This year’s Super Bowl match-up is a particularly painful pairing for Chiefs Kingdom given what both teams represent from an otherwise magical season.
This year’s Super Bowl is particularly painful for Kansas City Chiefs fans. The team is only one Dee Ford offsides penalty or a lost overtime coin flip removed from being in this Super Bowl—a unique level of torture even for K.C. fans.
The end result for Chiefs Kingdom is a Super Bowl between the Los Angeles Rams and New England Patriots, a match-up which makes it feel like K.C.’s magical, record-setting season was a whole lot of build up just for a long, loud fart. While that may be the pinnacle of comedy at the expense of a fanbase, it’ll take a few years of distance before the stink stops making me hate my life.
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That doesn’t mean I’m not going to watch the Super Bowl. I’m sure there are plenty of Chiefs fans who will say they aren’t, but they’d be liars. They might believe they aren’t going to watch it right now, but come Sunday they’ll be where roughly a third of the entire country will be: in front of their TV, tuned to CBS, watching Tony Romo flawlessly predict formations, motions, route combinations, and probably even the Maroon 5 halftime show setlist. (For the record, Maroon 5 is only worthy of their spot on the halftime show if they play “Sweet Victory.”)
Usually, it’s fairly easy for me to pick a team to root for in the Super Bowl. The league spends the entire season building storylines for each contending team, so by the time we get to February, there’s at least one angle of a team that makes me want to see them win it all. In this year’s case, anything that might make me want to see the Rams or Patriots win feels indelibly tainted by both teams’ connections to the Chiefs’ most miserable moments of the season.
I don’t hate the Patriots as most non-Patriots fans do. Their fans are another story entirely, but the team itself, and particularly the Tom Brady-Bill Belichick combo, is something I don’t have any strong emotions about one way or the other. Every league needs a villain, and the Pats have been perhaps the greatest sports villain of all time. As someone who thinks the Chiefs’ time to be the NFL’s resident bad guys is coming, it’d make me a bit of a hypocrite to hate New England for being the best at being evil.
So normally I don’t mind it when the Patriots win yet another Super Bowl. Last year I was rooting against them because the Eagles had Doug Pederson, but otherwise, in recent history, I’ve leaned toward the Pats in their Super Bowl matchups. But this year, obviously, is especially difficult for me to want anything to do with even seeing the Patriots’ colors on my TV. Tom Brady accounts for two of the Chiefs most heartbreaking losses of the season. I don’t have to relive them here; your pain is as raw as mine.
As for the Rams, I love Sean McVay. He feels like a cartoon version of the “offensive genius” coaching trope. He’s like if Community did an episode where Abed got obsessed with football instead of obscure B-movies. I also love the Rams’ retro uniforms (which they will be wearing in the Super Bowl, FYI), and when it comes to choosing teams to root for who aren’t the Chiefs, it usually comes down to fashion design for me. Also, despite having been in Missouri for 20 years, the Rams-Chiefs always felt like a friendly one to me with no real ill will. I could be wrong, I’m not from K.C. so I don’t have that local perspective. Point being, there aren’t a lot of reasons for me to hate the Rams.
Week 11 still haunts me, however. Regular season losses are typically very easy to move on from, especially when they ultimately are meaningless in the context of the full season picture. But man, that Monday Night Football game is gonna stick with me forever. For the Chiefs to be the first team to score over 50 points and lose feels like the most Chiefs loss in Chiefs history, and it added fuel to the “Patrick Mahomes can’t win big games” narrative. Overall, it was a really bad night for me.
So which team do I root for? I guess the answer is “neither”. The more accurate question is “Which team’s victory will make me less miserable?”
As of right now, I think the answer is the Patriots.
The Rams are currently seen in some ways as the NFC version of the Chiefs. An explosive, inventive modern offense ran by one of the leagues top young quarterbacks. Mahomes and the Chiefs failed at their attempts to stake their claim to the title of Kingslayer despite K.C. feeling like the obvious team and Mahomes feeling like the obvious QB to take down Brady and Belichick.
If Jared Goff, Sean McVay, and the Rams take that title on Sunday, it’ll make the Chiefs’ seemingly inevitable conquering of the Pats and taking of their place as the class of the AFC a little less sweet. Not to mention, watching the team that beat you get beat in the Super Bowl is a bit more painful than watching them win. “At least we lost to the champs” actually feels like a consolation. Almost. Kind of.
Plus, the Pats have won so often we should all be numb to it. They’re far past the point at which winning another Super Bowl could possibly make anyone hate them more. Their dominance is just an unavoidable reality. It’s best to just accept it and know (hope? pray? beg the cosmos?) that Brady isn’t an alien and time will eventually take him like it does everyone else.
But, in the meantime, go Patriots or whatever.