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WHO COINED THE PHRASE “ON ANY GIVEN SUNDAY?”

After he became commissioner of the National Football League, Bert Bell went to great lengths to emphasize that the league was so balanced that a team could win any given game at any time—even if it was an decided underdog.

“Both my brother Upton and I heard my father say On any given Sunday…many times,” recalled Bert., Jr., who obtained intellectual rights to the phrase a number of years ago.

On November 30, 1958, Pittsburgh upset the Chicago Bears, 24-10 for the Steelers’ first win over the Bears in 14 games spanning more than 24 years. Afterwards, a sportswriter asked Bell what he thought of the game.

“It doesn’t matter in the NFL how many games you win, what your score is, how well you do,” he replied. “On any given Sunday, any team in the NFL can win.”

“Commissioner Bert Bell had already coined a phrase that was soon to become a slogan: On any given Sunday, any team in the NFL can beat any other,” Tom Callahan wrote in his book “Johnny: The Life and Times of John Unitas.”

But after the Steelers-Bears game that day in 1958, the commissioner’s favorite saying received even more attention and was well on its way to becoming the defining axiom of the NFL. It remains as the league’s most prominent slogan to this day.