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!
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.