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.
Sorry but the history says otherwise. Again: first SB to sell out, first SB to have better ratings than the separate championships (technically league) that came before, first SB to have high profile celebrity attendance, first SB to be called Super Bowl. Something had to spawn all that, and it sure wasn’t the matchup everybody thought was going to be another vicious beating of an AFL team by an NFL team.