had never advanced to the Super Bowl in their franchise history. In the 60 years since their last national championship, the team had won just one playoff game (20-7 over the Dallas Cowboys in the 1998 NFC Wild Card Game). The Steelers then passed over Grimm and instead hired Minnesota Vikings defensive coordinator Mike Tomlin. Once Tomlin was hired by the Steelers, Grimm joined Whisenhunt in Arizona in the same position as assistant head coach as he had in Pittsburgh, and the two of them began to remodel the perennial losing club into a winner like the Steelers. Of historical note the game matched up two franchises previously merged into a single team, "Card-Pitt", for the 1944 season in response to the depleted rosters during World War II. Pittsburgh was going for its sixth Super Bowl win, which would place it in sole possession of the record for most Super Bowl wins, while the Cardinals were seeking their first league title since 1947 and only the second undisputed league championship in their history. (The then-Chicago Cardinals were named the NFL champions in 1925 for finishing with the best record, but also because the Pottsville Maroons (who, like Pittsburgh, were based in Pennsylvania) had been fined and suspended for playing a game against the Notre Dame football team in another NFL franchise's territory.) It was the third Super Bowl in history to feature two pre-expansion-era (pre-1960) teams, joining Super Bowl XIV (Steelers vs. Los Angeles Rams, the latter of which coincidentally also went 9–7 in the regular season) and Super Bowl XLI (Indianapolis Colts vs. Chicago Bears). This game also featured the oldest franchise in the NFC playing the oldest franchise in the AFC. The Cardinals were founded in 1898 as an independent amateur team in Chicago. The Steelers, founded in 1933 as the Pittsburgh Pirates, are one of only three AFC teams that pre-date the 1960 NFL season. The Cardinals and Steelers played each other twice per season from 1950 through 1969, first in the American Conference (1950–52), then in the Eastern Conference (1953–66), and finally in the Century Division of the Eastern Conference (1967–69). It also was the first time that two quarterbacks who previously started for a Super Bowl winning team (Kurt Warner and Ben Roethlisberger) opposed one another since Jim Plunkett's Los Angeles Raiders defeated Joe Theismann's Washington Redskins in Super Bowl XVIII. Warner started for the