Super Bowl XXIV coaches; rookie head coach George Seifert took over after Bill Walsh retired following the previous season's Super Bowl. The 49ers finished the 1989 regular season with a league best 14–2 record. The Broncos, who posted an 11–5 regular season record, entered the Super Bowl looking to avoid tying the Minnesota Vikings with four Super Bowl losses as well as the Vikings record of losing three Super Bowls in four years. This game remains the most lopsided game in Super Bowl history. San Francisco's 55 points were the most ever scored by one team, and their 45-point margin of victory was
Tex Schramm had built the Cowboys into an elite team. The Cowboys, despite two consecutive losses to the Green Bay Packers in the NFL Championship Game in 1966 and '67, had 20 consecutive winning seasons, and won the most games of any NFL team of the 1970s. They appeared in five Super Bowls that decade, winning Super Bowls VI and XII, and losing Super Bowls V, X, and XIII by a combined 11 points. The Cowboys became a marquee NFL franchise, their popularity inspiring the nickname "America's Team". In 1966, Schramm met secretly with American Football League (AFL) founder Lamar Hunt to