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No team in Super Bowl history loaded up to get there quite like the 1994 San Francisco 49ers. Jimmy Johnson’s rival Dallas Cowboys had won the previous two Super Bowls, beating the 49ers in the NFC Championship Game both times. Mike Holmgren’s Green Bay Packers were rising in the NFC. Free agency was new. Competition was palpable.
Then-49ers owner Eddie DeBartolo Jr. opened his checkbook, adding future Hall of Famers Deion Sanders, Rickey Jackson and Richard Dent in free agency, plus Ken Norton Jr., Bart Oates and Gary Plummer. That all-in San Francisco team also traded up from No. 15 to No. 7 in the first round of the 1994 draft to select Bryant Young, who became a Hall of Famer.
Those 49ers beat the Cowboys in the NFC title game and won it all, covering an 18.5-point Super Bowl spread versus the San Diego Chargers.
An East Coast businessman with advanced degrees in psychology and social policy was taking detailed notes. Jeffrey Lurie, who purchased the Philadelphia Eagles that same year, said his team would be “as aggressive in the front office as we expect the players to be on the field.”
Lurie, more than most, always seems to be pushing. The “Dream Team” that his Eagles assembled in free agency 13 years ago crashed, but this year, the team’s most audacious bet — on former New York Giants running back Saquon Barkley — highlighted a historic offseason.
The 2024 Eagles are the only Super Bowl team since 1970 with two veteran additions who earned first-team Associated Press All-Pro honors, per Pro Football Reference. Fourteen other Super Bowl teams had one such newcomer. The remaining 95 teams had zero.
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