So it's the Super Bowl everyone hated because it's the Super Bowl everyone feared—the one you saw two years ago. You know, the one with all the points and yards and lead changes and quarterback stuff. Yeah, that one. The one that sucked, even though everyone liked it at the time.
Yes, you spoiled piglets, you're getting the much-dreaded reprise of Chiefs-Eagles, the third-highest scoring Superb Owl of them all. It's all because Josh Allen couldn't reach Dalton Kincaid with a drive-saving pass because George Karlaftis was the one pass rusher the Buffalo Bills couldn't account for with the AFC championship on the line, and because Patrick Mahomes could find Samaje Perine in the flat with the game's security on the line. Because Kansas City is on a roll of winning games by a cheese-slice-thick margin almost unprecedented in NFL history and is, for the moment, the most unbeatable beatable team there has ever been. Because the Chiefs, for all their socially recidivist trappings, just know how to do this shit.
The truth is that by beating the cursed-by-Nosferatu Bills, 32-29, the Chiefs earned their way to the brink of unbearable annoyance, which is the second-best thing a team can have next to the love of a grateful nation. Since we regard gratitude the way we regard tertiary syphilis, let us hate-bathe in the Super Bowl you all said would make you quit football forever.
See, it's not the matchup America objects to. It's what we know is coming before the game—all the Kelces and Swifts and Mahomeses(es) and legacy blather and pissing/moaning about officials on the take, and Tom Brady comparisons and worst of all, by a wide margin, lots more Andy Reid leering bug-eyed through that Swedish psychopath impersonation of "Fumble-a-rooskie-doo" on a 336-hour loop of serial crime advertising. Plus, we haven't covered the litany of Philadelphia's felony-powered sociopathies that will remind us why we hate leaving the house.
And we get it. No football game, no matter how potentially intriguing, is worth all that, especially when you realize that this will be the third straight Fortnight Of America At Its Worst: The same story line only tripled down for extra repetition.
And we get it. The game may be sensational, but the lead-in is going to be Victor Wembanyama's middle finger down all our throats, the moment our gag reflexes all merge into a gigantic tracheotomy from hell. Your only hope is to concentrate on the game because, even if the game turns into Patriots-Rams (the worst Super Bowl of all time), it will be galactically better than everything that comes before it.
And we get it, because the Super Bowl is about the game in the same way that America's Got Talent is about talent and, no, Kendrick Lamar at halftime can't save it. In fact, Kendrick Lamar at halftime will do as much damage to Kendrick Lamar as Kendrick Lamar did to Drake—until people got tired of the Kendrick-Drake feud and moved on to political shithousery and other amusements.
But the game is coming off a record-breaking points tsunami of a conference championship weekend. Eighteen touchdowns and 139 total points, with just five field goals after the most kick-happy season in NFL history. If you can skip everything that comes first, including any conversation in which you are supposed to be included, you might well find the game a captivating event. Just be somewhere else for the rest of it.
The only problem here is that the chances of this Chiefs-Eagles game being as good as that other Chiefs-Eagles game are probably minimal. Part of the law of big numbers is that games with big numbers tend to regress to the mean like everything else. The two teams come into the next game with a combined record of 34-5, the best aggregate record for two finalists since 1998. But they weren't fun like Detroit and Buffalo and Lamar Jackson Unchained, and they didn't win enough games by enough points to satisfy the "Good Teams Win, Great Teams Cover" crowd, and because we hate reruns (and anything with Jake From State Farm attached to it), we will spite-watch this game because the two-week approach will seem like walking Interstate 10 from Phoenix to Palm Springs on July 4 naked and barefoot. We will bargain with nature to send a pack of wolves to eat us instead.
For all that, the games Sunday actually were worth the dread to come. That is, until you wake up at 3 a.m. Thursday and hear voices from downstairs that scare your skin off, only to find out that it's just Andy Reid over-emoting "Great Googley Moogley" on the TV you forgot to switch off Wednesday night. You will spend the rest of the morning fighting off the urge to set fire to your own garage with you sitting in it. If that isn't a metaphor for the United States in 2025, well, don't say 2025 hasn't done its damnedest.
