Invincible Became Vulnerable

Despite being Superman on the field, Mahomes appears the everyman off it. From his curly hair, dadbod, and Kermit the Frog voice, he looks nothing like an average QB let alone an all-time great….which could also be said about Sunday’s performance. 

For the second time, Mahomes has been embarrassed on football’s highest stage. Once is a fluke, but twice is a connection. 

His first Super Bowl loss (aka the COVID Championship) felt like an aberration. He had won his first Lombardi in the previous season and would contribute two more after, opening a dialogue about a dynasty.  

His 31-9 loss was also under the radar, hiding behind pro-Tampa Bay narratives. 

Leading up to the game, fans highlighted the Buccaneers’ becoming the first team to play the Super Bowl in their home stadium and the media was captivated by Tom Brady’s ascension into divinity. Eight months prior, Belichick had thrown him off the pirate shop, and here he was leading his new team to a title in his first season.

Once Tampa Bay had completed their Super Bowl triumph, Brady now claimed more Super Bowl titles than any individual franchise. 

Mahomes’ deplorable statline (26-49, 0 TD, 2 INT, 3 SK) was overshadowed by Brady’s contributions and became merely an afterthought on a stellar resume.

However, this past Sunday’s performance - an abominable no-show by Mahomes and co. changed his legacy.

In Mahomes’ two Super Bowl losses, his team hasn’t even sniffed a competitive fourth quarter with both game scores - differentials of 22 and 18 points - appearing closer than the actual gameplay would indicate. At least in Brady’s three Super Bowl losses, he kept his team competitive down to the wire, as each was a one score game with last-gasp Hail Mary attempts.

Beyond looking at the back of one’s players card, we will remember players by how they made us feel through iconic moments captured on screen. In conjunction with images of Mahomes triumphantly smiling, joyfully screaming, and holding up the Lombardi, our brains are now seared with shots of Mahomes sitting on the sideline bench forlorn, bewildered, lips puckered.

Athletes have bad moments on the sidelines and the affect of many facial expressions or postures are taken out of context. Unfortunately for Mahomes, there’s no story in which those dismal images of him are taken out of context. 

This isn’t like MJ being held by his teammates in the flu game - dehydrated, dejected, writhing in anguish. 

This isn’t like Tiger Woods who in the 2008 US Open was caught wincing and limping as he played on a torn ACL. 

In a vacuum, photographs of those two depleted athletes could be symbolic of a high stakes loss.* Yet in those specific competitions, these players valiantly willed themselves to win. 

Even beyond those two triumphs, their performances during the apex of battle are in a different tier than Mahomes. 

Jordan went 6-0 in the Finals. Tiger lost just once when leading in the final round, which during the least prestigious major (PGA Championship). On the highest stages, these players never lost, choked, or in any form demonstrated being second best at their craft. They always had the final say and the last laugh.

Future generations of sports nerds will Google “Every Super Bowl score”, see the Super Bowl LIX score, and not realize the extent of its one-sidedness.

For Mahomes, two Super Bowl blowouts will stain his legacy. Not from a stats perspective, because I expect him to win at least one more Super Bowls; Rather how these unsightly images of a supposed leader/king/God will be ingrained in millions of people’s memories. The collective consciousness of Americans now have film on Mahomes being fragile, incompetent, and vincible. 

When the spotlight shines brightest in the highest stage, spectators' critiques are most deleterious. We arrived for a threepeat and departed feeling bamboozled.

Brady may have had slipups like his overthrow of Welker or his own drop on a trick play (“My husband can’t throw and catch the ball at the same time!”). But those were independent mistakes not a culmination of incompletions, interceptions, and sacks.

Brady kept his team in all three games until the game’s final play. 

Mahomes was done after three quarters. 

*We’re Americans, so we have this see-sawing conflict of elevating our heroes while also bringing them down to our level. It’s why the Crying Jordan and Tiger Mug Shot are two of the most popular memes. The humor induced from those images represents the dissonance between being the greatest at their job while seemingly flawed like us.  

Dominance Became Overlooked

NFL fans treated the Kansas City Chiefs as if both shared an insecure relationship, analyzing and scrutinizing the gestalt of Chiefdom. 

History lovers focused on the positive - how a Threepeat would ensure the Chiefs’ dynasty (4 Super Bowl victories, 5 appearances in 6 years) as the league’s greatest. Haters dove into the negative, dark rabbit hole about the referees rigging games, especially in crunch time of 4th quarters. Bills Mafia, anti-Swifties*, and members of the illuminati were up in arms about this predetermined script with the Chiefs ordained as the chosen ones yet again.  

So much pandemonium centered on the illusory aura around this season’s version of the Chiefs, especially since they had their best record despite Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce having the fewest yards of their respective careers. The Chiefs’ +59 point differential was the smallest ever for a 15 win team and good for only 10th in the league. 

Heck even the lovable Andy Reid ruffled some mustaches with his meaningless intentional safety in the Divisional Round, creating one of the baddest beats you’ll ever see. 

2024 was the Chiefs’ jagged, oblong, distorted jigsaw piece trying to squeeze into their otherwise glorious puzzle of legacy. 

Chiefs, Chiefs, Chiefs. Blah, blah, blah. 

We all got enthralled with Kansas City and their ability to maneuver through the superior American Football Conference featuring the Killer B’s (Bills, Baltimore, and Burrow), that we severely overlooked their obstacle to history - the Philadelphia Eagles. 

The Eagles may have been the best team in NFC, but were treated like old news. Perhaps their story wasn’t as sexy as the Lions having their franchise’s best season or the Vikings being the league’s biggest surprise, hanging alongside Detroit for the #1 seed. 

But after September, the Eagles were always the NFC’s best team - winning 17 games in a row when Jalen Hurts finished the game. 

So why were the Eagles so under appreciated? Why was their legitimacy so voided?

My theory starts at the top with Nick Sirianni, since fans don’t really like him.

They found his introductory press conference awkward, his lack of humility jarring, and his overt bravo condescending. His slight overbite makes him look like a bully ala Nelson Muntz and his shaved head, ushering in the Baldianni era, made him appear like a Green Street hooligan. Needless to say, he’s got a punchable aura. 

People find a way to hate on the Tush Push, a Sirianni led cheat code which makes every new set of downs a 1st and 9. Never mind that the Eagles have the largest O-Line and a QB who was a competitive powerlifter in high school…because Sirianni perfected this play, we must ban it.  

Despite having the most wins of any coach in his first four seasons, his public persona has deterred people from rooting for him and when you don’t like someone, you overlook the good and hone in on the bad. 

Throughout this successful season, even as the Eagles won 10 in a row, people still viewed Sirianni through the lens of last season’s collapse. In 2023, the Eagles began 10-1 which kept the momentum going from their prior Super Bowl appearance. But something happened whether injuries to the secondary, discombobulation with defensive play callers, or Jason Kelce’s looming retirement altering clubhouse chemistry, the team wilted to a 1-6 finish and an annihilation by Tampa Bay in the Wild Card. 

After starting 2-2 Sirianni was on the hot seat, with detractors overlooking that a great coach and great organization could be resilient and correct course. 

Epic bounce backs have occurred in recent memory.

In March 2018, University of Virginia’s men’s basketball team became the first victim of one of sports largest “never been done before”s - a #1 seed losing to a #16. The next year they won the National Championship.

Next year, the Tampa Bay Lightning set the NHL regular season points record, easily securing the #1 seed and being heavy favorites to win the Stanley Cup. They didn’t win a single postseason game, getting swept in the first round against the Columbus Blue Jackets. The Lightning won the next two Stanley Cups. 

Coaches learn from mental lapses, players become healthy, the front office makes personnel improvements ... .all this to set aside abnormality in a stretch of otherwise a winning pattern. 

The anti-Sirianni, anti-Philly cohort was too jaded with malevolence to accept that this Eagles’ team was a different pedigree from last year. 

95 points in their final two games.

Two dominant victories.

The NFL’s best team won the Super Bowl.

*Many people will go back to their theory that the refs got the Chiefs there and that Taylor Swift’s black magic helped them win 17 straight one possession games. Once the refs got the Swift to the Super Bowl - injecting $300M to the NFL revenue - the Chiefs would no longer get assistance. 

Surprise Became Obvious

All the storylines - disseminating from articles, talk radio, television shows, social media videos - that built momentum over weeks and months of the season has come to a crashing halt, becoming nothing more than conjecture over truth.

From the jump, the NFC North was the hottest division in the NFL. Through six weeks, the division’s worst team was 4-2 and although the Bears would succumb to a 10 game losing streak with demises involving a Hail Mary, blocked field goal, and unused timeout, the rest of the North’s participants kept climbing. 

By the end of the year, the Packers won 11 games  - a tally that would have snagged three division crowns (AFC South, NFC South, NFC West) - but given their circumstances settled for 3rd place. The Vikings became the first 14-win team not to win their division, because the 1st place 15-2 Lions decided to have one of the best seasons of all time. 

For all the talk about how good the NFC North was, about how all these teams could make a deep playoff run against inferior NFC opponents, the Lions, Vikes, and Pack all laid down without a fight. 

In the regular season, those three were a combined 15-3 vs. the NFC, but in the postseason they were 0-3. 

Out of these three teams postseason’s losses, the Vikings’ symbolizes the cruelty of how a great team can build momentum, conjure dreams of an improbable run, but go down with a whimper. I’m sure many people would believe the Lions - the league’s best team, America’s underdog - would be the trio’s most disheartening loss. Giving up 45 points in one of the biggest home playoff games as a 9 point favorite is demoralizing. 

But while the Lions had won the division previously and ran it back with the same cast of characters, the Vikings’ success was way more surprising.

At the forefront of the Vikings turnaround from a 7 win team was quarterback castaway Sam Darnold. Darnold, the 2018 3rd overall draft pick, had originally been designated as the Jets savior (isn’t every Jets QB?). But after faulty play over his time in New York, he bounced around a few other teams, initiating a career as journeyman backup. When Minnesota signed Darnold this offseason, they expected him to continue #2 duties behind rookie JJ McCarthy. Yet after McCarthy injured his meniscus in the preseason, requiring season-ending surgery, coach Kevin O’Connell had no better choice than to insert Darnold. 

From the onset to the final game, Darnold played out of his mind. He threw 35 TDs, utilized weapons like Justin Jefferson and Jordan Addison into a Top 10 offense, and most importantly led the Vikings to 14 wins. Through no fault of his own, the Lions matched them step for step in the wins column, leading to a nationally broadcast Week 18 matchup for first place. 

Unfortunately for the magical Darnold, the clock struck midnight. He threw for his lowest completion percentage and fewest yards all season. The Vikes only scored 9 points and would be slotted in at the #5 seed, the first 14 win team to open on the road.

While they were still favorites against the NFC West Champ Rams, Darnold played poorly yet again. He was sacked an egregious 9 times and only scored 9 points for the second straight week. The Vikings as a whole were manhandled 31-9 and that was it. 

In a poof, the 14-3 Vikings (14-1 against teams not named Detroit) who had provided so much joy to their local fans, so much excitement to the NFL fans - were gone. 

Yet another Kevin O’Connell special regular season gone in one postseason game. In 2022, his Vikings went 13-4 including a record 11-0 in one score games. They lost at home to Daniel freakin’ Jones (he has a playoff win!) with the Giants beating them 31-24 in their first and only one score loss.

As a fan, I grapple with the sound and fury nature of the dichotomy of the regular season and the playoffs.

We get so excited by the buildup, the anticipation of what could be, that we need to appreciate the building blocks along the way that made us excited for potential greatness. We want to believe that the momentum is all the linear - that an accomplished regular season will lead to a high achieving postseason. But these two “seasons” are apples and oranges.

It’s difficult to compartmentalize how the Vikings first 16 games could set up fans to believe in a miraculous Super Bowl run, a potential title that would be their first in franchise history. Yet in the final two games, the team lost their steam, or in fan-speak proved the sustained success throughout the season was merely a mirage. But we don’t get to even have the “mirage conversation” without the incredible 9 game win streak, Darnold’s career year, clutch defensive stands in the games’ final minutes. 

The final 2 games, including the elimination game in the postseason, seem unjust, like a tease. 

I have to accept that unfortunate surprises, out-of-the-blue identity shifts, and questioning how we know what isn’t so are all parts of life. I, like most people navigating consequential domains, prefer order over chaos. I want to know that my action will lead to a predictable reaction (thank goodness for sciences like chemistry and physics), otherwise what’s the point in acting or behaving over anything.

But sports doesn’t operate like that and perhaps that’s why we watch. It’s why we gamble, take odds, and hope to profit off the insanity.

For a 14-3 team to wilt so quickly is to understand that for every string of greatness, there is a reset, a recalibration of teams’ hierarchy where each stands 0-0, having to prove their worth to the public once again.

For 2024’s NFL season, this was Sam Darnold, Kevin O’Connell, and the Minnesota Vikings.