Your 1,800-Word Guide to Super Bowl Lick. I Mean LIX.
The Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles will meet in New Orleans for the Super Bowl on February 8, 2025. It’s the 59th Super Bowl. The NFL insists on branding the Super Bowl with the Roman numerals, so that makes it Super Bowl LIX, which I keep reading as Super Bowl LICK.
In terms of football, it has a reasonable chance of being a good game. The Eagles are powered by a punishing ground attack and arguably the most complete defense in the NFL while the Chiefs are not particularly good at anything and only win games because they’ve sold their souls to Satan.
WHO’S ROOTING FOR WHO
Emerson College Polling conducted a survey to find out who Americans are rooting for in Super Bowl LICK LIX. The results showed that respondents were rooting for the Eagles by a +6% margin.
Fact is, though, a significant number of otherwise neutral observers will be cheering for the Chiefs. This includes a contingent of pop music listeners under the delusion that they have a deep and meaningful personal relationship with a billionaire named Taylor Swift. If you do not know why Taylor Swift and her cult-like following of mild-to-severely mentally ill white women are pulling for Kansas City, you must live under a very nice rock. Zillow tells me it’s worth a quarter of a million dollars.
Other neutral observers will be rooting for the Chiefs because they are chasing their third championship in as many years. A back-to-back-to-back champion is something that has never happened in the NFL. It would cement this current iteration of the Chiefs, led by quarterback Patrick Mahomes, as the best to ever play the game. It would make them—and I want you to read this next part in dumb internet guy voice—TEH GrEaTEsT oF AlL TiMe.
Americans have a fetish for great athletes. They seem to think if they worship at their alter, their greatness will rub off on them. It’s like how ancient cultures deified their generals. It’s weird. It’s a sickness. It’s also because, in my opinion, Americans on the whole have an inflated sense of self-worth and they see themselves as greats denied their spotlight. To paraphrase that John Steinbeck misquote, socialism never took root in America because sports fans see themselves not as exploited rotational players but as temporarily embarrassed hall of famers.
Some portion of people rooting for the Eagles are doing so in rejection of this mentality. If the Chiefs only go back-to-back instead of back-to-back-to-back, what’s it matter? The great team that is great will still be great even if they lose. The Eagles—a roster which has never won a Super Bowl before—are the ones with something to prove.
Of course, the other portion of people rooting for the Eagles are from the Philadelphia area, and Philly sports fans are certifiably insane. Ahead of big sporting events, the city will pre-grease light poles so people do not climb up them. In 2018, a Philadelphia man was arrested during a playoff game for punching a police horse. There is also a real life, honest-to-god-I-am-not-making-this-up article on Wikipedia called “Philadelphia Eagles Santa Claus incident.”
HOW THE KANSAS CITY CHIEFS PLAY FOOTBALL
The Chiefs finished the regular season with a 15-2 record, good for the best in the AFC. Vegas odds setters have them as a 1.5-point favorite over the Eagles in Super Bowl LICK—fuck, I mean LIX—but their advanced stats in passing offense, rushing offense, passing defense, and rushing defense do not make for the profile of a champion (10th, 13th, 14th, and 10th, respectively).
Their bread and butter has been making things messy and weird and extremely close. Over the course of the 2024 season, 12 of their wins have come in one-score games. They’ve won the last 17 one-score games that they’ve played in, good for an NFL record. Part of this has to do with how they are extremely efficient at situational football—the offense leads the league in third down conversions by volume.
It’s also because they are an extraordinarily lucky team. Their opponents are only hitting 75% of their field goals, which is the second lowest percentage in the league. Their field goal kicker, by contrast, beat the Chargers by doinking the ball off through uprights. The officials’ propensity to throw 50-50 calls the Chiefs’ way is coincidence but it has nevertheless led a sizeable number of people to baselessly but not wholly unreasonably speculate the playoffs are rigged in Kansas City’s favor.
I say not wholly unreasonably because the Chiefs offense resembles a fifth-grader who was supposed to memorize the Gettysburg Address and recite it for class, but he didn’t so now he’s riffing everything after “four score and seven years ago.”
That works when your quarterback is Patrick Mahomes, a slippery improvisor who people insist on comparing to Michael Jordan because god forbidden we let football, the teamyiest of all the team sports, be about the team.
It has to be said that Mahomes would be nothing without his receiving corps, key components of which are Xavier Worthy, who is statistically the fastest rookie player ever with a 4.21 second 40-yard dash; JuJu Smith-Schuster, who loves TikTok so much he’s been nicknamed “TikTok Boy;” and Travis Kelce, who will be best remembered as “the ex that inspired that Taylor Swift album.”
Kelce is arguably the most important piece of this. He is a matchup nightmare in pass coverage. I am not going to explain why. Find a Taylor Swift fan. Ask her to explain it. When she can’t, call her a fake fan and leave the room, then wait fifteen minutes and she’ll come back to you with a detailed history of the tight end position and a demand, in the nastiest of terms, that you take back the fake fan allegation because she has memorized all 997 words of “All Too Well” (which is 366% more words than the Gettysburg Address).
Lastly, the defense has been essential to Kansas City’s success. That side of the ball has been largely responsible for keeping them competitive in tight contests. Their secondary is fine, but their pass rushers are non-entities with the exception of defensive tackle Chris Jones, the most agile six-foot-six, 310 pound man to ever live. They have not allowed a 100-yard running back in eight straight playoff games, but they haven’t met a running back like the Eagles’s Saquon Barkley.
HOW THE PHILADELPHIA EAGLES PLAY FOOTBALL
I did not watch a single Eagles game all year until I started writing this. I also did not start writing this until I came down with Covid. Did I grind the tape? Yes. Did I not fully understand what I was watching because I had a fever of 104? Also yes.
But from what I could gather when I was not hacking up a lung and longing for the sweet embrace of death, the Philadelphia Eagles are very good. Their defense is so great, they almost hardly warrant mentioning. What makes them notable is how unspectacular they are. As of December 20, they were 15th in takeaways and didn’t have a player in the top 15 in sacks, the top 10 in interceptions, or even the top 25 in quarterback hits. Individually, they are statistically unspectacular but together find new and innovative ways of keeping points off the board and ruining the opposition’s day.
The offense is what’s special. In our pass happy era, the Eagles are embracing their inner contrarian and keeping the ball on the ground. They average 186.6 rushing yards per game (2nd highest in the league) and 180.5 passing yards per game (the 2nd lowest in the league). Part of what’s allowed them to do this is their quarterback, Jalen Hurts, can be as explosive as a passer as he is as a runner.
But most of what’s made this offense work is their running back, Saquon Barkley, who accounts for a little less than 37% of all 6,242 yards of offense the team put up all year. Following the blocks set up by Philly’s 1,500-pounds of offensive linemen, he’s had a storybook season. Over 2,000 of his yards have come on the ground. In a typical year in the modern NFL, the leading rusher nets around 1,400 yards.
Last year, Barkley was a New York Giant with an expiring contract. Everyone could see he was an extremely talented back, but New York’s front office chose not to pursue an extension. Why? Because they’d just signed their quarterback to a $40 million extension and wanted to focus on building around him as a passer.
Column inches have been filled by hindsight-ridden journalists who want you to know how clearly that was a bad decision, but on paper it makes sense. Virtually all successful offenses in the NFL are built around passing the ball. Barkley, and the running back position more generally, does not fit into that.
So what’s at stake for the Eagles going into Sunday is something very Moneyball-esque. They’re trying to prove that there’s more than one way of doing business in the NFL, and that running backs are not a feature of a bygone era.
PREDICTION
In the land of online video gaming, two phrases get thrown around a lot. The first is “get good, [homophobic slur]” and the other is “the meta.”
“The meta” is a fancy way of saying “the main strategy people use to win.” In football, for the longest time, the meta was “run the damn ball” because, in the words of a possibly apocryphal quote credited to Ohio States’s Woody Hayes, “there are three things that can happen when you throw a pass, and two of them are bad.”
The meta has flipped. For at least the last ten years, success in the NFL has been predicated on a strong passing attack. Defenses have responded by getting faster and leaner and expending a great deal of time and energy on finding ways to disrupt the quarterback’s ability to process information. They do this by spreading out, and whereas they used to line up seven players within five yards of the line of scrimmage, most defenses now will only line up six. But they’re making themselves increasingly vulnerable to the running game.
It is inevitable that the meta of football will worm its way back to “run the damn ball” as a result. The Philadelphia Eagles are not the first team to notice this, and they are not the first team in the air raid era to embrace the ground game as a central piece of their offensive identity, but they are going to be the first to ride it to a Lombardi Trophy.
IN CONCLUSION: 30-13, EAGLES. GO BIRDS, BABY! YEAH!
