1969 American Football League season
American Football League season
The 1969 AFL season was the tenth and final regular season of the American Football League. To honor the AFL's tenth season, a special anniversary logo was designed and each Kansas City Chiefs player wore a patch on his jersey with the logo during Super Bowl IV, the final AFL-NFL World Championship Game prior to the AFL–NFL merger.
The Chiefs defeated the Oakland Raiders in the final AFL Championship Game, then soundly defeated the National Football League's Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl IV.
Division races
In its final two years of existence, the AFL had ten teams, grouped into two divisions. Each team played a home-and-away game against the other four teams in its division, a home-and-away series against one of the five teams in opposite division, and one game each against the remaining four teams from the opposite division. Using that format, the defending World Champion New York Jets went 10–0 against the five teams they played twice, but were 0–4 against the top four teams in the West.
For the 1969 season, a provision was made for a four-team playoff to determine the AFL champion, the league's representative in the Super Bowl, with the #1 team in the division hosting the #2 team in the opposite division. The NFL also had a four-team playoff, introduced in 1967, matching the winners of the Capitol and Century divisions, and the Coastal and Central divisions.
The 1970 merger placed the ten AFL teams (along with three teams from the pre-1970 NFL) into the 13-team AFC. The other NFL teams went into the 13-team NFC.
Regular season
Results
Standings
For its tenth and final season before merging with the NFL, the AFL instituted a four team playoff tournament with the second place teams in each division also participating.
Playoffs
Super Bowl
The Kansas City Chiefs defeated the Minnesota Vikings 23–7 at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans, Louisiana, on January 11, 1970. The Super Bowl Most Valuable Player Award was given to Chiefs quarterback Len Dawson
Stadium changes
After six seasons at Fenway Park, the Boston Patriots moved to Alumni Stadium at Boston College in 1969.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1994198. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1969, 1967 and 1970.
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