL franchise decided to take its name from one of the top collegiate teams of the era, the Fordham Rams.

The Rams name stuck even with a move to Los Angeles in 1946. The team became the St. Louis Rams in 1995.

After more than a decade without a football team, Baltimore acquired an NFL team in 1996 when the Cleveland Browns relocated.

Owner Art Modell allowed the Browns’ name, colors and history to remain in Cleveland, so Baltimore set up focus groups and fan polls to decide on a new name. Baltimore Ravens was the winner, beating out Americans and Marauders. The name refers to the mythical bird in Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven.” Poe lived and died in Baltimore.

When an NFL franchise was bought for Boston in 1933, the team was set to play at the home of the baseball Boston Braves so it adopted the same name. The following year, the Braves moved to Fenway Park and changed their name to the Redskins. The Redskins name traveled with the team to become the Washington Redskins.

NY Giants and New England Patriots

With Super Bowl XLVI (#46) this weekend, I thought I'd post some team history today. Neither of these teams has a very unusual team name origin. The American football Giants are an old franchise. They were one of five teams that joined the NFL in 1925, but the only one admitted that year which still exists.

The team ranks third among all NFL franchises with seven NFL titles: four in the pre–Super Bowl era (1927, 1934, 1938, 1956) and three since the advent of the Super Bowl (Super Bowls XXI (1986), XXV (1990), and XLII (2007). Their championship tally is surpassed only by the Green Bay Packers (13) and Chicago Bears (9).

In order to distinguish themselves from the professional baseball Giants, the football team was incorporated as the "New York National League Football Company, Inc." in 1929 and changed to "New York Football Giants, Inc." in 1937. Although the baseball team moved to San Francisco after the 1957 season, the football team continues to use "New York Football Giants, Inc." as its legal corporate name, and is often referred to by fans and sportscasters as the "New York Football Giants".

The team has also gained several nicknames, including "Big Blue", the "G-Men", and the "Jints", an intentionally mangled contraction seen frequently in the New York Post and New York Daily News, originating from the baseball team when they were based in New York. Additionally the team as a whole is occasionally referred to as the "Big Blue Wrecking Crew", even though this nickname really referred to the Giants defensive unit during the 80s and early 90s.

Although the Giants have a number of rivalries in their history (particularly with the Cowboys and the Eagles), any rivalry with the Patriots is relatively new.

The New England Patriots, commonly called the "Pats," are based in the Greater Boston area, playing their home games in the town of Foxborough, Massachusetts at Gillette Stadium. The team changed its name from the original Boston Patriots after relocating to Foxborough in 1971. (New Jersey Giants fans often wish that the NY Giants would be known as the NJ Giants because they play in the Garden State.)

An original member of the American Football League (AFL), the Patriots joined the NFL in the 1970 merger of those leagues. The team advanced to the playoffs four times before appearing in Super Bowl XX in January 1986, losing to the Chicago Bears. The team also appeared in Super Bowl XXXI in January 1997, losing to the Green Bay Packers.

Origins of American Football Team Names

This site tries to look at the origins of names that are unusual. So, when I got an email from someone asking me why the Denver Broncos have that name, I was torn about responding. It seems obvious.

There are probably more teams that have "normal" nicknames than the unusual ones.But here is a wrap-up post on American football team name origins. I'll save the more unusual ones for my individual team posts.

For example, "bronco" (an unbroken or tamed horse) obviously refers to Denver's Wild West heritage. Maybe they wanted to know that the name was selected through a contest in January 1960. Or that Denver’s 1921 entry in the Midwest Baseball League team was also named the Broncos.

A good number of teams in all sports are from contests that ask fans for suggestions.

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers came out on top of 400 entries in a radio-sponsored competition after Tampa was awarded the first of two expansion franchises on April 24, 1974.  Other possibilities included the Buzzards, Sea Horses and even the Mafia. It was a good idea to go with Buccaneers...

Also in Florida, when Miami was awarded an AFL expansion franchise in 1965, a contest was held to determine the name. A dozen names were forwarded to a seven-member screening committee of local media and "Dolphins" was the runaway winner.

They actually had 622 people select that name, so they created a tiebreaker where you had to pick the winner and score of that year's game between Notre Dame and the University of Miami. The one winner got two lifetime passes to Dolphins games. The winning answer? The game ended in a scoreless tie.

Atlanta held a contest in 1965 and Falcons was chosen for the new NFL team. The argument was that “the Falcon is proud and dignified, with great courage and fight. It never drops its prey. It is deadly and has a great sporting tradition.”

Jacksonville also held a contest in 1991, in anticipation of the team that would come to the city in two years. It would be the NFL’s 30th franchise. Animal names seemed to be their choice and Jaguars claimed the majority of votes, though it has no real connection to the city. It does have the alliterative beat of J and J. Other possibilities included the more "logical" Sharks, Stingrays and Panthers (which does have a Florida connection).

According to Wikipedia, the day after the NFL awarded the expansion team to Jacksonville, the Jaguars' proposed helmet and jersey was shown at the NFL owners' meeting in Chicago. The team's colors were to be teal, gold, and silver with black accents. However, this jersey and helmet design, with a gold leaping jaguar, created controversy. Ford Motor Company, parent of the automaker Jaguar, believed that the Jaguars' logo bore too much resemblance to the automaker's logo. Though no lawsuit was brought to trial, an amicable agreement was ultimately reached where Jaguar would be named the official car of the Jaguars, and the Jaguars would redesign their uniforms.

Their logo, as with many teams, has evolved from a full-body crawling Jaguar logo, to a clawing Jaguar, to the current snarling animal head.

In 1960, Oakland held a contest to pick a name for its AFL team. But fans don't always rule when it comes to names.

The fans chose Senors, but the team's management wisely went with the more appropriate Oakland Raiders. Though we don't associate Oakland or the West Coast with pirates, their black uniforms and "bad boy" image worked well in those early years.

In a 1975 contest, Seattle’s expansion franchise received 20,365 entries, with a staggering 1,741 different names. It was finally decided that the Seattle Seahawks, a name denoting the city’s link to the sea, would be the choice. It had gotten 151 votes.


There was an original AFL franchise called the Dallas Texans, but they relocated to Kansas City. Owner Lamar Hunt picked "Chiefs" as a nickname to honor Kansas City mayor Roe “The Chief” Bartle for his efforts in securing the team. Bartle promised to enlarge Kansas City’s Municipal Stadium and guaranteed Hunt three times as many season ticket sales as his club had in Dallas.

Of course, their logo - an Indian arrowhead - certainly suggests a reference to Native Americans. Luckily, the Kansas City Chiefs avoided using a more offensive logo like the many that continue to rightfully anger Native Americans.

The Dallas Cowboys seems like an obvious choice for a Texas team. Actually, "Rangers" was the first name suggested, but the club went with Cowboys since Rangers might be confused with a local minor-league team of the same name.

The MLB Texas Rangers baseball team came to be in 1972 when the Washington Senators franchise moved to the city.

Their star logo is very "cowboy" but suggests both the state "lone star" flag and heritage and also a Texas Ranger badge.

New York’s AFL squad was originally the Titans. Titans seemed rather close in meaning to the nearby NY Giants. In 1963, after three seasons, a five-man syndicate bought the franchise. On the same day they hired Weeb Ewbank, the owners announced that they were changing the team’s name to Jets.

The new name sounds similar to the baseball NY Mets and fit in that fact that there would be jets landing and taking off from the nearby LaGuardia Airport.

The New York Jets (who, like the NY Giants actually play in my home state of New Jersey) hold the distinction of being the first AFL team to defeat an NFL club in an AFL-NFL World Championship Game when they defeated the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III.

Owners often call the shots when names are selected.

When Detroit radio executive George Richards purchased the NFL’s Portsmouth Spartans in 1934, he moved them to his city. Richards chose the name Detroit Lions. There seemed to be something feline going n in the city which already had their baseball Tigers and had an earlier football team called the Panthers that folded in 1927.

The nickname for Carolina’s 1995 expansion team was selected by team president Mark Richardson, the son of owner Jerry Richardson. The younger Richardson also chose the Carolina Panthers’ colors of "Panther blue," silver and black.

A group of New England sportswriters picked Patriots as a tribute to Patriot Day, which celebrates Paul Revere’s ride. The New England Patriots is an unusual team in that they are not connected in their team name to a city or state but to an entire region.

Pittsburgh’s professional football team (founded back in 1933) was, like its baseball neighbors, initially dubbed the Pirates. For marketing purposes, having two teams with the same name is a problem, so, in 1940, owner Art Rooney changed the name to the Pittsburgh Steelers, reflecting the city’s ties to the steel industry.

  

The team's general manager, Bert Rose, recommended the name Minnesota Vikings to Minnesota’s Board of Directors in 1960. The name is a good one for the team since Vikings are known as aggressive warriors, and it connects with the Nordic tradition inherent in that region of the country.


There's lots of interesting information about team histories on all the NFL team web sites. 
I also enjoyed looking through these books: Yogi, Babe and Magic : The Complete Book of Sports Nicknames and Yankees to Fighting Irish: What's Behind Your Favorite Team's Name?