A Closer Look At The History Of The 'Super Bowl Hangover' Effect

Couple thoughts:

• Super Bowl winners are 423-216 the year after proceeding a Super Bowl win. That's nearly a .662 winning % in what's supposed the be a 'hangover year.' 
• When I set out to do this exercise, I hypothesized that if there was in fact some historical grounding to the 'SB Hangover Effect', teams would bounce back the year after the 'hangover.' I thought this might be particularly true in the years before free agency was introduced to the league in the 1993 Collective Bargaining Agreement. Well, first of all, it's hard to really say that teams historically struggle the year after winning a Lombardi. Sure, there have only been 8 repeat champions, but....
• Only 12 SB winners failed to make the playoffs the following year. The Steelers championships teams of 2005 and 1979 did not return to the postseason to make a run at repeat glory. It sure appears as if th 2008 SB winning Steelers will not be returning to the post season to try to defend their title.
• The back-to-back championships by Pittsburgh in both '74/'75 and '78/'79 constitute 2 of the 8 times teams have repeated. That's quite an impressive list of quarterbacks behind those title runs: Troy Aikman, Brett Favre, John Elway, Joe Montana, Steve Young, Tom Brady, Bart Starr and of course, Terry Bradshaw. 
• Back to my hypothesis that teams might bounce back two years after winning it all. Firstly, here's the record of teams two years removed from their championship:  400-241-1 Again, that's quite an impressive winning percentage. .624 to be precise. 
• There really have only been a handful of teams that really fell off substantially following their SB wins. The 2002 Buccaneers for example weren't very good in 2003 and 2004. But they were very free agent heavy earlier that decade and couldn't sustain that kind of spending. Jon Gruden also phased out Tony Dungy's system with his own philosophy and the Bucs began their slide back towards the middle of the pack fairly quickly. The first repeat champs - the Green Bay Packers - also trended back towards the mean. They'd miss the playoffs consecutive years following Super Bowls I and II. A few Joe Gibbs coached teams weren't that special either following their title runs. 
• In the first few years of the 1980s, the Steelers too fell off after their dynastic run throughout the 1970s. Yes, even the legends of Steelers lore couldn't sustain their dominance forever as an era gradually came to an end.
• Generally speaking though, I gotta say - I don't really see it when it comes to there being a noticeable 'Super Bowl Hangover' effect. In fact, this exercise made me realize really how much of the NFL's history has been dominated by a handful of dynasties and a small group of other franchises that have enjoyed the sweet taste of Super Bowl success. The teams that have been good have stayed good.