The History of NFL Threepeats

Three is the magic number, or so we’re told.

The Kansas City Chiefs have been dancing around the Super Bowl threepeat title for years now, always so close but just out of their grasp. This is the seventh year in a row the Chiefs will be in the AFC Championship Game, one short of the Patriots’ record eight. It’s come to the point where it seems expected – almost inevitable – that the Chiefs will be here in the final four, year after year, no matter how they slum through the regular season. They can be historically dominant, like they were in 2018 and 2019. They could slip in with a poor record (for a contender) like they did in 2023. They could get lucky early in the year and then turn on the jets in December, like they have this year. It doesn’t matter what happens before Thanksgiving: Kansas City will be here in January.

We have come to expect the real Chiefs to show up in the playoffs – they’ve been a substantially better team in the postseason in each of the past four years. I suspect that’s more coincidence than plan, though Andy Reid does seem more comfortable with risk in do-or-die games than he does in a random game in October, and that may be playing itself out with better results in January. Additionally, Kansas City plays the vast majority of their playoff games at home – the AFC Championship will make 14 games in Arrowhead since 2018, as opposed to just two as the road team. Usually, offensive and defensive DVOA each improves by about 7.5% at home, although it was only three percentage points in 2024. At the very least, the Chiefs don’t find themselves wading in to hostile waters very much come January.

But be it due to strategy, situation, or serendipity, the Chiefs are once again favorites in the AFC Championship, just like they were in all but one of the previous trips here. They even face a familiar foe in the Buffalo Bills, who have a 4-1 record against Kansas in the regular season in the Mahomes era, but an 0-3 record in the playoffs. You could write a whole article on the Bills’ postseason struggles against Kansas City. I know, because we did that last year! Bills-Chiefs is going to go down as one of the greatest playoff roadblocks in NFL history, alongside the Vikings blowing up the Rams in the 1970s or the Packers stonewalling the 49ers in the 1990s. For the fourth straight playoff matchup, we have Buffalo with a higher DVOA than Kansas City entering the game. How that did work out the last three times?

Rooting for Goliath may not be fashionable, but it sure can be fun. Patriots fans can attest to that, as can Cowboys fans before that, and 49ers fans before that, and Steelers fans before that. And yet, here we are, 58 Super Bowls in, and we’ve yet to have a threepeat winner. That’s a little strange, right? The other Big Four sports don’t have that problem. The Yankees have done it three times; the Lakers, Bulls, Maple Leafs and Canadiens twice each. The fact that those sports play series and not single-elimination games certainly helps, but going over half a century without a single triple champion is hard to believe.

In the salary cap era, the preseason Super Bowl favorite has between a 15 and 20% chance to win it all – at least, that’s where our odds generally end up when we do our season simulations. That would imply a 25% chance that someone would have threepeated by now – and that doesn’t take into account the pre-salary cap era, when it was easier to build and keep dynasties, or the increased size of the league today after expansion, or the longer paths champions have to take with expanded playoffs.

In 2024, the best preseason odds belonged to the Chiefs, at +500. That’s a 16.7% implied probability of winning, but we can find much better historically. Every year but one in the 1980s had multiple teams with better odds than 2024 Kansas City, and you can find standout teams as low as +250. If we use fairly standard +300 odds mark – an implied winning probability of 25% — then that moves the odds that we would have had a threepeat champion up closer to 60%. It’s not crazy that we haven’t had a back-to-back-to-back champ yet, but it does feel like something we should be talking about the Steel Curtain doing in the unbalanced 1970s, not something that we’re still trying to do in the year 2025.

Of course, the NFL has had threepeat champions, which is why we always have to awkwardly note that the Chiefs are trying to be the first team to do it in the Super Bowl era. The Green Bay Packers threepeated from 1929-1931, the era of Curly Lambeau and Johnny Blood. There were no playoffs then and a maximum of 12 teams, so it’s not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison, but hey, it’s a threepeat. And then the Packers did it again from 1965-1967, the heart of the Lombardi Era. That included wins in Super Bowls I and II (excuse me, the first and second “AFL-NFL World Championship Games”, as they were referred to at the time), but they failed to threepeat as Super Bowl champions due to a small problem of the Super Bowl not existing at the time. Your theoretical Super Bowl 0 would have pitted the Packers against a Buffalo Bills team that would have been significant underdogs going in – a good defense, if overly reliant on turnovers, but an average offense by AFL standards at the time thanks to the loss of Cookie Gilchrist. The Packers missed out on being the first threepeat Super Bowl champs simply due to a matter of bad timing.

We’ve had other near misses since then. The 1971-1973 Dolphins made three consecutive Super Bowls, winning the last two. They’re arguably the closest team to pulling the feat off if you don’t let yourself be limited by little things like the linear flow of time, but they fell at the first hurdle, walloped 24-3 by the Cowboys in Super Bowl VI. The Steelers won back-to-back Super Bowls twice in the 1970s but missed the playoffs entirely in 1980 and lost the AFC Championship Game to Oakland in 1976 with both Franco Harris and Rocky Bleier missing the game due to injuries.

More recently, the Cowboys won in 1992, 1993 and 1995, but missed out in 1994 due to losing to the 49ers (who were worse by DVOA, 26.8% regular-season DVOA vs. 33.9%) in the NFC Championship Game, with three first-quarter turnovers putting them in a hole they simply weren’t able to climb out of. The Patriots had a couple realistic shots at a threepeat, missing the playoffs in 2002 to break up a string of three Super Bowls, falling to the Nick Foles in Super Bowl LII to break up another potential string, and getting battered by the Broncos defense in the 2015 AFC Championship Game to break up yet another potential threepeat. And finally, there are the Chiefs themselves, as they might already have the threepeat in their bag had they not been upset by the Cinderella Bengals in overtime in 2021. With Cincinnati’s 3.1% regular-season DVOA beating Kansas City’s 20.4% mark, a 16.7% difference, that’s the sixth-biggest upset in conference championship history, and Kansas City would have likely been favored over the Rams in the Super Bowl, too. So close, and yet so far.

But we skipped a team in the threepeat list there, and it’s the team that the Chiefs resemble the most. That would be the 1990 49ers, a team that has come up again and again when discussing this Chiefs team. The similarities are striking.

The 49ers won the Super Bowl in the 1988 and 1989 seasons, and were well-established as the preeminent dynasty in the league. Much like the Chiefs were upset by the Bengals the year before their back-to-back titles, the 49ers were shockingly knocked out of the playoffs in 1987 by the Vikings. The 33.1% DVOA gap between those teams would be second largest on the above table… had it happened in the conference championship and not the divisional round. Never matter! Both the 49ers and Chiefs bounced back to win the next two titles and establish themselves as the team of their respective decades.

The 1990 49ers, like the 2024 Chiefs, were not dominant. They fell to a 19.3% DVOA – fourth best in the league, but their lowest mark since 1982. The Chiefs, similarly, had a 14.7% DVOA, their worst mark since 2017. They were both a little lucky to be the NFL’s last undefeated teams, with San Francisco needing six fourth-quarter game-winning drives to Kansas City’s seven this year. But lucky or not, they kept winning – they’re the only two teams to start a year 10-0 following back-to-back Super Bowl wins. And, in the playoffs, they looked much like their old selves; the aura of the back-to-back champs reasserting itself. Travis Kelce looked ready for it and did better than Chiefs fans expected in their wildest dreams as Kansas City handled Houston. The 49ers, too, were led by a tight end as Brent Jones had a 100-yard day with San Francisco cruising to a win over Washington.

For the 49ers, it ended in the conference title game – a testy, defensive battle decided by a late fumble from Roger Craig and a late injury to Montana. The Giants – a better team on paper by our numbers, but 8-point underdogs – played a tough, defensive game, holding every 49ers rusher under 30 yards and limiting Montana to one deep touchdown pass, forcing him to dink-and-dunk the rest of the way. They stayed in touch long enough to capitalize on Craig’s fumble and kick the game-winning field goal as time expired to win 15-13.

Will the Chiefs suffer the same fate? After all, like the 1990 Giants, the Bills are the better team on paper by our numbers but will be underdogs headed into Arrowhead this weekend. It probably won’t be the same in the sense of a tight defensive battle, as the Bills are OK there but tremendous on offense – Josh Allen is a wee bit more reliable than Jeff Hostetler. But unlike the 1990 Giants, the 2024 Bills know they can beat the Chiefs – they won their regular-season match and crushed the hopes of the undefeated season. Maybe the Chiefs’ habit of playing every game close and finding a way to win at the end will finally come back to bite them, like it did San Francisco in 1990.

Or maybe the Chiefs will continue being the exception to guts and stomps. They’ll win, again, and get to the Super Bowl, again, and keep the threepeat hopes alive. After all, they’ve survived on nonsense and fairy dust for this long, what’s two more weeks?