Chad Aaron introduces you to the (linear) NFL World Heavyweight Championship. Learn the history, get caught up, and see who the reigning champion is!

The Super Bowl is arguably the biggest sports spectacle in the world. Happening just once a year, it is how the NFL crowns a champion. The winning team can call themselves “Champions” for an entire year.

Did you ever wonder what football would be like if that championship was put on the line week in and week out, similar to the way a wrestling title is, subject to being won and lost on Any Given Sunday (or Thursday, or Monday, or Tuesday, or Wednesday the way 2020 has gone). I did. So, a while back, I came up with what I call…

The NFL World Heavyweight Championship.

How did this come about? I am not really a boxing fan. A number of years ago, I came across an article about the “Linear World Championship.” That, in summary, is the idea of tracing the World Championship from fight to fight, and not factoring in cases where governing bodies have stripped titles from fighters for various reasons. There would be no exhibitions, every fight was a title fight. The Linear title often crossed with one or more of the actual world titles, but It was more interesting to me in the cases where it did not.

Of course, in wrestling, there are often non-title matches, or situations where the champion wrestles, but the title is not on the line – tag team matches, battle royals, etc.… The idea of a Linear World Championship in wrestling would be much more difficult to trace back. And tracking down house show matches from decades ago seemed like an impossible task.

So instead, I took that idea and wondered if it could be applied to other sports. Football seemed the easiest, with its one-game-a-week schedule and small number of games each season. The idea of the NFL World Heavyweight Championship was born.

I needed a starting point, and the first Super Bowl seemed like the natural genesis. So, I treated Super Bowl 1 as the finals of an inaugural NFLWHC tournament. Every regular season and playoff game from then on would be considered a title defense. Ties would count much like a Double-Disqualification or Double-Count Out in wrestling; no winner is declared, and the current champion retains. From there, it is just a matter of tracing each season and following the title from team to team.

Let us look at 2020 as an example. Baltimore ended the 2019 season as the reigning NFLWHC title holder and carried the crown into the playoffs. Tennessee beat them for it in the divisional round of the playoffs, then lost it to Kansas City in the AFC Championship Game the following week.

The Chiefs defended the title in Super Bowl 54 and carried it into the 2020 season. They lost the title to Las Vegas in October. Tampa Bay won it two weeks later, and New Orleans claimed the throne two weeks after that. They held on until this past Sunday when Philadelphia knocked them off and became the current champions.

However, should the team with the title not make the playoffs, the title is vacated at the end of the season and the playoffs become a tournament to crown a new champion. This happened in the very first season. Green Bay took the initial crown in Super Bowl 1. That next fall, they lost it to Minnesota, who lost it to Atlanta, who lost it to Dallas, who lost it to Washington, who lost it to Cleveland, who lost it to Philadelphia. The Eagles ended the regular season with the title, but failed to make the playoffs. The title was then vacated, and the Packers reclaimed the title by winning Super Bowl 2.

Make sense? Probably not. For me, it is just a bit of harmless fun to follow during football season. There were some oddities to figure out along the way with franchise relocations, The Browns/Ravens/Browns situation, etc.

I will leave you with a couple of notes for the stat nerds. There have been 388 title wins and 19 vacancies. The Raiders are the Nature Boys of the NFL, with 28 championship wins. The Cowboys are next at 22, with Buffalo sitting at 18. The Broncos and Chiefs both stand at 17 titles to round out the Top Five. The Bottom Five sees four teams sitting with four titles each; recent expansion brethren Carolina and Jacksonville, then Baltimore – who gets treated like an expansion franchise for these purposes, and finally Tampa Bay. Rounding off the Bottom Five are the Houston Texans, who in 18 seasons, have never won the NFL World Heavyweight Championship.

History of the NFL World Heavyweight Championship

NFL World Heavyweight Championship Stats