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Why was the NFC so dominant and the AFC so weak in the Super Bowl from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s? (alien.top)

submitted 1 year ago by Istobri@alien.top to c/nfl@nfl.community

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Hi everyone,

I'm a Canadian who watches some NFL (but more hockey and baseball) and would consider myself somewhat partial to the Buffalo Bills. I remember clearly when the Bills went to four straight Super Bowls in the early '90s, and lost all four. From the reading I've done on Reddit about those Bills teams, they really only had a true shot at winning the first one against the Giants (SB XXV in 1990), when Scott Norwood missed Wide Right. They were more or less dominated in the other three losses by Washington and Dallas.

If you look at those four losses in historical context, though, they were part of a larger trend. The AFC champion lost every SB to the NFC champion from XIX (1984) to XXXI (1996). This streak included four wins by San Francisco, three wins by Dallas, two wins each by Washington and the Giants, and one each by Chicago and Green Bay.

My question to you is: why was this the case? What made the NFC teams so dominant in the SB during this stretch of time, and conversely, why was the AFC so weak in the SB during this stretch? Has there ever been another time in NFL history when one conference dominated the SB so thoroughly?

Thanks!

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[–] AlfonzL@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

WE SHOULD HAVE WON THAT GAME DAMMIT!!!!!!!!!!
^(PTSD is a bitch)

[–] Silver_Instruction_3@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Of the major sports I think the NFL is the most dependent on coaching. During the 80s and 90s the league was pretty much dominated by 4 coaches:

Bill Walsh
Joe Gibbs
Jimmy Johnson
Bill Parcells

Whereas the AFC had the better coaches the previous decades like:

Noll
Shula (he continued to coach into the 90s but he was mostly ahead of his peers in the 70s.

[–] albundy66@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

DAL won those SB's in spite of Jimmy

[–] TomBradyFanCEO@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

no Tom Brady

[–] Hey-Bud-Lets-Party@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

The old NFC consisted mainly of large market teams, while the AFC consisted of cities that couldn’t get an NFL team pre-merger. In the pre-salary cap and free-agency world large market teams had a huge income advantage when fielding a team. A handful of NFC teams would stockpile talent and have depth that teams today could only dream about.

[–] VariousLawyerings@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

A lot of good answers in here but one weird factor that doesn't really get talked about is that despite so many different NFC teams winning Super Bowls, on a year-to-year basis there was a weird lack of depth and only a couple (sometimes even just one) true Super Bowl contenders. The Giants (and Redskins to a lesser extent) were bizarrely inconsistent while the Bears and Cowboys had consistent but shorter windows with the Packers coming in at the end. The 49ers were always there but you only had one or two years where even half of those teams came together as a serious threat, and that meant NFC's most dominant team didn't face very many risks of an upset.