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Elizabeth Merrill, ESPN Senior Writer
He doesn’t watch as much football anymore, but Jerry Kramer surely plans to ease into his leather recliner with a glass of bourbon and follow along as the Kansas City Chiefs chase history this season.
The legendary Green Bay Packers guard even found himself watching part of the Chiefs’ preseason, which is another thing he normally wouldn’t do. Kramer, who at 88 years old is about as throwback as it gets, earned the nickname “Zipper” because of all his stitches. And there he was, watching Kansas City quarterback Patrick Mahomes throw a behind-the-back pass to Travis Kelce in mid-August. He didn’t hate it. “I kind of got a kick out of it,” Kramer says.
He will root for the Chiefs, as long as they don’t play the Packers. He wants to see another team make history. It’s been 56 years since Kramer’s Packers won three consecutive championships — an NFL title in 1966 followed by Super Bowl wins in 1967 and 1968. He can’t believe that no team has won three straight in the Super Bowl era.
“I thought New England would probably do it,” Kramer says, “with Brady and all of his bunch. But we still seem to be in that place by ourselves.”
Three-peats are a rarity. The Los Angeles Lakers were the last North American pro team to do it when they won NBA titles from 2000 to 2002. The New York Yankees won three straight World Series from 1998 to 2000. The NHL hasn’t had a team win three consecutive titles since the New York Islanders won Stanley Cups in 1980 to 1983.
It’s even more elusive in football. Seven other teams, including Tom Brady’s New England Patriots, won back-to-back Super Bowls but failed to win a championship the following season. It’s never been done in major college football, with Georgia falling short in 2023 after losing the SEC championship game 27-24 to Alabama. The Bulldogs did not receive a College Football Playoff bid, joining seven other teams spanning eight decades that failed to win three straight titles.
The three-peat is almost a mystical achievement. Three is considered the number of joy in numerology. Winning one title is an achievement, two is an even greater accomplishment, but three is a trend. Three-peats are definitive. UConn men’s basketball coach Dan Hurley, whose team will begin its pursuit of a third straight NCAA title this fall, says a three-peat cements a dynasty. Hurley turned down a six-year, $70 million offer to coach the Lakers to remain at UConn, a preseason top-5 team.
Kansas City coach Andy Reid sidesteps any mention of it; Mahomes seemingly embraces it. After the Chiefs’ Super Bowl victory in February, Mahomes said a three-peat would be “legendary.”
For Kramer, winning three straight was one of the biggest achievements of his football career. In his basement, next to the poker table, hangs a Sports Illustrated cover from Jan. 22, 1968. The photo shows Kramer hoisting Packers coach Vince Lombardi on his shoulder after they beat the Oakland Raiders 33-14 in Super Bowl II in Miami.
Lombardi is looking down at Kramer, smiling, while teammate Forrest Gregg is propping their coach up from the back. “Gregg didn’t like it as much as I did,” Kramer says. “He said, ‘Same old, s—, Jerry. You got his face; I got his butt.'”
For Lombardi, a Hall of Fame coach who had won four titles before the 1967 season, it was clear how important that third consecutive championship was to him. Early that year, he talked to his team about how special it would be, Kramer recalled, and that they would remember it for the rest of their lives.
The 2024 Chiefs are the preseason favorites to win the Super Bowl with +500 odds, according to ESPN BET. It’s the same odds, according to ESPN’s Doug Greenberg, that the Patriots and Denver Broncos carried before their failed attempts at a three-peat.
“They’re invincible right now,” Kramer says. “They’re supermen. And who the hell in the world can defeat them?
“It’s just human nature to relax when you succeed, and everybody is telling you how wonderful you are. I think that’s probably the biggest thing they have to fight.”
Three-peaters are part of an exclusive club, and those who have accomplished it have their own psychology about what it takes to win three championships in a row. But they also acknowledge that no matter how much you prepare, or how much money is sunk into a roster, sometimes it all comes down to uncontrollable fate.
ESPN spoke with coaches and athletes who have achieved the three-peat, those who have come agonizingly close and a couple of coaches who are in the middle of chasing history. Here are their stories.
Dan Hurley, UConn men’s basketball coach, national champions 2023, 2024
Things you get to do after winning back-to-back championships, or, as Hurley calls them, “the cool s—” splashed in between all the work:
• Throw out a first pitch at a New York Yankees game.
• Ring the bell at the New York Stock Exchange.
• Take two trips to the White House.
• Stand on a float during a parade in Hartford, Connecticut.
It’s early September, and Hurley and his Huskies share a unique perspective with the Chiefs — both on the precipice of potential history, grappling with expectations, internal and external pressures and unlimited unknowns. Reid retained much of his 2023 roster, including Mahomes and defensive anchor Chris Jones. Hurley, however, is in the unenviable position of having to replace four starters who were drafted into the NBA off his 2024 championship squad.
Yet the Huskies are wearing rubbery blue bracelets displaying their team mantra: “Dynasty.”
Winning three in a row, Hurley says, constitutes a dynasty, and he’s embracing all of it. Maybe he can be this way because he started out as a high school coach, and who would have thought that the guy who coached at St. Benedict’s Preparatory School and taught driver’s ed would be a back-to-back NCAA champion, with all eyes on him as the Huskies try to accomplish something that hasn’t been done in men’s college basketball in more than five decades?
“In life you have opportunities to be successful to win championships,” Hurley says. “But when do coaches and players get chances to do historic things, to do things that very few coaches or teams or players have ever done before?
“I’m focused on the next game; you’re focused on your preparation. But I do think you have to acknowledge the enormity of certain moments.”
Only one team in men’s college basketball has won three consecutive titles — UCLA captured seven in a row, from 1967 to 1973, under coach John Wooden (the Bruins also won a championship in Wooden’s final season in 1975).
Hurley is superstitious, and when told by a reporter that Wooden’s seventh straight title occurred in the year Hurley was born, he said it was a sign.
UConn had a scheduled summer workout on June 10, the day Hurley made his decision on the Lakers. He called his team in for a meeting. The players didn’t have their phones, didn’t see the news alert and Hurley walked in acting as if he hadn’t decided what he was going to do. He says he wanted affirmation of the work they would be willing to invest in their quest for a three-peat.
Their response, Hurley says, was that they’d run through walls.
“I don’t know if this team is talented enough or good enough to actually do it,” he says. “You’ll know as you go. But I think it’s actually easier for us to win it than it is for other people because at UConn, we know we can.”
Byron Scott, former Lakers guard, NBA champions 1987, 1988
Former Lakers coach Pat Riley long ago credited Scott for coining the phrase “three-peat,” and according to Scott, it happened in 1988 during training camp in Hawaii. Or was it during the championship parade a few months earlier? Scott isn’t positive.
“I think we were down by the beach or something,” Scott says. “We just started talking about [winning a third championship] and I said, ‘How about a three-peat?’ Then I remember saying it one other time I think during the parade, when I got up to kind of address the crowd. I said something about a three-peat and Riles loved it.”
Riley filed for trademark on the term just before the start of the 1988-89 season and embraced the quest for a three-peat. Scott says a batch of collared shirts with “three-peat” on them arrived in time for training camp.
The Lakers were favored that year, because of course they would be with this roster: Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Michael Cooper, A.C. Green and James Worthy.
Scott loved that despite all their talent, the Lakers remained a team in every sense. Each player knew his role, Scott says, and sacrificed individual accolades for the team. The first six months of the season, everything went as planned. The Lakers finished 57-25 in the regular season, earned the top seed and swept the Portland Trail Blazers, Seattle SuperSonics and Phoenix Suns in the playoffs. One team stood between them and the three-peat: the Detroit Pistons in the NBA Finals.
The night before Game 1, the Lakers held a final practice. Riley, worried about the inside presence of Dennis Rodman and Bill Laimbeer, ran a rebounding drill. It was the last drill of the night. Scott went up in the air, came down awkwardly and heard a pop in his hamstring. He grabbed his leg and knew it was over.
“I remember going back to my room,” Scott says, “and just bawling like I was 6 years old.”
A few days later, Johnson injured his hamstring in Game 2, and Detroit eventually swept Los Angeles.
Scott says Riley was “driven” by the idea of achieving a three-peat. For years, he’s been in position to capitalize from others’ good fortunes. Riley, who declined to comment for this story, reportedly earned about $300,000 in licensing fees a few years later when the Chicago Bulls won their third straight NBA championship.
According to a search of a U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database, Riles & Company still holds the registered trademark to the following terms: “three peat,” “three-peat,” “threepeat” and “3 peat.” A California man has a pending application to register the term “KC Three Peat.”
John Aldrich, Riley’s attorney, declined to get into specifics about the trademarks, but he said that over the years, there have been some teams that have requested the use of “three-peat” prematurely and wound up losing their bid for No. 3.
“I would just say,” Aldrich said, “that I have not been approached by the Chiefs.”
Trevor Pryce, former DT, Denver Broncos, Super Bowl champions 1997, 1998
Pryce was talking about life after football recently when the subject shifted to the Chiefs’ pursuit of a three-peat.
“Let me stop you right there,” Pryce says. “It won’t happen.”
He is emphatic about this, that the Chiefs will not win a third straight. If it were possible, he says, it would have been done before. Brady and the Patriots would have done it.
Pryce doesn’t think football is built for it. When a team reaches a Super Bowl, he says, the season is very long and the offseason becomes very short.
“If you have two of those long, drawn-out seasons in a row,” he says, “some of the players don’t recover real well. If they play in a third [straight] Super Bowl, they have basically played four seasons in three seasons. And the human body — the football body — cannot handle that.
“Forget physically how difficult it is. … All of a sudden the meetings are 15 minutes longer. The coaches want you to put a little more into the study of the game plan. There’s 10 more plays than there was last week. It’s that, ‘No stone unturned.’ But what people don’t realize is, it takes a lot of goddamn energy to turn over all the f—ing stones.”
Nearly two decades ago, when the Patriots were aiming for their third straight title, Pryce called the feat “impossible.” Football has a way of evening everything out, he says, through the drafts and free agency. Through injury.
Pryce didn’t always have this perspective. The first two years of his NFL career, he didn’t know anything but winning. He was a rookie when the Broncos won Super Bowl XXXII. Then quarterback John Elway retired after Super Bowl XXXIII, then running back Terrell Davis suffered a season-ending injury, and the Broncos, of course, did not three-peat.
Pryce played another 11 seasons in the NFL, but he never played in a Super Bowl again.
“It beats you up psychologically and emotionally,” he says. “And imagine trying to do this for a third time. So there’s no way [the Chiefs] are going to do it. Would I like to see that? Of course I would. But there is no way. None. Zero.”
Deion Branch, former Patriots receiver, and Russ Hochstein, former offensive lineman, Super Bowl champions 2003, 2004
Here’s something that is as unsurprising as a Dunkin Donuts in Massachusetts. In 2005, when the Patriots were coming off back-to-back titles, coach Bill Belichick did not talk about a three-peat. He didn’t really mention the successes of the 2003 and 2004 seasons.
He stuck to the “Patriot Way” mottos of doing your job and not listening to the hype.
Branch, who’s now director of player development and alumni relations at Louisville, says the goal in New England was never to be the first team in the Super Bowl era to go back-to-back-to back. The mission was to win Super Bowl XL.
“It’s just hard to win a regular game in the regular season,” Branch says. “So much is put into each and every game plan. … One of the biggest things I preach to these young men, and I posed this question a long time ago and I still live by it. I ask guys: ‘Would you rather lose and be done with the regular season, or make the Super Bowl knowing that you’re not going to win? Which one would you choose?’
“It hurts to go through all those extra weeks and extra days and extra practices just to be, just to get, second place. My answer would always be: ‘I would rather this stuff ends at the end of the regular season, for me to get my offseason started right away to be a better player, to be a better teammate, to be a better team.'”
When historians talk about what went wrong in the Patriots’ 2005 season, they start with linebacker Tedy Bruschi suffering a mild stroke a few days after the Pro Bowl, and the season-ending injury to safety Rodney Harrison. Then there were the five turnovers in an AFC divisional round loss to Denver.
Hochstein also points to something less talked about: the loss of continuity on the coaching staff. Both coordinators — Charlie Weis and Romeo Crennel — took head-coaching jobs in the offseason; Weis to Notre Dame and Crennel with the Cleveland Browns.
“Every coach brings their own personality,” Hochstein says. “Not just by their words or actions but also by what they want to implement.
“That’s where consistency comes into play. We can still make these subtle changes, but we have to go back to what we know really well and continue to do those things really well. So it makes a big impact on the team.”
Like Branch, Hochstein also believed in Belichick’s tunnel vision regarding three-peats. In the kind of coachspeak that could have come directly out of Belichick’s mouth, Hochstein says that if you don’t take care of business, there’s no business at the end to take care of.
Still …
“As players, you do talk about it,” Hochstein says. “We’re not dumb. We know what’s going on.”
Scotty McCreery, country music singer, five straight No. 1 singles
McCreery was a sad 12-year-old the night the Patriots lost their bid to three-peat. McCreery is a lifelong Patriots fan, and at 22, McCreery got to sing the national anthem in New England’s 2016 divisional playoff game against Kansas City, a Patriots victory.
Two years later, he scored his first No. 1 song when “Five More Minutes” topped the country singles chart. McCreery popped champagne in celebration, just like the athletes do when they win a championship.
“I bought the cheap stuff to spray,” he says, “and the nice stuff to actually indulge in and have a few drinks.
“I would equate it to the Super Bowl just with how many great artists and songs there are nowadays. It’s a lot of hard work, it’s a team effort. We don’t have to be in as good of shape as those guys on the field. But you have to stay focused, you have to have your goal and work toward it every single day. … So I do think there are some parallels there.”
When McCreery had his third consecutive No. 1 with his song “In Between” in June 2020, he had a deep reverence for the three-peat. He thinks he probably bought more champagne for that one than any of the other songs.
“It’s a streak then at that point,” he says. “You get one and two, but three is like, ‘OK, we’re really on a roll here. We’re doing something different than a lot of people can say they’ve done.”
With his fifth consecutive No. 1 song, McCreery made up championship rings for his management company, his agent and the people from his record label.
He says he’ll be watching the 2024 NFL season with great interest, in part because one of his friends, Joe Thuney, plays guard for the Chiefs. They went to college together at North Carolina State.
“I’d love to see the Patriots get back on top,” McCreery says, “but I’m not sure that’ll be this season. It’s tough to count out the Chiefs between Mahomes and Kelce.”
Patty Gasso, Oklahoma softball coach, NCAA national champions 2021-24
In 2020, after COVID-19 shut down sports, Gasso gave her team summer homework. She told the Sooners to watch “The Last Dance,” an ESPN documentary chronicling Michael Jordan and the Bulls’ dynasty that won six NBA championships in the 1990s, including two three-peats.
Gasso had a young team and needed to reset. She wanted her players to see that success and take in what an elite athlete was saying and doing.
“Michael Jordan is an individual player, but very much a team player as well,” Gasso says. “He knows that he can’t do it himself, and he knows that you don’t have to be best friends with everyone on your team; you have to know that you need them in order to get what you want.
“So you need to find a way to bring them up to your level and communicate with them and have a relationship even if it’s just a professional relationship versus a personal relationship. Because that’s something that, I think, in a [women’s] locker room looks a little bit different. And one thing that I think makes me good at this level as a [woman] is that I know what female cliques look like and I know how they can absolutely annihilate your program.”
The Sooners have gone on to win four straight national championships. It helped that Oklahoma’s freshman class was loaded with talent, and that veteran outfielder Jocelyn Alo was smashing home runs en route to the NCAA’s all-time career record.
“Unapologetic,” Gasso says is a buzzword in her program. There’s no one you have to apologize to, she says, for being great. She knows there are people and teams that don’t want to see them win again, but if you truly love sports, she says, wouldn’t you want to see excellence?
She wants her players to celebrate things big and small, to enjoy the ride and doesn’t care how that looks. Gasso said three-peats — and four-peats — are a big deal.
“It’s something that just doesn’t happen in sports,” she says. “[But] I’m going to be honest with you from my side and I think it’s the players’ side as well. When you’re getting to that point of the season, you’re just physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted.
“When it’s done, your emotions are just joy, like, ‘We did it. Oh my gosh, we did it.’ But you’re also, ‘Thank God this is over. Thank God that the pressure of this and the intensity and everything that goes with it is just over and you can breathe again.’ Because the further you go in the tournament, it’s harder to take that deep breath because everything is heavy on your shoulders. So you just see a sense of joy and just a sense of relief. Like, I can just live again.”
B.J. Armstrong, former Chicago Bulls guard, NBA champions 1991-93
As a Chicago Bulls rookie in 1989 surrounded by Jordan, Phil Jackson, Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant, Armstrong learned one quick, overarching lesson: He was hired, exclusively, to win.
That, to Armstrong, meant never taking vacations, never straying from his diet, never having an offseason. He knows that might not sound healthy. But Armstrong believed that’s what it took to win.
He kept in touch with his teammates in the offseason, and in the 1990-91 season, the Bulls won the first of three straight NBA titles.
“You work at a sense of urgency,” Armstrong says. “This is a very short window in my life. I committed to this life. I was the little crazy kid that said, ‘I want to be a professional athlete,’ and then you get there and then you said, ‘Then you want to start taking a vacation?’ That just didn’t make sense to me. I was living a dream that I set out to do my entire life. And when I got there, the last thing I wanted to do was stop.
“I was doing something I committed my life to do. Like, I dreamed of it. I thought of it 24 hours a day. Then once I got there, I didn’t want to stop. I never wanted the games to stop. I just wanted to keep going. I’m 56 and I wish — I could — but I mean, I’m too old. I get it, but I watch every game; I’m still involved in the game because I loved it. … I love it even more”
Linda Brennan, dog owner/trainer handler for Heart, a black Labrador retriever, 2016-2020 champions, obedience category, Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show
Brennan had her sights set on a three-peat in the obedience category at Westminster because three consecutive wins would mean Heart would have permanent possession of the Challenge Trophy. Or so Brennan thought.
She picked Heart out of a litter of 10 puppies. She was leaning toward another dog, but then Heart kept bringing back tennis balls and dog toys. She wouldn’t leave Brennan’s side.
Her first obedience championship came after a nail-biting tiebreaker, and the next year they won with what Brennan thought was an even better routine.
“She thrived in that Westminster atmosphere,” Brennan says, “the applause and the electricity in the air.”
Heart won again in 2018 — good for a three-peat — but then Brennan found out the rules for the obedience category were different than she expected. They’d need to win five in a row to take home the trophy.
The competition she says, was “coming for you.”
“After I won it [the fourth year], the judge was so sweet,” Brennan says. “She said to me, ‘You know, my husband said to me before I came here: Whatever you do, don’t let that girl who’s won it every time win again.'”
Brennan wondered whether she’d ever have another dog like Heart, so she kept going in the quest for five obedience titles. In February 2020, they won their trophy.
A few months later, Heart was diagnosed with cancer and died that next February. Brennan still gets choked up when she talks about it. But she will always remember the night they won the trophy, when Heart was in the spotlight, at Madison Square Garden, and was a very good girl who was petted by many people.
“She just thought,” Brennan says, “that was the best thing ever.”