Super Bowl Open Thread I
By Before we get to today’s game, let us note that relief that Eli Manning — one of the five best QBs in the NFL zero times in his career — did not make the Hall of Fame on the first ballot. I’ll get to that in another post eventually.
We discuss the game at length here. The case for picking the Chiefs is, well, [gestures at the work of Mahomes and Reid passim.] Enough money has come in on the Eagles to drive the line down to Chiefs -1 at some places, and it’s also not hard to make a case for them:
The Eagles should win Super Bowl LIX.
The Eagles are better than the Chiefs on the offensive and defensive lines. They are far superior at wide receiver and in the secondary. They are immeasurably superior at running back.
The Chiefs are better at quarterback, of course, as well as on special teams. They are better coached. They have a slight edge at linebacker. I count Travis Kelce as a receiver, and I tend to think of his success as an extension of Patrick Mahomes’ success these days: the creaky Kelce is a vessel for his quarterback’s telepathy.
The Eagles’ advantages neutralize the Chiefs’ advantages to a degree. Mahomes should be pressured, and his receivers will have a hard time getting open. He is still MAHOMES, but he has to be. If he were a lowly Joe Burrow or Lamar Jackson, the Eagles would be three-point favorites.
The Eagles offense, meanwhile, jams Saquon Barkley unrepentantly down their opponents’ gullet. The Eagles can slow games down, stay ahead of the sticks and generate splash plays with the running game. They can control the fourth-quarter clock. The Chiefs want to beat opponents in the final four minutes of the game, like a college basketball powerhouse that knows it can wear the opponent out, sink a timely three pointer and then make all the free throws in the final seconds. The Eagles are pretty darn good at forcing bricks on defense, then running the shot clock down to zero on offense.
This is very superficial analysis. Aaron Schatz ground the numbers down until they were ready for the French press and concluded that the Eagles had a slight edge. He then picked the Chiefs in the ESPN experts’ poll.
The biggest counterpoint I can make in Kansas City’s favor, as Schatz’s analysis alludes to, is that Fangio’s bend-but-not-break defense isn’t necessarily a great matchup for this particular iteration of the Chiefs, which tries to nickel-and-dime you to death and normally succeeds rather than getting explosive plays. They can overcome this by getting home with a 4-man pass rush, but they’re going to have to.
And, hey, even though I have a Chiefs +375 ticket from my trip to Vegas in the wildcard round, Fly, Eagles, Fly!
