By reasonable metrics, the Super Bowl that the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs will contest on Sunday is one of the best-looking Super Bowls ever. Both teams were the No. 1 seed in their conference playoffs, something that’s happened less than a quarter of the time in the 57-year history of this event (and 13 out of 48 times since the NFL implemented playoff seeding). The Eagles are 1.5-point favorites, a tighter betting spread than all but four Super Bowls to date. As a combination of best-on-best teams that the world thinks are almost exactly even with one another, the only modern peer Super Bowl to this one was the 2014 season’s. In that game, the AFC No. 1 seed New England Patriots beat the NFC No. 1 seed Seattle Seahawks on a goal-line interception in the last minute. A decent guess is that the 2022 season’s Super Bowl will be exciting on a similar order. We’ll see where the line closes.
On paper, it’s hard to get a better game than Super Bowl 57. Thankfully, the game is also played on an actual field, and it should be equally compelling there. If there is a perfect matchup of styles, then Chiefs vs. Eagles is pretty close. That’s partially because of their high-end abilities even by elite NFL standards and partially because styles make fights. The Chiefs and Eagles arrived here on the backs of two sharply divergent team-building paths, and the fun on Sunday will be seeing how the two products interact.
Kansas City’s route here started the second the team took Patrick Mahomes with the 10th pick in the 2017 draft. Mahomes sat for a year behind Alex Smith, took the starting job in 2018, and immediately made it clear that he was bound for an all-time career. Mahomes is a one-man button with CONTENTION scrawled on it in capital letters. If you have him, you always, always have a chance to get this far if a few other things go right. Three times in five years, they’ve gone right enough for the Chiefs to play in this game. Mahomes will aim for his second Super Bowl ring in five seasons as a starter, but whether or not he gets it, there are more Super Bowls and eventually a Hall of Fame induction in his future.
The Chiefs have always understood what they have. In 2020 they signed off on the first half-billion-dollar contract a team had ever agreed to with an athlete. It was a no-brainer; the Chiefs could do nothing other than give Mahomes whatever he wanted and hope that it was enough. The deal does create complications, albeit good ones, in a salary-capped sport, and the highest-profile cutback the Chiefs made in response came when they traded Tyreek Hill, one of the NFL’s two best receivers, before this season. Hill went on to give the Miami Dolphins an MVP-like season, but Mahomes is expensive enough and good enough to make even fellow Hall of Famers expendable. The loss of Hill didn’t prevent Mahomes and another future Canton inductee, tight end Travis Kelce, from spearheading the best offense in the NFL yet again.
The Chiefs’ philosophy is not quite to put things on autopilot with Mahomes sitting in a swivel chair; I don’t mean to discount Kelce’s greatness, a punishing offensive line, Andy Reid’s coaching staff, or a defense that has gone from horrendous to perfectly average. But when you have Mahomes, you make sacrifices elsewhere. The Chiefs surrounding Mahomes with Kelce and a great line makes them unfair.
The Eagles pursued a different order of operations. They won their first Super Bowl five years ago. That looked like a lot of fun. The backup quarterback became the starting quarterback and beat Tom Brady in the biggest game of the year, in part by catching a touchdown pass. But then the Eagles collapsed. The young QB they’d signed to a megadeal, Carson Wentz, turned out to not have the juice. After three more seasons, their title-winning coach, Doug Pederson, was out on his ass, fired as the team decided to start anew. After one more, the Eagles somehow found a sucker (the Indianapolis Colts) that was willing to take Wentz off their hands. They entered a wholesale new era for 2021, now two seasons ago.
The year before getting rid of Wentz, the Eagles spent a second-round pick on Jalen Hurts, a beloved, successful, and limited college quarterback who had played on a national championship team at Alabama before transferring to Oklahoma. Hurts was a very good college player who put up solid passing stats, but he was most special for his leadership qualities and his hellacious running ability. (There are run-capable QBs, and then there are QBs who run with the power of a tailback. Hurts is the rare latter.) Hurts was nowhere near a sure thing to make it in the NFL, and his lasting until the 53rd pick reflected as much. In four games as a rookie in a pandemic-disrupted season, Hurts did not do well. Few Eagles did. The season ended with the symbolic farce of the Eagles’ backup backup QB, Nate Sudfeld, taking snaps in one of the rare examples of an NFL team pretty obviously not trying to win a game at hand.
The Eagles stuck with Hurts, though, and made him their starter in 2021 after offloading Wentz. He improved across the board, not morphing overnight into a great or even good NFL QB but showing some signs that he might be Philly’s guy. The Eagles had drafted his former Alabama teammate and Heisman Trophy–winning receiver DeVonta Smith before Hurts took over as the starter, and before 2022 they stocked the receiving room further: General manager Howie Roseman swung a trade for Tennessee Titans receiver A.J. Brown, a fast, physical, and technical target whom the Titans wouldn’t pay. The Eagles already had pieces in place for a great offensive line, and so they went into 2022 in a clear-cut position: They were going to find out what Hurts could do with an ideal supporting cast.
A ton, it turns out. Brown and Smith both went over 1,000 yards receiving, while tight end Dallas Goedert cleared 700. The line, ranked as the best in the league by Pro Football Focus, gave Hurts time to throw and paved lots of running lanes for the quarterback and 1,200-yard running back Miles Sanders. A strong defense ensured that Hurts was rarely playing from behind in desperate situations. Hurts more than held up his end, giving the Eagles both a capable downfield arm and a two-headed run game. The Eagles were perfect for Hurts and Hurts was perfect for the Eagles, and now there are no more questions about whether he can be one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL. Where the Chiefs started with Mahomes and put the best team they could around him, the Eagles found all the complementary pieces first and used them to help their young QB develop. Turns out there’s more than one way to bake a cake.
The Chiefs still have the quarterbacking advantage, because Mahomes is Mahomes. But it will be a task for him to look like his usual self against the Philly defense. The Eagles are the first team in NFL history to field four defenders with double-digit sack totals in a season. Their defensive front creates constant havoc, and while one pass-rusher in particular (Haason Reddick, with 16 sacks) does the most damage, the Eagles have enough threats that offenses have to be diligent with their blocking allocations. (The three-year contract the Eagles gave Reddick, after he had a mixed but positively trending first five seasons in Arizona and Carolina, stands out as one of the best moves any team made entering 2022.)
The Eagles led the NFL with 70 sacks, 15 clear of the Chiefs in second place, and posted the league’s second-highest pressure rate (just shy of 25 percent) despite not often sending more than four rushers after the QB. Football is math, and the Eagles’ defense mastered a simple piece of it: If you can explode an offensive line with just four guys, the remaining seven will have an easier time covering everyone else. The Eagles have been lousy at stopping the run, ranking sixth-worst in the league in expected points added by rush defense, per Sportradar. But they’re the league’s far-and-away No. 1 in the same department against the pass, which helped them finish the year third in overall defensive EPA and first in yards allowed per play. You do not have to stop the run if you turn opposing passing attacks into mush every week.
The great dance of this Super Bowl will be Mahomes’ chess game against the Philly D. Mahomes is a football god, but like more or less every other QB who’s ever lived, he’s vulnerable against a defense that generates pressure without blitzing too much—the thing the Eagles do better than anybody. In the four games this season where Mahomes faced the most pressure as a percentage of his dropbacks, the Chiefs are 2–2. He faced a paltry eight blitzes across those two losses. The Eagles’ path to the Lombardi Trophy is the same as their path to Mahomes. If they can rush him a lot, they are likely to win. There are no guarantees of that, as Mahomes can get the ball out quickly and has the protection of a mean line himself. Chiefs center Creed Humphrey is one of the nastiest players in football, in a good way.
This Super Bowl has lots of made-for-TV storylines, the type that will get extensive pregame show coverage and interludes during Fox’s game broadcast. Reid, the Chiefs’ coach, was the longtime and mostly great coach of the Eagles, but he never could win a Super Bowl until his time in Kansas City. Eagles center Jason Kelce is Travis’ brother and podcast co-host. (I will set the over-under on cutaways to their parents in the stands at 7.5.) In addition to being massively interesting on pure football terms, Chiefs-Eagles is a good popcorn flick in the way that every Super Bowl appeals to a mass audience. Rihanna’s even doing the halftime show. I, for one, am ready to have a Sunday.
