A Superbness of Owls
A good day for the "Defense Wins Championships!" Guy
I first started really paying attention to football back in the mid-1980s, which was the beginning of a really dominant run by the NFC. They won 13 Super Bowls in a row, and only two of them were at all close (the 49ers beating the Bengals 20-16 in 1989 and my Giants beating the Bills 20-19 in 1991). Most of the games were pretty clearly over before halftime, at which point we were only watching for the commercials.
Over the last decade or two the inter-conference win totals have evened up a bit. The last fifteen years have been almost evenly split (the NFC leads 8-7), and before last night only two of the games had been old-fashioned shellackings. They’ve mostly been pretty good games, margin within a score or two, and a couple of them went to overtime.
Last night felt like a bit of a throwback to my youth: the NFC team came out and just bullied the AFC team for three full quarters. The Eagles led 24-0 at halftime, and it didn’t even feel that close. The final score doesn’t look completely awful, but that’s mostly because Philadelphia stopped trying in the fourth quarter.
Anyway, it wasn’t great football, but I did stay up to watch the whole thing, so I might as well get a blog post out of that… So here are some scattered thoughts about the whole business:
— Football-wise, it’s a good day for the “Defense Wins Championships!” Guy. It’s an even better day for me, a confirmed “Line Play Wins Football Games” Guy. Pretty much the entire story of this was in the line play: Kansas City couldn’t stop Philly’s defensive line from getting to Patrick Mahomes (they sacked him six times without ever calling a blitz), and he was running for his life on a lot of plays where he didn’t end up taking the sack. Since they didn’t need to rush extra guys to get pressure, nobody was open down the field, so Mahomes’s passing numbers through three quarters were just awful (they ended up looking okay on paper, but again, the Eagles stopped trying in the fourth quarter).
On the other side, the Chiefs had clearly decided to sell out to stop the run, which they did very successfully— as a Giants fan I was hoping Saquon Barkley would have a big game (he handled the awful situation in New York with a lot of class, and I wish him well), but they bottled him up. They had very little success at getting near Jalen Hurts, though, and he just ate them up. To some extent this reflects a choice on KC’s part— the classic “we don’t think that guy can beat us” call— but it’s also a testament to the quality of the Eagles’ offensive line.
For all the endless hype surrounding quarterbacks and knucklehead wide receivers, that’s where you win football games. An all-time great quarterback behind an overmatched offensive line can be made to look pretty terrible, while a merely very good QB can look great with the right protection. (The ultimate example of this, for my yelling-at-clouds cohort, is Mark Rypien in 1991-2 with the Washington Racialslurs).
— In the second quarter, Philadelphia’s rookie cornerback Cooper DeJean intercepted Mahomes and ran it in for a score. They flashed up a graphic after the ensuing commercial break noting that it was DeJean’s 22nd birthday, and that he was the second player in history to score a touchdown in an NFL championship game played on his birthday.
Which is really just about the best live-action example you’ll ever see of the “If I had a nickel for every [Thing] I’d only have two nickels but it’s weird that it’s happened twice” joke.
— Speaking of the inevitable ad breaks, I thought the Seal-as-an-actual-seal ad for Mountain Dew was going to be the most horrifying thing I saw all night. But then there was the Fleshy Cowboy Hat spot from Tubi in the second half, which was a “Nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.” level abomination. Jesus, people.
— That said, the single most personally irritating ad for me was probably the NFL’s in-house spot promoting flag football for girls. It’s bad enough that unfuckable dorks use my name as a derogatory term, I don’t need the biggest sports league in all the land piling on…
— I missed a good chunk of the first half while I asked multiple times over the last week whether The Pip would be attending any Super Bowl events hosted by friends and was assured that he’d be watching at home, you can guess what happened. Five minutes into the game he got a phone call from a friend and after a bit of discussion and a change of outfit, he asked for a ride to another kid’s house. Which sort of conveniently put me in the car in time to go pick up the food we had ordered for both him and SteelyKid, but meant I was only getting the radio call of the game.
(Happily for my wasitline, I had actually screwed up the order, forgetting one of the items The Pip had requested, so I didn’t end up eating a colossal pile of leftover fried crap…)
I apparently missed one of the two semi-controversial calls of the game, and got back just after the commercial break where replay overturned an apparent long TD pass from Hurts to Jahan Dotson. Which instead led to the ball being placed on the half-yard line and another dumb “Tush Push” touchdown. Really glad I caught that…
— SteelyKid, who is generally anti-sports was also watching, mostly for the ads and also the Kendrick Lamar halftime show. Which was… fine? The Super Bowl halftime spectacles are never really for me any more: they tend to feature current artists whose stuff I mostly don’t know, and the shows tend to lean very heavily on enormous troupes of dancers doing complicated dances in unison, which is an art form that just doesn’t interest me.
Kendrick Lamar is at least somebody whose work I know a little (I own two of his albums, and have listened to some of his other stuff on streaming). I can recognize that he’s good at what he does, in terms of the lyrics and delivery. But, frankly, his voice sounds like an irate Muppet to me, and I have a hard time getting past that. The rest of this was the usual: a medley of songs, some celebrity cameos, and mass dancing. Meh.
(Also, the song “Reincarnated” has been coming up on shuffle play a lot recently, and the lyrics end with a dialogue with some sort of possibly-divine father figure, including the exchange:
"So can you promise that you won't take your gifts for granted?"
I promise that I'll use my gifts to bring understanding
"For every man, woman and child, how much can you vow?"
I vow my life just to live one in harmony now
And every time it comes up, I think, “my dude, you are about to play the Super Bowl and revel in doing a song calling one of your rivals a pedophile, so I don’t really need this self-aggrandizing horseshit…”)
— The other thing I’ve seen a bunch of commentary about is, well, the commentary. Specifically, Tom Brady calling the Super Bowl for the first time. Which was… okay I guess? I saw a lot of people complaining that he spent too much time talking about the Super Bowls he played in with the Patriots and Buccaneers, but it didn’t bug me that much because, as noted above, it was kind of a terrible game. Which means there’s not a whole lot interesting to say about the action on the field, but you still have to fill hours of live television with… something.
Which, again, is kind of a flashback to Super Bowls of my youth, where you’d end up with John Madden diagramming the Gatorade dump because that was a better use of time than talking about what was happening in the game.
— Speaking of Brady, he featured in one of the two best post-game jokes I saw on social media, namely: “So we see once again that Patrick Mahomes isn’t able to win a playoff game when Tom Brady is in the building…” The other was this, from a meme account on Facebook:
(Honestly, as much as I think the bad game wasn’t attributable to Mahomes personally, if this poor showing leads to some scaling back of his omnipresence in tv spots, that would be a net win for human civilization…)
And that’s about enough of that. Farewell to (American) football until September; on to basketball and baseball.
So there’s your dose of unnecessary sports commentary. If you want more of this, for some reason, here’s a button:
And if you want to argue with my football analysis or call me an “oldhead” for not appreciating Kendrick Lamar’s brilliance, the comments will be open:
Really was a throwback to the pre Brady era of our youth when the nfc championship was always the “real” championship because the nfc champion was going to brutalize a flashy AFC offense in the Super Bowl. I guess the difference between this and the Bucs loss was that even Chiefs fans knew that the line couldn’t hold back Suh and all those guys they had that year. When they got by the Texans (who had a strong defense) and the Bills this year it seemed like things were under control and they’d win at the end. I saw somebody write that the chiefs fans were only believing because they didn’t pay attention to the nfc playoffs, that it was obvious to any dispassionate observer that the eagles front four was going to be too much. I think that’s right. I was horrified but even as a chiefs fan one had to admire the savagery.
The evergreen lesson is that if you can provide pressure with the front three or front four alone you are in a really good position to win, because you can keep enough guys back in pass coverage and still make the quarterback's life miserable on the front end. (See: Pats-Giants x2 in addition to last night.)