The Kansas City Chiefs did the sensible, defensive, and very orthodox thing when they won the opening coin flip of Super Bowl 59—they deferred possession until the second half. It was the last thing they controlled the entire evening.
The team that rope-a-doped their way to almost incandescent glory in 2024 instead found out that sometimes, you just can't slip the punch. It wasn't the third-time's-not-the-charm jinx that did them in, it was the Philadelphia Eagles. And more decisively, it was the Eagles with only some Saquon Barkley, an entirely different M.O. That meant the Chiefs weren't undone by a single player but a smothering collective impervious to even Patrick Mahomes's multileveled sorceries. The final score of 40-22 grossly flattered the Chiefs and barely explained Philadelphia's dominance. It's as if the "GAME OVER" legend at the end of Kendrick Lamar's halftime show had been frantically cobbled together after Zack Baun's second-quarter interception.
And it was a cathartic evening for Eagles fans, whose memories of harsh endings ignores the fact that they celebrated a championship just seven years ago. If nothing else, the fan base can no longer justify their default settings. They are now blessed rather than cursed, and they will have to shift into smug mode for the foreseeable future.
The Baun interception seems of little consequence now, but it shifted a surprising start into a full-fledged rout. At the time, the Eagles were ahead "only" 17-0, and 17 didn't seem like enough points against Mahomes. It was a reasonable concern, but Baun's moment of glory and the subsequent touchdown pass to A.J. Brown that turned 17 into 24 essentially sealed the deal in one of the most comprehensive beatings in championship game history.
The Baun pick was the second of Mahomes's three turnovers, the first being Cooper DeJean's pick-six midway through the second that gave the Eagles that 17-0 lead. But because we are speaking of Mahomes here and a Chiefs team that flirted with failure through almost all their victories, DeJean's coup de grace felt more like a found wallet than proof of Philadelphia's basic superiority.
But making that superiority clear was merely a matter of time and repetition for the Eagles. The second-half kickoff to Kansas City produced two more sacks of Mahomes (numbers four and five in a stunning and career-high six-volume set) and reminded us that this game was not about magic but muscle. Once the Eagles got the ball, they unlocked Barkley and chip-shotted a 29-yard field goal from Jake Elliott to make it 27-0. One series later, the Chiefs failed to convert a fourth-and-5 on their own side of the field, leading to a brilliant 46-yard touchdown pass from Jalen Hurts to DeVonta Smith. That made it 34-0, and there would be nothing even resembling a rebuttal from the defrocked champions. These Chiefs did not have it in them. Instead, this was the most mathematically lopsided and physically comprehensive defeat in Mahomesian history. The Chiefs' dynasty might not be over, but it is clearly in abeyance.
Kansas City's offensive line could not block well enough for Mahomes to find receivers, not even well enough to allow him to escape to create something from the nothing he was provided, even though the Eagles did not blitz a single time. They moved the line of scrimmage six yards into the Chiefs' backfield on a regular basis, and the result was almost alien to the sport Mahomes and Andy Reid understand.
In failing to finish the threepeat, the Chiefs became the 16th team in pro football history to be so shorted, and the ninth since the merger. Each of the other eight teams that got to two but not three never even reached the big one, losing in the conference final to a superior rival and having to watch other people steal their legacies. Indeed, the last team to win three titles in succession was coached by the man whose name has been appropriated for the trophy: the 1965, '66 and '67 Green Bay Packers under Vince Lombardi. Those Packers won the last title before the AFL-NFL merger and the first two Super Bowls, one of just three teams since football was codified as legalized human crashes to assemble three consecutive championships. Mercifully for us, the surviving Packers from that 1967 team do not gather to spite-toast the rest of the sport for not matching their deeds the way the 1972 Dolphins do, in part because they are all in their early- to mid-80s and don't get around that easily any more.
Rather, the toasting will be done with beers by civilians climbing lampposts and standing atop buses as they face a brand new world with indisputable bragging rights. Even Eagles fans long inured to the coal-in-stockings endings that had been Philadelphia's historical stock in trade must recognize that this was the team they always pretended they deserved. This was the championship that forgave Jalen Hurts and A.J. Brown and Nick Sirianni and Vic Fangio and Howie Roseman and all the other well-slandered employees for all their prior crimes and misdemeanors against the faithful. The Eagles are now fully on scholarship for the duration, and while that might be a difficult adjustment for a town that hates its own with crystalline brilliance, the citizens now must face the fact that they have no rebuttals left. They have the best team in football, no matter what they are used to believing.
