Super Bowl XV
1981 edition of the Super Bowl
Super Bowl XV was an American football game between the American Football Conference (AFC) champion Oakland Raiders and the National Football Conference (NFC) champion Philadelphia Eagles to decide the National Football League (NFL) champion for the 1980 season. The Raiders defeated the Eagles by the score of 27–10, becoming the first wild card playoff team to win a Super Bowl.
The game was played at the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans, Louisiana, on January 25, 1981, five days after the Iran hostage crisis ended. The game was thus held under patriotic fervor, as the pregame ceremonies honored the end of the crisis.
The Raiders were making their third Super Bowl appearance after posting an 11–5 regular season record, but losing a tiebreaker to the AFC West division winner San Diego Chargers. Oakland then advanced to the Super Bowl with playoff victories over the Houston Oilers, Cleveland Browns, and San Diego. The Eagles were making their first Super Bowl appearance after posting a 12–4 regular season record and postseason victories over the Minnesota Vikings and Dallas Cowboys.
Aided by two touchdown passes from quarterback Jim Plunkett, the Raiders jumped out to a 14–0 lead in the first quarter and the Eagles never recovered. Oakland linebacker Rod Martin also intercepted Philadelphia quarterback Ron Jaworski three times for a Super Bowl record. Plunkett was named the Super Bowl MVP after completing 13 of 21 passes for 261 yards and three touchdowns; he was the second Heisman Trophy winner to be named Super Bowl MVP, after Roger Staubach in Super Bowl VI.
Background
Host selection process
The NFL awarded Super Bowl XV to New Orleans on March 13, 1979, at the owners' meetings in Honolulu.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Super Bowl XV” is 1981 edition of the Super Bowl. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Super, Bowl and edition, not as a finished interpretation.
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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 Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q766921. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1980, 1981 and 1979.
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This entry incorporates text from “Super Bowl XV” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.