For a half, the Super Bowl's Most Valuable Player was either Jason Myers or Bad Bunny, and you could have gotten equal odds on either one. But bad games rarely stay bad forever, and because the second half more resembled a normal game with exotic things like touchdowns, we would not be subjected to a choice of potential MVPs between the Seattle Seahawks place kicker and the star of the halftime show. In the end, there would also be Seattle punter Michael Dickson.
Such was the comprehensive beatdown that was LX, a 29-13 Seattle triumph over the New England Patriots whose final score actually flattered the Pats. No matter what statistic you could pull from the game, if it did not lead directly to a tale of the Seahawks' utter dominance, it was a lie. Drake Maye threw for 295 yards that didn't matter. Kenneth Walker The Third ran for 135 yards, which was about 100 less than it looked. The bad part of that is, because almost everyone expected the game to be a rout for the Seahawks, there is nobody to mock today. Everyone was right, from your grandfather who's been saying "defense wins championships" since you were crib-bait, to the lowliest pundit who ran out of ideas four days too soon, to the mugs in Las Vegas who took all the New England money they could get and nearly got a group hernia from the stifled laughter. You couldn't find anyone outside of Bill Simmons who saw a happy ending for New England, and now you know why.
The truth was simple: The much better team behaved like it because it was never forced to do anything but be the performative bully it was advertised to be. Nothing complicated or video breakdown-worthy. No highlight package that could even qualify as a discovery motion. Seattle's two best plays came after the game stopped mattering—a stripsack/pick-six by Uchenna Nwosu that killed off all Patriot delusions, and a subsequent 49-yard touchdown run by Walker The Third that was nullified by a Jalen Sundell hold. One sensed that they could have been recreated any time the Seahawks saw fit to repave their lead. As it was, neither did anything but make a long-decided game even less palatable for Patriot apologists. This could and probably should have been significantly more lopsided than the scoreboard said it was, and the scoreboard was plenty derisive on its own.
Seattle's defense allowed nothing to endanger the team's chances of winning until it was too late for them to lose. Their control of the line of scrimmage rendered Maye skittish for most of the game, and the offense did just enough often enough in the first half to make the second half inconsequential. There was no moment when a reasonable person thought Seattle could fail, either through the hand of the often discomfiting Sam Darnold or the open bar that broadcasters are contractually bound to call the replay booth. The Seahawks turned a game from a potentially intriguing matchup into feeding time at a reptile farm. Nothing more to see here, folks. Move along.
The Super Bowl promises much in normal times, in large part because it tries to be everything to everyone. The weeks of hype gave way to a week-long infomercial, followed by a five-hour pregame dreck-fest that, this year, included a garbled message from Doctor Rambling Tedium and commercials that did everything but provide the identities of the products they shilled. It's the American smorgasbord made real. The game? Well, it's on its own.
And this year, the game failed fully to compel, for the very simple reason that one team was built to modern specs for success (read: defense is more important to success than offense, and always have a reliable kicker) and the other was too poor too recently to make the full transition to championship level. If there was a plot twist, it never revealed itself, unless you're talking about Lady Gaga turning up out of nowhere, the halftime show marriage, or the fan who ran on the field and turned Mike Tirico into Judge Roy Bean. Frankly, in any fair-minded society Bad Bunny would have been the MVP rather than Walker, for without him you would have remembered nothing about the game save the amount of empty food containers you hauled out to the garbage in your bare feet.
So what is to be done about your recollections of Super Bowl The X Of L? Nothing. Forget it ever happened. Tell your friends you were watching curling, or went to late Sunday church, or fell asleep at halftime. The Make-Super-Bowl-Monday-A-National-Holiday Movement took a genuine beating because nobody needs to rest up after this one, let alone pretend the game took too much out of your will to work. It was, in one way, the worst kind of game—the one that leaves no trace once the on-field confetti cannons have been silenced. American commerce and post-modern entertainment standards did their best but, for one of the rare times in modern sport, the game never came close to pulling its weight. It was what we thought it would be, the way we thought it would be what it was, and frankly, nobody wants that level of predictability. They wanted the game Bad Bunny played instead, and nobody will be surprised if he isn't made the early betting favorite for Super Bowl The LX&I, next year in what by rights should be San Juan.
