Super Bowl of the Super Bowl, while the Jaguars (1995) and Texans (2002) are both recent NFL expansion teams. (Detroit, Houston, and Jacksonville, however, have hosted a Super Bowl, leaving the Browns the only team to date who has neither played in nor whose city has hosted the game.) The Minnesota Vikings won the last NFL Championship before the merger but lost to the AFL champion Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl IV. The Green Bay Packers won the first two Super Bowls (Known as the AFL-NFL World Championship Game for these first two contests), defeating the Kansas City Chiefs and Oakland
Super Bowl XXXVIII Panthers made their first trip to the Super Bowl after posting a one-win regular season just two years earlier. The franchise was only in their ninth year of existence, joining the league as an expansion team in 1995. In just their second season, they posted a 12–4 regular season record and advanced to the NFC Championship Game, but lost to the eventual Super Bowl champion Green Bay Packers 30–13 (the Packers coincidentally went on to defeat the Patriots in Super Bowl XXXI 35–21). But from 1997 onward, they had just one non-losing season (an 8–8 finish in 1999) until they