The road to the Super Bowl is underway and fans of the Denver Broncos and Seattle Seahawks are excited of course because their teams are the number one seeds going into the annual NFL post-season tournament.

The winner of the NFC and AFC finals gets to tangle in the Big Apple for the Super Bowl and most of the fans you might speak to in either of those cities are already booking their flights and hotel rooms.

But hold on a minute!

Just because your team is the number one seed doesn’t mean they are headed for NYC to hoist the Lombardi trophy if history has anything to do with it.

In fact, there is a good chance these two teams might not even make it to the prom.

Using the year 2002 as a base (that’s when divisions were realigned) the number one seeds in either league has not faired all that well it seems.

In that season, the Raiders were the number one team in the AFC and the Eagles were their NFC counterpart. Then along came Tampa Bay who beat the Eagles in the NFC final and clobbered the Raiders in the Super Bowl.

The next year it was New England and the Eagles meeting as number one seeds with the Patriots winning the big game but then you have to skip to 2009 before another number one seed managed to win the Super Bowl as New Orleans beat the other number one seed in Peyton Manning and the Colts.

Then the Patriots and Falcons rang up a number one seeding and didn’t even get to the game in 2010 but New England made up for that only to lose in the Super Bowl.

In 2012 the Broncos and Falcons were the big men on the NFL campus but again but teams were dumped before they got to the dance.

So you can understand why some fans in Seattle and Denver might be a little wary of being crowned the league champion by record only.

There is still plenty of football to play this year and no shortage of teams ready to take out the big gun at any point of the playoff run.

So the rest of the teams in the mix are certainly not out of this and can take solace in the fact in seven of the post 2002 Super Bowls the lower seeded team has a 6-1 record. Of course the hard part is getting to the game.

Let the party begin!

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