THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
Super Bowl 57 (or LVII Celsius) turned into a game that pitted two of football's longest serving axioms: "defense wins championships" and "you need an elite quarterback to win Super Bowls" against each other. My pregame assessment could be boiled down to simplicity: I thought the Eagles had the better lines on both sides of the ball, and he who wins the trenches wins the war (war is still a big metaphor in the NFL), and the Eagles' defense all told was one of the league's best, while the Chiefs' D lingered somewhere around league-average in terms of various statistical measures.
But the Chiefs had Patrick Mahomes. The best quarterback in the league, now that Tom Brady struggled through his final season and Aaron Rodgers was about to lock himself into a soundproofed lightless room for four days to discover the universe's plan for his future. So, helped by the fact that I had tipped the Chiefs as my Super Bowl winner pick back in September, I picked Kansas City to win the game. Though their route to the win was not quite such a simple formula as I've just laid out.
As I stood in the Wapping Tavern Sunday Night, hosting a Super Bowl bash for something just short of 200 people, I marveled at how far NFL football had come since I came to this country in 1977. For those of you who haven't been expat for 46 years, you won't remember when your coverage involved listening to Armed Forces Network on a transistor radio, walking around the room to keep reception from Wiesbaden, reception you would lose as the sun began to rise over Germany an hour earlier than it did in London. For a few years, even seeing game highlights was a random thing: ITV's World of Sport or BBC's Sport Saturday might run them, and if you happened to be in front of a TV at the right five minutes you'd see them, alongside a usually mangled explanation of what it all meant.
Then, in 1982, Channel 4's head of sport, Adrian Metcalfe, the former Olympic hurdler, brought NFL to our screens, as "minority" sport (it would be followed by the excellent Sumo show), presented by a DJ, Nicky Horne and an expat American basketball player, Miles Aiken. It was a hit, and when the Chicago Bears, fresh from their 1985 Super Bowl Shuffle, brought 'The Fridge', William Perry, to town for a pre-season game that sold out Wembley, NFL had become a thing, if on a still limited basis. There was (and still is) considerable resistance among the media and sporting establishment to this foreign invasion; luckily NFL still hasn't become popular enough for the Brits to claim they invented it.
Pretty soon we were seeing Super Bowls live, and the NFL set up the World League of American Football, with the London Monarchs, in 1991. I came on board, doing WLAF games for the late, lamented satellite channel Screensport, who did all the North American sport in the wee hours; I was working for Major League Baseball at the time, and began by doing baseball, in the course of which it was revealed I had played college football, and Robert became my mother's brother. The WLAF disappeared for a couple of years, and when it came back in 1995, I began doing live commentary on the games for Sky. Soon I was doing NFL for them too, including Super Bowl broadcasts. In 1997 they let me go and I moved to the new Channel 5, doing Sunday and Monday Night games in the Super Bowl-like wee hours of the morning. Channel 5 led to Channel 4 and to the BBC, and finally, in 2008, my first Super Bowl onsite, from Phoenix, where the Giants upset the Patriots.
That game began an unprecedented run of Super Bowls that were good competitive games - which has held up ever since, apart from the Baltimore/Denver blow out in the Meadowlands, which I was doing for Channel4, who snatched the rights from BBC and blessedly brought me along. That 2007 season was when the NFL began staging regular season games in London; the Giants beat Miami at Wembley and rode that win to the Super Bowl!
Now the NFL sits on ITV alongside Sky, and UK watchers can see the Super Bowl on either channel, or on the NFL's own Game Pass. Sky's coverage featured a British host with two NFL players, on the sidelines an American woman who was captain of the GB women's American football side, and also a British-born player on the sidelines with a British woman host.
ITV had another British woman in the studio with my old BBC partners Osi (Umenyiora, who played in that 2007 Wembley game) and Jason Bell, and instead of the Fox game feed offered its own coverage with a British play by play man (who managed to create the "Walter Lombardi Trophy") alongside another British-born NFL player and another former NFL star who works for the league. We are spoiled for choice in ways I could not have imagined back in the Seventies.
Nor would I have thought I'd be broadcasting 25 or so Super Bowls, on radio or TV, including nine on site. Or that the number of people interested in how I explained the game or what I thought about it would grow into something the NFL's London office dismissed to me as a "cult".
Not that it took a lot of explanation to convey the drama of this game. No breakdown can deliver an actual preview of what will happen, and even characterizing the Chiefs' win as Mahomes over the Eagles' D is itself misleading. The Chiefs do not win that game if Jalen Hurts doesn't fumble a ball that Nick Bolton picks up and runs for a touchdown, nor if Kadarius Toney doesn't field a punt and after a few steps recall that the Chiefs are forming a wall to his right side, and follow that passage 69 yards to the Eagles' five yard line. Those two plays were turnaround plays: the first kept KC in the game in the second quarter; the second gave them an eight point lead with nine minutes left.
But what pre-game analysis often overlooked was that the Eagles' one weak point defensively was against the run: although their front four was dominant against passing games, with their two big men inside occupying blockers and pushing the middle, their two ends played wide and rushed hard: the kind of thing the Bucs did to harass Mahomes (who was missing both his starting tackles) in Brady's last Super Bowl win. You could exploit that wide rush if you could run inside it off tackle, forcing the Eagle linebackers to make plays. Andy Reid is known for eschewing the run at any excuse, but in this game he realized the Chiefs, who'd had the ball for only eight minutes in the first half, but were still down only ten, needed to force the game. Their first drive after halftime featured seven runs and three passes. What this did was even more important after Patrick Mahomes re-injured his ankle: almost all Mahomes' throws were quick ones, limiting the pass rush and stretching the Eagles' stubbornly sticking to a zone defense. Rookie Isiah Pacheco ran 15 times for 76 yards: the Chiefs called 20 runs, and Mahomes scrambled six times for 44 yards; two of those scrambles were crucial - and one very funny as he tried to dodge tacklers while unable to bend his ankle; he looked like an old man who forgot to wear rubbers, stepping through a puddle without getting his shoes wet!
Philadelphia had brought in Vic Fangio, former Denver head coach and a quality defensive coach going back to the Philadelphia Stars of the USFL, where he coached under Jim Mora and Dom Capers. Fangio also plays primarily zone defenses in the secondary: but he also plays primarily a 3-4 front, unlike the Eagles' 4-3. This allows him to bring either or both of his outside linebackers in pass rush, generating extra pressure inside or out. Patrick Mahomes' longest completion of the day was 22 yards: in fact, he completed 21 of 27 passes for only 182 yards. If you had told me before the game Mahomes would throw for under 200 yards and be the game's MVP, I would have thought you were crazy. But Jonathan Gannon, Philly's defensive coord, stuck stubbornly to his 'bend but don't break' deep zone, which works best of you are generating pressure. He did bring up a safety quicker to try and limit Travis Kelce, which worked, but they misfired on the same play at the goal line twice, once on each side, and they wound up having to use some man coverage. And indeed, the game's big talking point play - the late defensive holding call against corner James Bradberry - came when Bradberry was in man coverage against JuJu Smith-Schuster, a match the Chiefs looked for. The first time they'd got it, Bradberry had interfered with Schuster, but no penalty was called. This one though, in the last two minutes, drew a flag.
I dislike the idea that officials have to "let the players play", especially at the end of games. We know that playoff hockey and basketball are different sports than in their regular seasons, with more contact allowed, but in the case of a receiver in football if you're allowing the defender "to play" by grabbing jerseys or holding arms, you are taking away the receiver's ability "to play". I saw the foul and wanted it called; I thought if JuJu hadn't been tugged back, he might have been alone for a TD. I also appreciate that the one thing we ought to expect from officiating is consistency. After the game, Bradberry said simply, "Yes, I held him...I'd done it before and didn't expect it would be called". It was a gesture of sportsmanship we don't see very often. The reality is we can blame officials for capriciousness, we can also blame the NFL whose "emphases" or interpretations of the rules for the refs take much of the objectivity aware from them. By rule, no contact is allowed on the receiver, but by "emphasis", it's only contact that "gains an unfair advantage" that is a foul. As if trying to catch a football with someone pulling you backwards by the jersey, or worse, an arm, isn't an advantage. The Super Bowl wasn't as badly reffed as some of the playoffs, but in the NFL it's no surprise referring again became a headline story.
Anyway, that didn't lose the game for Philadelphia. It did rob the audience of a thrilling minute and a half of the Eagles trying to tie or win the game, which might have created an interesting Jalen Hurts MVP story. As it was, I thought Hurts, who threw for 304 yards, including some amazing pin-point throws (including one overturned) and ran for 70 more and three more TDs, as well as a number of those famed "rugby scrum" quarterback sneaks (sic - they're actually more like rugby mauls) made a good case for being the MVP for the way he carried the offense on his shoulders. Only one player from a losing team has ever been the Super Bowl MVP, the Cowboys' Chuck Howley in Super Bowl 5, which Dallas lost 16-13 to the Baltimore Colts. I think Hurts' fumble precluded his election as a losing team MVP, but had the Eagles' come back, who knows?
The non-QB MVP was surely Nick Bolton, who was the game's leading tackler, scored a TD on the fumble return and should have had a second when Miles Sanders' fumble was ruled an incomplete pass. The NFL usually rules like that on bang bang hits, but after telling us on a previous play that the three factors in a complete pass were control, feet down, and a "football move", Fox's refereeing analyst Mike Pereira now switched the third to "a third step" since Sanders had clearly transferred the ball and turned to start running, but hadn't yet stepped. So it goes.
As I write this, the Eagles' offensive coordinator Shane Steichen has been hired as the head coach of the Indianapolis Colts, which is sort of bad news for Hurts as he has had different coordinators almost every year since leaving Alabama as a free agent for Oklahoma after he lost his starting post to Tua Tagovailoa. But the Colts announced they were keeping both their defensive coordinator and special teams coach, hirings which are usually the new coach's prerogative, so they wanted an offensive minded coach who wouldn't demand that much control. I thought Steichen would be a better hire for the Arizona Cardinals, whose job was the only other one still open; he would have been able to do for Kyler Murray exactly what he helped do for Hurts. But as I write this it looks like Jonathan Gannon is going to be the Cardinals hire as head coach. sThis puzzles me. The Chiefs just put up 38 points on Philly; admittedly only 24 on their defense. But Arizona also interviewed Cincinnati Bengals' defensive coordinator Lou Anarumo, whose D, before this year's conference championship game, stymied Mahomes for three straight losses, and lost to him by only 23-20. Go figure.
It's a mark of how great the impact of the NFL is. Less than two days after the Super Bowl, I'm writing about coaches for next season. If I had been calling a game on site, I would have probably have had more to say.
How about that Rihanna halftime show!
