Photo: Cooper Neill/Getty Images
Is it okay to say that the NFL postseason has been a bit of a bummer so far? I don’t mean that it hasn’t been exciting: It has been taut and thrilling, with a cavalcade of dramatic moments. The wild-card round featured Eagles fans threatening to tear apart their own stadium, an incredible Bears comeback that felt Papally ordained, and a brutal end to Aaron Rodgers’s season — and possibly career — that briefly made you wonder if there might be some justice in the world. Then, the Divisional round had multiple games in the snow (always enjoyable), a late-game call so controversial that tennis players in Australia were vandalizing camera equipment in protest, and a last-second throw from Bears quarterback Caleb Williams that was one of the most jaw-dropping things I’ve ever seen on a football field. That hurl into the end zone capped the most batshit moment for the Bears in a season full of them.
But in the end, the Bears ended up losing, going down in overtime in front of a roaring and freezing Soldier Field crowd. In fact, all the fun teams ended up losing. The Bills fell short once again, even in a season where their nemeses the Chiefs had been safely sidelined. The Texans and Jaguars, the only teams in the playoffs never to reach the Super Bowl, are gone. The fun underdog stories have all been extinguished.
The four teams left have all won the Super Bowl in the last 12 years, and three of them have won multiple Super Bowls in the last 25 years. In a sport constructed for parity and to boost the underdog, they’re all Goliaths. None of these teams’ fans have suffered enough to really get behind. That’s a particular shame because this has been such a bizarre season — the Chiefs didn’t even make the playoffs! — that there was room for a hard-luck franchise to go all the way. But these final four? Eh.
Nevertheless, as is tradition around these parts, we must issue our annual NFL Championship Weekend Rootability Rankings For the Otherwise Unaffiliated for the final four teams remaining. But deep down: We all wish it could have been the Bills or Bears.
These are not the Patriots you have spent the last 20 years hating. They have a smart, tough, downright normal-ish head coach in Mike Vrabel who has led the team to the AFC Championship Game in his first season after taking over for Jerod Mayo, the poor sap who had to follow Bill Belichick. (Vrabel was a three-time Super Bowl champion for Belichick’s teams, but he was always one of the least annoying Patriots.) They’re a young, exciting team — there isn’t a single player on this roster who was on the last Patriots team to win a Super Bowl, back in 2019 — and they’ve been one of the most surprising stories in the NFL this year. Their quarterback is the actually-pretty-likable Drake Maye, who could not be any different than Tom Brady if you had specifically created each human being in a lab. (As an example, Maye is married to his middle school sweetheart, whom he met when they were both 12.)
But none of that matters, because they are still the Patriots, they are still wearing those uniforms, they are still owned by Robert Kraft and — most important — they still have the same fans. It’ll be another 100 years before it’s OK to root for the Patriots again, and honestly, probably not even then.
The Rams have one of the rarest things in all of professional sports: A head coach who is both brilliant and not wholly hateable. Sean McVay has been coaching the Rams for nine years, and has suffered only one losing season, He has reached two Super Bowls, winning one of them. He is also kind of funny in commercials, has an almost-amusing tendency to criticize himself after games, particularly games his teams win, and is a fierce, outspoken defender of Ukraine (his wife is Ukrainian). Matthew Stafford, the Rams’ QB, is also not particularly unlikable, a grizzled veteran who just had the best year of his career and is likely to win his first MVP.
But it’s impossible to forget that Rams owner Stan Kroenke is the epitome of an evil billionaire, one who lied to get his team out of St. Louis (and ended up successfully sued by the city) but benefitted so much anyway that he is legitimately now the largest private landowner in the United States. And he owns Arsenal, which is my favorite soccer team, a factoid that, if I can ever Eternal Sunshine it out of my consciousness, I absolutely will. The Rams also unquestionably have the fewest actual diehard fans of any team left in the playoffs, and maybe any team in the NFL. They are a real-estate deal with helmets and shoulder pads.
Seahawks fans are nicknamed the “12s” because Lumen Field, Seattle’s stadium, is so noisy when full that Seahawks opponents say it’s like playing against a 12th man on the field. (Texas A&M uses this nomenclature in college football and has earned it; it’s tough to find another NFL team that has.) As good as the Seahawks have been for the last 14 years — they’ve had just one losing season — they’ve only won one Super Bowl, and it was the dullest, and coldest, Super Bowl this entire century. They and their dedicated fanbase are due for a fun one. They also have as their quarterback Jets reject Sam Darnold, a man who is 28-6 as a starter the last two years after going 2-10 in his last year with the Jets. (Do not watch a Seahawks Super Bowl with a Jets fan.) The Seahawks and their fans can be polarizing, sure — in the way that the Cardinals’ ’ “Best Fans in Baseball” were irritating to people, back when the Cardinals were relevant — but we could all do a lot worse.
This NFL season has been absurd. Many expected favorites (the Eagles, Chiefs, and Lions) had deeply disappointing seasons, while traditional doormats (the Bears, Jaguars, and Texans) became contenders. The MVP is either going to be Matthew Stafford, a 37-year-old who has never won the award or Drake May, a 23-year-old who the vast majority of casual fans still don’t know. Nothing has made much sense. So what better way for this season to end than with a Super Bowl-winning quarterback who, until this coming Sunday, will have not taken a single snap in an NFL game in more than two years? Thanks to a freak injury to Broncos quarterback Bo Nix in overtime of their playoff win against the Bills, the Broncos’ starting QB for the rest of the playoffs will be a man named Jarrett Stidham, a career backup who has only started four games in his entire seven-year career. As football writer Rodger Sherman pointed out, Stidham is perhaps most famous for being brought in by the Patriots during a blowout, immediately throwing a pick-six and inspiring Bill Belichick to put Tom Brady back in. The Broncos are the only team in the NFL whose backup didn’t take a snap all year, and now they are counting on that backup to get them to the Super Bowl. It’s madness, which is to say, it would be the perfect way for this lunatic season to end.
