Here's how history shortchanges the champion '73 Dolphins who followed the perfect Fins
HOUSTON – Ed Newman wears his Super Bowl ring with pride, even though he knows the conversations it starts will get “awkward,” as he puts it.
“There’s a little bit of silence,” says the four-time Pro Bowler.
Newman was on the team that won the first Super Bowl played in Houston. That team mauled its opponent, the Minnesota Vikings, 24-7, allowing them only a single touchdown in the fourth quarter of Super Bowl VIII. The team returned home from Texas to a packed airport of fans. It was an unforgettable moment for Newman.
But it was decidedly more forgettable for many other people. That’s because Newman was a rookie on the 1973 Dolphins – the team that followed the perfect ’72 team. As the years went by, everyone talked about the ’72 team, but fewer people – even in Miami – mentioned the team that followed. Although that ’73 team has been commemorated alongside the ’72 club, it has never been officially feted on its own by the Dolphins organization.
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“It’s kind of an unknown champion,” says Harvey Greene, director of historical affairs for the team.
And that’s especially interesting considering many of those who watched both teams say the 1973 team, which finished 15-2, was better.
“A lot of the veterans said that,” Newman says. “I’m not saying it was a better team, but I believe it because veterans would say it.”
The perfect team (17-0) is known for the “no-name defense,” but it’s hard to argue the defense wasn’t better the next year. It gave up more than 16 points in only two games all season – both in victories. The defense allowed a mere 150 points the whole year. Just for comparison across eras, this season’s Patriots are first overall in the league and have given up 250 points in 18 games.
Yes, there were two losses, which is of course why the ’72 team will always be remembered more fondly, but the schedule was much tougher the second year in the back-to-back crowns. The ’73 team faced the Raiders, Cowboys and Steelers – all powers in that day. It also faced O.J. Simpson twice in his famous 2,000-yard season. The ’72 Fins played only two teams in the regular season that finished with a winning record.
The ’73 losses came to Oakland in Week 2, 12-7, and to the Baltimore Colts in the second-to-last game of the season, 16-3. But the Dolphins also beat those Colts 44-0 in the same year.
The team was so good that it helped Newman immensely. He was a rookie, not expecting much playing time, having just arrived from Duke. “I felt like the loneliest man in the world in the first few weeks,” he says. But even though his teammates had already done something that wouldn’t be repeated for 44 years (and counting), there was plenty of motivation in the locker room. Head coach Don Shula had lost to the Jets in Super Bowl III with the Colts, and then his Dolphins lost to the Cowboys after the 1971 season, so he was fighting a reputation of being unable to win the big one (if you can believe that). Shula and the team wanted to steamroll into 1973 as if 1972 never happened. For the most part, the Dolphins did, and Newman found himself playing in garbage time fairly often.
“I heard the disappointment about the ’71 season,” Newman says, “and that they would never let that happen again.”
So there was an extra intensity and urgency among the ’73 team. “No mental mistakes and 100 percent effort,” Newman remembers. “The players, they had hardened themselves.”
There was also a more stable quarterback situation. Bob Griese, who started only five regular-season games the year before, was healthy for a full season in ’73. He threw 17 touchdowns compared to four the year prior. And again, many of these games were out of reach by the late stages. The Dolphins more than doubled the score of each of their three postseason opponents.
Yet as the years passed, all of that got somewhat neglected. The champagne toasts when a team lost its first game, the Mercury Morris taunts, the mythology that settles in over time – it all left Newman with some explaining to do to strangers who wanted to talk to the Miami-Dade judge about the ’72 team he wasn’t on.
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“I resent a little bit having to say, ‘I wasn’t a part of that team,'” Newman says. “I can’t dilute the ’72 team. But there’s a little bit of silence: ‘I’m sorry to have to correct you, sir, I don’t deserve the credit.'”
Not that he resents the team; after all, he was teammates with nearly all of them. He’s in awe of the perfect season like everyone else in South Florida. But the most recent Dolphins team to win a Super Bowl was Newman’s team, and that’s more of an oh-by-the-way than it should be. Even Dan Marino’s runner-up team the following decade is more regaled. The “A Football Life” documentary about Shula barely mentions the second champion. Many rankings of the best teams of all time leave out the ’73 club. One list last year called the ’72 team the best Dolphins team ever, saying it was a “no-brainer.”
“I think in recent years we made a particular effort to recognize the ’73 team,” Greene says.
It’ll always be this way, though. Perfect is the enemy of the good, as they say. In this case, perfect is the enemy of the better.
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