Here's how we'll get a Super Bowl upset
Here's how we'll get a Super Bowl upset
Plus, our picks for the game and some players you can feel good rooting for in this one
The buzz surrounding Super Bowl 55 is distinctly more muted than we’re used to before the big game. All season, it’s been impossible to ignore the risks of playing during a pandemic, and this week has been no different, from a virtual Super Bowl media day to the Chiefs’ barber testing positive for Covid right in the middle of giving a player a haircut.
While the NFL has had to forgo its usual over-the-top approach to this week, there’s another reason it’s been more lusterless than spectacle: This year’s seemingly inevitable matchup isn’t particularly friendly for nonpartisan fans.
Neither team can be considered an underdog — the Chiefs, who are the actual favorites, are the defending champs. The Buccaneers will be playing in their home stadium and have a six-time Super Bowl winner as their quarterback. Both have their share of unlikeable players, for reasons both disturbing (Tyreek Hill, Frank Clark, Antonio Brown) and annoying (Tom Brady).
But since we’d like to be able to enjoy the Super Bowl, let’s focus instead on the players and coaches we can root for, guilt-free, on Sunday.
Chiefs you can root for
Patrick Mahomes
Mahomes is so good, at such a young age, that he should be infuriating. But I can’t, with any sincerity, hate on him. And unless your team is playing against him, trying in vain to defend against whatever trick shot-esque throw he pulls out of nowhere, then I’m not sure what anyone’s gripe with him would be. He seems like a genial dude who is enthusiastic about life and genuinely enjoys playing football for a living. He’s confident, but not cocky and competitive, but not in an outwardly unhealthy way.
On that note, let’s compare Mahomes to the quarterback he’ll be going up against for the fifth time in his career.
Here’s what Mahomes had to say to his teammate Mecole Hardman on the sideline after Hardman’s muffed punt put the Chiefs in a 9-0 hole against the Bills:
“Hey, we good. Be you. You’re gonna make a play this game.”
On their next possession, Mahomes hit Hardman for the Chiefs’ first touchdown of the game. On the first play of their ensuing drive, Hardman took an end-around for a 50-yard gain. The encouragement from his teammates, especially his quarterback, no doubt helped the second-year receiver bounce back from his early blunder.
And here’s what Tom Brady told one of his teammates after their win over the Packers:
Ugh. I know some people eat up that “winning over everything” mindset, but didn’t we all just watch Ted Lasso and understand how to move past this kind of toxic masculinity?
At 25 years old with a Super Bowl MVP and regular season MVP under his belt, Mahomes has a chance to wrest away the GOAT moniker from Brady one day. But if the Chiefs lose to Brady in the Super Bowl, that will always be held against Mahomes in any hypothetical MJ vs. LeBron-type debate. And if you’re completely exhausted by Brady, as I’m assuming most of us are, then you want somebody to challenge Brady’s dominance in the record books, and right now, Mahomes has the best shot. That alone is worth cheering for him. — SH
Le’Veon Bell
Normally I’d say Travis Kelce, who was Kansas City’s nominee for the Walter Payton Man of the Year award thanks to all the community service he’s done in western Missouri. But Kelce was once the subject of an E! reality show. No, worse than that, an E! reality *dating* show that wasn’t Burning Love. No amount of service can wash away that stain. Dude’s a villain.
I’d also throw Ke’Shawn Vaughn into the mix, the rookie running back who played for nothing but underdogs in college (Illinois, then Vanderbilt) and dedicated his debut season to leaving a legacy for his newborn child. But rooting for a rookie to earn a Super Bowl ring feels like an embarrassment of riches, regardless of how much grinding he did behind bad offensive lines against Power 5 teams.
So let’s roll with Le’Veon Bell, who has had very little turn out the way he’s wanted since 2018. He sat out that season as part of a contract impasse, then took less money than he’d hoped for just to be wasted in Adam Gase’s incompetent Jets offenses before being released in the middle of the 2020 season. That led him to Kansas City where he’s been … not great.
The former All-Pro has seen his total touches drop from 27 per game in his final season as a Steeler to just 7.8 in his 10 games as a Chief. He’s been a fairly pedestrian member of a tailback platoon that’s featured big games from Clyde Edwards-Helaire and Darrel Williams, but rarely Bell. A breakthrough performance could help re-establish him as a difference maker in the NFL — and give him the Super Bowl ring he never got in Pittsburgh. — CD
Travis Kelce
His ultra bro status makes him a difficult pill to swallow for some. I get that. You can really only tolerate being called “bruh” or “bro” or “bro dawg” or “brah” or whatever the latest slang for friend among the backwards trucker cap and Patagonia vest crowd is these days. (I get it. I ski, a sport where bros and Karens are a near insufferable part of the experience.) But before you write off Kelce as just another dipshit with puka shells hung onto the rearview mirror of his Tesla Model X, I beg you to consider his work in the Showtime series Moonbase 8.
He plays himself in the show, because NASA wanted a celebrity. And he plays himself to type perfectly. It’s funny to see his dish out the bro dawg abuse to a perpetually frustrated John C. Reilly. Kelce’s clearly out out of his depth alongside Reilly and the other two feckless scientists played by Fred Armison and Tim Heidecker.
I’m sure in real life, if Travis Kelce and I really did hang out, I’d probably get sick of the constant butt slapping and bro’ing out, but knowing that the guy let himself be turned into a joke on a TV series somehow humanizes him a little more, makes you want to root for him just so he can get more gigs as a dopey cross fit dude dropped into a study group of nerds. —RVB
Bucs you can root for
Bruce Arians and the coaching staff
Arians might be the biggest players’ coach in the NFL. He doesn’t hesitate to call them out if he thinks they need it, but he’s fine also taking a more hands-off approach too, letting his best players be themselves. Despite a relatively successful tenure with the Cardinals, where he often showed off his colorful personality and vocabulary, this is Arians’ first appearance as a head coach in the Super Bowl (though he won two championships as part of the Steelers’ coaching staff in the early aughts).
But what really makes Arians a coach who’s easy to root for is his commitment to having a diverse staff at a time when the NFL is rightfully getting hammered for its lack of minority coaching hires:
Arians hired Jen Welter, the first woman to serve as a training camp coaching intern, in 2015. Four years later, he hired Lori Locust and Maral Javadifar, making the Bucs the first NFL team to hire two women as full-time coaches.
He’s not giving these coaches jobs to prove what an ally he is, either. He’s doing it because he knows they can do the job if provided the opportunity. You can tell as much by the way Arians advocates for his staff:
Other teams, take note. — SH
Ryan Succop
The Bucs were saddled with a notorious kicker curse for most of the last decade. Ryan Succop, whose name literally sounds like “suck up,” wasn’t a likely candidate to overcome such a troubled history. When Succop won the Bucs’ job in September, he was a 34-year-old who had missed most of the previous season with a knee injury. In the six games he played for the Titans in 2019, he made just one of his six field goal attempts.
Luckily for both the Bucs and Succop, he was able to rebound in 2020. He made 90.3 percent of his field goal tries even while playing his home games in infamously kicker-unfriendly Tampa (perhaps something to keep in mind during the Super Bowl). Now Succop has the chance to be just the second Mr. Irrelevant to earn a Super Bowl ring— against the same team where he spent the first five seasons of his career to boot*.
* PUN INTENDED AND I WILL NOT APOLOGIZE
— SH
Former Jaguars first-round picks
The Buccaneers have TWO of the Jacksonville Jaguars’ former first-round picks on their roster. My hat is off to both of these men for escaping one coastal hellscape for another, albeit one with a better football team.
Blaine Gabbert was Blake Bortles before the later became an easy punchline for lazy hacks like myself. The Jags took the Mizzou signal caller with the 10th pick in the 2011 NFL Draft. It’s hard to blame the Jags for making a bad pick there; the entire draft industrial complex looked at Gabbert as the second-best QB in the draft that year, and some had him at the top of their list because they were too small-minded to see just how amazing Cam Newton at the time. But seriously, that was a garbage year for QBs. After Newton, Andy Dalton is the second-best signal caller to come out of that draft. And my hat is off to Gabbert for getting out of some terrible situations and settling into one of the best jobs in all of sports, backup QB.
Cutting running back Leonard Fournette actually made sense for the Jaguars this year. They didn’t need him or his cap hit clogging things up for a roster that would surely be getting an overhaul this spring. It’s nice to land with a Super Bowl contender after getting cut in the preseason. — RVB
Super Bowl 55 picks
Perhaps more than any other sport, it’s really hard to repeat as champs in the NFL. It’s been 16 years since any team has done it (of course it was the Patriots, but even they could only do it once). Still, we think the Chiefs will buck the trend and win their second straight Lombardi Trophy:
That doesn’t mean the Buccaneers, who already lost to the Chiefs earlier this season, are a long shot. There’s hope for them to claim their first title since the 2002 season. So what would it take?
How the Buccaneers win
Let’s start with the defense. The Chiefs’ booming downfield attack looked vulnerable toward the end of the regular season. The bye week led to an uneven performance where Patrick Mahomes got hurt and his team managed only 22 points against the league’s 25th-most efficient defense. The AFC championship loomed; was it possible Kansas City could be derailed in its bid for back-to-back titles by the Bills?
Hah, no. Mahomes returned and spanked a powerful defense that was peaking at the right time, hanging 35 more points on Buffalo than the Ravens managed one week prior. *That’s* the Chiefs offense we expected in the postseason. That’s the offense the Bucs have to derail on Sunday.
Tampa Bay’s success will hinge on its ability to bring pressure. We saw the Raiders hand Kansas City their only true loss of the season (Week 17 with Chad Henne doesn’t count) by generating a legitimately surprising amount of pressure that forced Mahomes into uncharacteristic mistakes. Las Vegas sacked him three times, hit him five more, and dialed up the pressure on 23 of his 52 dropbacks. As a result, Mahomes’ bad throw rate — 16.3 percent during the other 15 games of the regular season — rocketed up to 26.2 percent.
The Raiders did all that with a bottom-five defense. The Buccaneers come into the Super Bowl after 48 regular season sacks and five in their last outing against the Packers. They’ll also get to face a KC offensive line missing three starters. Mahomes will, without a doubt, have to make throws under pressure.
The question is whether a young, talented secondary and linebacker corps can turn the cracked window of an off-balance throw into a gaping crater of opportunity. Sean Murphy-Bunting has been an adventure in his first postseason, recording an interception in each playoff game but also getting away with some questionable tactics that may not be so easily ignored in the Super Bowl:
He’s flanked by Carlton Davis. He spent the Divisional Round making “Slant Boy” the preferred derogative for Saints wideout Michael Thomas and the NFC Championship giving up a 154.9 passer rating in coverage against Davante Adams. Adams also did this to him:
Each of those guys needs to play nearly flawless football to track the Chiefs’ absurdly fast wideouts as they improvise their way through the broken plays and scrambles Mahomes executes so well. Second-year corner Jamel Dean will also be called on to help erase Travis Kelce’s production, one week after Robert Tonyan and Marcedes Lewis caught all seven of their targets for 50 yards and a touchdown against the Tampa secondary.
Betting on the Bucs means betting that these guys have learned several tough lessons over the course of the season, but none tougher than the one Tyreek Hill dropped on them in Week 12 when he racked up 203 receiving yards and two touchdowns … in one quarter. Kansas City is going to score points, but this young group has the inherent talent to clean up the messes their pass rush creates for Mahomes.
That puts a burden on Tom Brady’s offense. We saw the alpha and omega of 43-year-old playoff Tom in Green Bay, separated mostly by halftime. He immediately recognized the Packers’ weakest point and attacked it repeatedly until Kevin King’s cracks brought down his defense’s entire wall. But Brady also looked lost under pressure, throwing floating, off-target passes that led to three interceptions (and it should have been more).
This is bad news. The Chiefs sacked Josh Allen four times and recorded 10 QB hits thanks to an aggressive scheme that sent blitzers on nearly 40 percent of his dropbacks. And that was against a mobile quarterback who could burn them with their scrambles and not the current Buccaneer signal caller who runs like a frostbite victim. While Kansas City may not be as aggressive thanks to Tampa Bay’s superior wideout depth and much more reliable running game, there’s no way Andy Reid didn’t see Brady’s weakness under pressure bubble to the surface two weeks ago.
Brady is going to have to stand up in the face of pressure but also utilize his short-range targets more. This means a bigger workload for Chris Godwin, Tyler Johnson and/or Antonio Brown, and his playoff huckleberry, Rob Gronkowski. Fortunately, those are pretty solid guys to carry the load! If the veteran quarterback can establish his passing game while limiting his time to throw in the first half, he’ll expand his second half playbook mightily. Bruce Arians may be more reliant on the blueprint of Brady’s first Super Bowl appearance rather than his last.
Ultimately, I don’t want to count out Touchdown Tom. I just don’t think enough of these things will happen. The Chiefs just have too many ways to carve you up, and their defense should provide enough support to keep this from becoming the shootout Tampa may need in order to keep pace.
Kansas City 31, Tampa Bay 20— CD
Bonus content: Don’t stop with one Super Bowl preview. I would really encourage you to read Stephen White’s prediction too. His annual prediction was always one of my absolute favorite things to edit/read back in the ol’ SB Nation days. And I’ll be damned if his predictions weren’t almost exactly spot on—most notably the Falcons’ infamous 28-3 implosion in 2017. So be sure to check out his preview/prediction for this year’s Super Bowl too.
Correction:In Wednesday’s newsletter, I broke down the Chiefs and Buccaneers by their celebrity fans. Unfortunately, I let one slip past me: The Backstreet Boys’ Kevin Richardson is a Chiefs fan, meaning the Bucs, who boast Kevin’s bandmate Nick Carter as a fan, do not hold an edge in the category of “boy bandness.” I have since retroactively replaced it with “overall Floridaness” for the Bucs. I highly regret the error, though it does not change my ruling that the Chiefs have a much, much, MUCH better celebrity fanbase. — SH