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.

Word of the Year

The Oxford Word of the Year for 2018 is "toxic" which is defined as "poisonous."
The collocates (words habitually used alongside toxic) include: chemical, masculinity, substance, environment and even a toxic relationship.

"Toxic" first appeared in English in the mid-seventeenth century. The etymology tracks its poisonous roots. It came from the medieval Latin toxicus, and back to the Latin toxicum, which has origins in the Greek toxikon pharmakon  which was the lethal poison used by the ancient Greeks for smearing on the points of their arrows. It is odd that pharmakon, meaning poison, did not move into Latin here, but toxikon did. The Greek word for "bow" was toxon., though it would seem that a word for arrow would have made more sense for the poison's use.