Rick Gosselin is a Pro Football Hall of Fame journalist who has covered the Detroit Lions, New York Giants, Kansas City Chiefs, and Dallas Cowboys. He became a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame selection committee in 1988 and has served on the board’s senior committee for more than twenty years. He is the author of Goodfellows: The Champions of St. Ambrose. His new book The Team that History Forgot: The 1960s Kansas City Chiefs (Nebraska, 2025) was published in November.

As a young football fan growing up in the 1960s in an NFL town, I was skeptical of the upstart American Football League. My team was the Detroit Lions, which afforded me the opportunity to see the mighty Green Bay Packers up close. The two teams played twice each season in the Western Conference, so I was able to witness Vince Lombardi molding the Packers into one of football’s greatest dynasties.

I had a passing interest in the AFL back then. They were an afterthought. I knew the real football was played in the NFL. When the AFL and NFL agreed to a merger in 1966 that would produce an annual championship game between the two leagues, the world would find out what I already knew as a 15-year-old—the NFL was superior. Far superior.

I remember watching that first Super Bowl in 1967 on a black-and-white television, knowing that the Packers would prevail . . . but hoping that disaster would not strike and the Chiefs would somehow steal the game.

The Chiefs were surprisingly competitive in the first half, trailing only 14-10, and had the chance to seize the lead at the start of the third quarter. Kansas City took the second-half kickoff and drove to midfield. But quarterback Len Dawson threw an interception that Willie Wood returned to the Kansas City 5. The game spiraled away from the Chiefs at that point and they wound up losing, 35-10.

That first Super Bowl always intrigued me. When my own career took me to Kansas City in 1977 as a sports writer with United Press International, I got the chance to meet the players and coaches I watched a decade earlier in that first Super Bowl.

I visited with owner Lamar Hunt, coach Hank Stram and all the stars of that team—Len Dawson, Otis Taylor, Mike Garrett, Chris Burford, Buck Buchanan, Bobby Bell, Johnny Robinson—I found them all approachable, friendly, and likeable. They opened up to me, and I listened as they talked about that Super Bowl and their mindsets before, during, and after. I kept all my tapes and interviews and thought this might be a pretty good book if I ever decided to write it.

When I moved to Dallas in 1990 and became the NFL columnist for The Dallas Morning News, my travels allowed me to cross paths with several of the Packers from that first Super Bowl—Herb Adderley, Willie Davis, Forrest Gregg, Jerry Kramer, Dave Robinson, Jim Taylor—for their perspective on the game. I also visited with Al Davis on several occasions in my travels about Oakland’s rivalry with the Chiefs, the AFL-NFL war, and the merger.

My notebook was full when I finally decided to write the book, The Team That History Forgot, in 2023. Kansas City was the most successful franchise in AFL history, winning the most games and the most championships. They were to the AFL what the Packers were to the NFL.

With the current Chiefs creating their own dynasty with five Super Bowl appearances and three Lombardi Trophies in the last six seasons, I thought this would be an opportune time to remind everyone that this is actually the second dynasty for the franchise. Before there was Clark Hunt, there was Lamar Hunt. Before there was Andy Reid, there was Hank Stram. Before there was Patrick Mahomes, there was Len Dawson. Before there was Travis Kelce, there was Fred Arbanas. Before there was Chris Jones, there was Buck Buchanan.

But because of that first Super Bowl loss, the Chiefs’ greatness that decade has been forgotten. Forgotten has been the fact that the Chiefs avenged that loss by upsetting another heavy favorite, the Minnesota Vikings, in Super Bowl IV—the final game ever played by an AFL franchise.

Forgotten has been the fact the Chiefs opened pro football’s door to the historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) by taking Grambling’s Buck Buchanan with the first overall pick of the 1963 AFL draft. Forgotten has been the fact that Kansas City built one of the great defenses in football history. The AFL Chiefs remain one of only two franchises to enshrine six Hall of Famers off one defense, joining the Lombardi Packers.

The 1960s Kansas City Chiefs deserve to be a team remembered, not forgotten.