Namath’s SB win is great because he made a guarantee, which gave the game drama, which caused it to be the first SB to sell out, and the first SB to get better ratings than the conference finals that preceded it, which caused the merger (which had only been approved on a 3 year trial basis) to be considered a success and made permanent. Pretty much everybody admits that Namath didn’t play that great, but without him flapping his jaw it’s probably another half empty stadium with nobody watching on TV and the merger gets unwound. And game MVPs can be odd things, sometimes nobody sticks out but somebody has to get the damn thing.
You might not think the guarantee mattered. But just look at the yawn the first 2 SBs were greeted with compared to 3, it mattered. Making it made the SB an event, and fulfilling it made the merger get finalized. Without that we don’t have the modern NFL.
His guarantee didn’t matter because no one remembered it until after the game. Namath was drunk and resopnding to a heckler. It wasn’t even a member of the press.