Don Shula built plenty of great football teams over his Hall of Fame coaching career, but nothing else in NFL history comes close to what his 1972 Miami Dolphins pulled off.
That team went a perfect 17-0, becoming the only club in the league’s 100-plus year history to finish an entire season, regular season and playoffs included, without a single loss. They capped the run with a 14-7 win over the Washington Redskins in Super Bowl VII, and to this day, no other team has matched it.
The roster wasn’t just undefeated, it was stacked. Quarterback Bob Griese, running back Larry Csonka, receiver Paul Warfield, guard Larry Little and the “No-Name Defense” anchored by linebacker Nick Buoniconti all went on to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, giving that squad six enshrined players plus Shula himself. Along the way, the Dolphins also led the entire NFL in both scoring offense and scoring defense that season.
In 2019, as part of the NFL’s 100th anniversary celebrations, an 80-person “blue-ribbon” panel made up of experts selected by the Associated Press and NFL Media set out to rank the greatest teams the league had ever seen. The 1972 Dolphins came out on top, edging out legendary squads like the 1985 Chicago Bears and the 1989 San Francisco 49ers for the No. 1 spot.
More than 30 members of that team, including Shula himself, returned to Hard Rock Stadium later that year to be honored on the field. It wasn’t the first time the team was celebrated at that level, either, President Obama invited the entire roster to the White House back in 2013, decades after their perfect season wrapped, to finally give them the recognition they’d missed out on the first time around.
The Dolphins proved their dominance wasn’t a fluke, either. The following season, they went 12-2 and won the Super Bowl again, becoming back-to-back champions.