It won't be the lead in anyone else's analysis of Sunday's NFL conference championship games, but the news that the Malignant Tangerine In Chief will not be going to the Super Bowl breaking too late to save the turgid New England/Denver game and just soon enough to undercut the NFC nightcap could well have been the biggest story of the weekend. Instead, the Seahawks and Rams delivered one of the finest games in a postseason full of them, and managed to make the president a footnote in the process.
You may judge that a coincidence, but we would suggest that knowing that they were competing to play in a game that Donald Trump would definitely not be attending inspired the Seahawks and Rams into delivering the brilliant showdown that riveted a traumatized nation. You got a better explanation? Keep it to yourself. We know what we want this to be, and since we don't like the news, we're just making up some of our own. And if all that wasn't actually what inspired the action in the NFC championship, the end result was pretty inspired all the same.
Of course, the mudslide-in-a-suit blamed his decision not to attend the Super Bowl on a long flight and the presence of Bad Bunny and Green Day, which in and of itself should earn the aforementioned musical acts and whoever invented time zones Congressional Medals of Honor. But, again, this is less interesting than Sunday's two football games and starkly disparate they were.
Of the Pats and Broncos, little enough needs be said to buttress Comrade Thompson's analysis on Sunday. The two teams shadowboxed awhile during a forebodingly sunny first half while they tried to figure out whether boredom is a strategy or a tactic, and then a biblical foulweather extravaganza struck Mile High Stadium and rendered all such considerations moot. The 10-7 final was explanatory if not flattering; the most noteworthy aspect of New England's survival might be that Bill Belichick was stuck watching it somewhere in North Carolina while working on NIL pitches and eating his own liver. Put another way, the game was rendered unplayable for the entirety of its back half and therefore magnificent as a spectacle in the way such anti-spectacles are.
But Seahawks-Rams, which was played in far more clement conditions, was a triumph by all involved for all involved. Well, more for the Seahawks than Rams, but you get the drift. The most notable of those triumphs was the happy news story of the weekend, Darnold, who had spent much of his career as the NFL's most pie-able and readily memed faces, and is now going to his first Super Bowl as the starting quarterback of the better team. This wasn't some Trent Dilfer-style ascent-by-association, either; Darnold played a nearly perfect game on Sunday, and was very much the reason why the Seahawks survived an extremely game Rams effort. Blessed finally with supporting talents that wouldn't take him off at the shins as in previous stops, and determined in the face of torrents of often merited ridicule to see this football thing out, Darnold had one of his greatest games, throwing for 125 more yards and two more touchdowns than Jarrett Stidham and Drake Maye threw for combined. More to the point, he also outplayed presumptive NFL MVP Matthew Stafford, and did so convincingly enough to more or less shake that uniquely stubborn Jets-stink off his career.
Of course, Darnold was also buoyed by being on the best team that he has ever played for, and by decent weather, and the bailouts offered him by Jaxon Smith-Njigba (10 catches, 153 yards and the go-ahead touchdown), Kenneth Walker III (19 carries, 62 yards, one score and a series of drive-extending runs), and the inimitable Jake Bobo, who was the recipient of every classic game's critical/inexplicable touchdown pass to the one player who was not in anyone's scouting report. Bobo had been targeted as many times in his last two years with the Seahawks as Smith-Njigba and Puka Nacua caught balls yesterday, but his score gave Seattle a safe lead it held the rest of the night. It came off the one crushing mistake the Rams made all night, Xavier Smith's muffed punt, and Darnold found Bobo on the next play to give Seattle an 11-point lead the Rams were never able to breach.
In retrospect, this is all very much Team Of Destiny stuff, but plenty of box scores read like that in retrospect. In the moment, both the Rams and Stafford, who also was spectacularly better than Maye and Stidham combined, fought feverishly to keep themselves in position to steal the game until they ran out of time and time outs. Two more plays and something like 20 more seconds might have made this a Rams story, and treated us to countless retrospective dumbasseries about the last Rams/Patriots Super Bowl, which remains to date the worst watch in the game's six-decade history. That grueling Patriots win was the last time Bill Belichick smiled for strangers, a 13-3 sludgebucket in which he turned the tactical clock back to to 1952, emerged victorious for the sixth and final time, and began his long march towards whatever this is.
Instead of that rematch, we have this, a Super Bowl in which the smart, stupid and disinterested money all thinks the Seahawks are the better play, and will continue to think so until game time, at which point they seem very likely to comprehensively prove it. A Seattle win will serve to complete Darnold's redemption, whose trip as a pro since being selected third overall eight drafts ago has been a series of WTFs with a slice of YGBSMs (you gotta be shitting me). He would be the first quarterback, and quite possibly the last, to go on to win a Super Bowl after achieving meme status due to an on-screen graphic about him having mononucleosis.
But whatever happens in that game, Sunday's other news guarantees that we will be able to enjoy a national holiday without Donald Trump appearing onscreen to remind us why we're all trying to figure out how to get Belgian citizenship. In short, this was a great day for Sam Darnold and the rest of the Seahawks, but also for Bad Bunny and the members of Green Day and all of us, too. Seahawks-Rams really was great, and it is also great that Darnold is the center of our Super Bowl scenarios two weeks before the game is played. "It could have been worse" is the standard, now, and the NFC championship game cleared that bar with room to spare.
