With the Kansas City Chiefs winning the AFC Championship Game last night, the Pittsburgh Steelers may soon have company. The Chiefs are one step away from winning their fourth Super Bowl in six seasons. If they do so, they will be just the second team to accomplish that feat, after the 1970s Steelers.
Of course, most will focus on the fact that the Chiefs are the first team with a chance to win three Super Bowls in a row. Never before has a team that won two consecutive Super Bowls reached a third the next year. The Steelers won back-to-back Super Bowls twice during their dynastic run, but with a two-year lapse in between. Now they are falling behind, the Chiefs erasing their playoff records.
The Steelers became the first team to win three total Super Bowls in 1978 and then became the first to repeat multiple times in 1979. Their four Super Bowls in a six-year span remains unprecedented, but the Chiefs can join them. The only other team that has won four Super Bowls in the span of even a 10-year period is the San Francisco 49ers. Between 1981 and 1989, they won their first four of five Super Bowls. But that took them nine years. Multiple teams have won three Super Bowls in a four-year span, but the fourth title has been elusive. Patrick Mahomes would also be the fourth quarterback with four rings, joining Terry Bradshaw, Joe Montana, and Tom Brady.
The Chiefs won their first Super Bowl since 1969 50 years later in 2019, in Mahomes’ third season. They reached the following Super Bowl, only to lose to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, giving Brady his seventh ring. In 2022, the Cincinnati Bengals kept them out of the Super Bowl altogether, but since then, they have been unstoppable.
All year, pundits have wondered if this Chiefs team is vulnerable, weaker than the team that won in 2023. Yet they only lost two games all season, dominating the Steelers while shoving coal in their stockings. Whatever it takes, they simply find ways to win. Mahomes passed Bradshaw in all-time postseason wins last year and is now behind only Brady.
Super Bowl LIX will mark a rematch of the 2022 edition. The Chiefs edgedthe Eagles in that one, 38-35, and hope to do the same again. Should they manage it, they will become only the second team to win four Super Bowls in a six-year span. The Steelers were the first team to do it, and remain the only team for at least two more weeks.
This marks the seventh all-time Super Bowl rematch between two opponents, and the second involving the Eagles. Philadelphia was the rare team changing its fortunes, losing to the Patriots the first time and then winning the second. The Steelers beat the Cowboys twice during their dynastic run, though they lost to them years later in 1995. That remains the only match-up that has played out more than twice in Super Bowl history.
The Chiefs are also going for their fifth Super Bowl win, which would tie them for the third most. Both the Steelers and Patriots remain at the top with six, while the San Francisco 49ers and Dallas Cowboys are stuck on five.
The 49ers were the first team to reach five in 1994, the Cowboys becoming the second a year later. In doing so, they prevented the Steelers from the honor, but they finally won a fifth a decade later. In 2008, they won their sixth Super Bowl, the first franchise to do so. If the Chiefs win, they will be just the fifth franchise to win five Super Bowls and would be one step away from joining the Steelers and Patriots at the top. Pittsburgh, meanwhile, is heading in the opposite direction.
