Great football games are not decided by dropped passes. A game headed toward greatness that is ultimately determined by a drop is spoiled. This is unfair but true. Both the Baltimore Ravens’ loss to the Buffalo Bills in the divisional round of this year’s NFL playoffs, and the Bills’ own loss, one week later, to the inevitable Kansas City Chiefs in the AFC Championship, were potentially great games decided by memorable drops. Both catches would have been hard, and neither receiver disgraced themselves, but still. If the energy around this year’s Super Bowl matchup between the Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles is not what it should be, given a triumphant regular season, it is at least a little due to drops like these. In fact, these entire playoffs have felt like a dropped pass. To understand why, it helps to know something about the background of the teams that could have been playing this weekend, but are not, as well as the recent history of the big game itself.
For a would-be receiver to be in a position to drop a pass, so much else must first go right. The play called needs to be the right one; the offensive line must block sufficiently; the quarterback has to read the defense correctly and deliver the ball accurately and on time. The catch, when it is made, completes this long sequence of success, which includes at least ten to fifteen people. Similar chains of excellence have run throughout this remarkable season, but the postseason has, so far at least, failed to do its part.
Let’s start with the two teams that dropped the ball. The Bills and the Ravens have the masses on their side. Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson has two MVP awards and an unjust reputation for wilting in the playoffs. We’re pleased when such regular season achievers get the playoffs right, at last.1 And the beneficiary of the Ravens’ drop, Buffalo, might be the most frustrated team in sports. It is always good and right to root for the Bills, who are not just one of only two teams to have ever lost four Super Bowls without winning any; they are the only one to do so four years in a row, from 1990 to 1993.2 In the intervening time, the Bills were known primarily as the greatest victim of the New England Patriots’ two-decade dynasty, when they went 33–3 against their neighbors to the East, failing to make the playoffs for seventeen consecutive seasons. It was all the sweeter when, in 2021, Buffalo’s brilliant young quarterback, Josh Allen, led the team to score on every single possession and beat Bill Belichick’s Patriots, in the latter’s only post–Tom Brady playoff appearance. Buffalo then lost in those playoffs to Kansas City for the second year in a row, a ritual they have since repeated twice more—adding another tragic tetralogy to their annals. Having sent one dynasty packing, the Bills have run headfirst into another.
Even more disappointing is that the other team to lose four Super Bowls and win none, the Minnesota Vikings, also enjoyed a miraculous regular season. After losing their star rookie quarterback to a leg injury in the preseason, they turned to oft-fired journeyman Sam Darnold, who went on to throw for thirty-five touchdowns and more than four thousand yards. Another thrilling sports story—but then Darnold and the Vikings lost badly in the final game of the regular season, which cost them a first-round bye. In the ensuing Wild Card game, they lost again, to the LA Rams. Nobody could deny that it felt good to see LA win something in the cursed month of January 2025, but did it have to come at the Vikings’ expense?
Hardest to stomach was the loss of the Detroit Lions, a team even more historically frustrated than the Vikings or the Bills. One of only two of the original professional clubs to never play in a Super Bowl, the Lions emerged as a force last year under head coach Dan Campbell, making it all the way to the NFC championship game, where they lost to San Francisco. This year they were even more dominant, setting multiple offensive records, only to lose their very first playoff game to the Washington Commanders. Even worse, the Commanders had already won a playoff game, which is historically the most that can be expected of a rookie quarterback like Washington’s bright young Jayden Daniels. The polite thing would have been for the Commanders to take their Wild Card win over Tampa Bay, then lose to the long-suffering Lions, and go rest up for next season—but they didn’t. Instead the Eagles easily beat both spoilers, the Rams and the Commanders, on the way to their second Super Bowl appearance in three years. And almost everyone is mad about it.
We are mad because either Tom Brady (who retired two years ago) or Patrick Mahomes has appeared in eight of the last ten Super Bowls, and have won seven between them. The only time Mahomes lost the big game, it was to Brady. And the only time Brady lost over the same period, it was to the Philadelphia Eagles, the team that Mahomes will play against this Sunday. No matter what happens in Super Bowl LIX, either Brady, Mahomes, or the Philadelphia Eagles will have won nine of the last eleven Super Bowls.3
Fans feel like they have been seeing the same teams in the Super Bowl over and over, because they have been seeing the same teams in the Super Bowl over and over. This has led the enraged to speculate that the NFL is so desperate to have the Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce’s girlfriend, one Taylor Swift, back at the Super Bowl that they have put their thumb on the scale for Kansas City. This isn’t so, but the feeling expresses something undeniable. In its promotion of a crowd-pleasing passing game above all else—the average passer rating has gone from 67 in 1966 to 92 in 2004—the NFL has undone its vaunted commitment to competitive parity. Professional football is rapidly becoming more like professional tennis, where two or three transcendent talents trade championships back and forth. Brady and Mahomes are less Montana and Marino than Federer and Nadal.
While Philly has not exhausted its welcome nearly as much as the Chiefs, the two teams did play in the same matchup just two years ago—and four seasons before that, in 2018, the Eagles famously beat the Patriots in the telenovela that was Super Bowl LI. You wouldn’t necessarily know it listening to Eagles fans, but their team is now fourth of all time in NFC championship game appearances, with nine, all but one of which have come this century. The Eagles are no dynasty, but neither are they minor players.
Those looking for a reason to root for the Birds beyond a wish to see the Mahomes machine dispatched will find one, wearing number twenty-six and running a 4.4-second forty-yard dash. Plenty of players are that fast, of course, but only Saquon Rasul Quevis Barkley is that fast while weighing 232 unabridged pounds. God’s own running back, Barkley so impressed coming out of college that even a league that tends to avoid running backs entirely in the first round was compelled to draft him second overall. After languishing with the desolate New York Giants for four demeaning years, Barkley at last arrived in the City of Brotherly Love, where he has become the first player in league history, when playoffs are included, to record seven touchdowns of at least sixty yards. If he manages a mere thirty yards on Sunday, he will break Terrell Davis’s record for total yards from scrimmage, set all the way back in 1998 with John Elway’s Broncos.
In a league hellbent on favoring the pass, the honest, appraising physicality of blocking and tackling has been replaced by the weaselly violence of the passing game. We wince for defenseless receivers, or throw up our hands at another ludicrous pass interference call, or stare in disappointment at another dropped ball. But Barkley’s 2,005 rushing yards are an accomplishment that cannot be gainsaid. So are the 1,921 yards that thirty-year-old Derrick Henry piled up this season for the Baltimore Ravens after leaving Tennessee. Yet in 2024 both players were freely available on the open market—afterthoughts, really—in an offseason dominated, as usual, by talk of passers and pass catchers and pass rushers. The revenge of the running game in the face of the league’s legislated preference otherwise is surely the most satisfying plot to the season.
Of course, the revival is not only about running backs. Quarterbacks, too, are now more mobile than ever; five of them ran for more than five hundred yards this year. And this brings us to the NFL’s greatest recent achievement: the ultimate decoupling of race and play style. The stereotype used to be that Black quarterbacks were rare and mobile. (That was never uniformly true: Warren Moon was not mobile, while Steve Young was.) Now they are common and often still mobile, but white quarterbacks are mobile, too. Don’t look now, but the best rusher in the league this year, on a per-carry basis, was the Patriots’ rookie quarterback, Drake Maye. And the sudden plethora of Black quarterbacks has allowed them to take on roles once reserved for white players: the underrated journeyman (Geno Smith), the MVP who may or may not be able to win the big game (Lamar Jackson), the thrice-blest gunslinger from God (Patrick Mahomes).
Philadelphia’s history with Black quarterbacks is particularly fraught. Randall Cunningham started for the team for ten immensely successful years before he abruptly retired, saying he felt underappreciated—only to triumphantly return with the Vikings one year later. Rush Limbaugh infamously said that Donavon McNabb, who led the Eagles to four straight NFC championship games, was merely a beneficiary of the media’s desire to see a Black quarterback succeed. The country may have been taken over by Limbaugh’s politics, but subsequent developments have shown that the media, such as it was, was right to believe the league might be improved by getting over its allergy to Black quarterbacks. It did, and it has.
One would be remiss not to point out that the first great play made by the Eagles in their victory over the Commanders was by their rookie cornerback, Cooper DeJean, who is quite apparently white—historically a rarity among cornerbacks. The position has long been considered the most athletic on the field, owing to the Ginger Rogers principle of doing everything wide receivers do, but backwards and in cleats. Nor is DeJean alone: in October, the Denver Broncos’ star corner Patrick Surtain II, who is Black, began a post-game press conference, tongue firmly in cheek, by somberly congratulating his new teammate Riley Moss for “making history” and “revolutionizing the game” as the first white corner to record an interception since Jason Sehorn twenty-three years earlier.
Diversity is in for a brutal four years. You’re going to hear a lot of lies about it from people who owe their platform to something other than talent. But the fact remains that such initiatives were always in the service of a meritocratic ideal. Anyone doubting this fact is invited to tune into the Super Bowl this Sunday and watch as one Black quarterback tries to stop another from becoming the first quarterback of any color to win three championships in a row. Here’s hoping everyone holds onto the ball.
In 1997, John Elway led the Denver Broncos to Super Bowl victory after losing his three previous attempts. Then, for good measure, he won again in 1998, and still we rejoiced. ↩
They lost their first Super Bowl appearance, in 1990, to the New York Giants, when Scott Norwood missed a forty-seven-yard field goal wide right just as time expired. (This incident would inspire Ace Ventura: Pet Detective’s insane—and insanely transphobic—storyline four years later.) Buffalo then lost each of its three subsequent Super Bowls in ever more painful ways, culminating in back-to-back losses to Troy Aikman’s Dallas Cowboys. ↩
The two exceptions were the Aaron Donald/Matthew Stafford Rams’ defeat of the Cincinnati Bengals three years ago, and before that, all the way back in Obama’s last year in office, when an aging Peyton Manning’s Denver Broncos leaned on one of the great defenses to defeat Cam Newton’s Carolina Panthers. Otherwise, it’s been the Brady and Mahomes show featuring Philadelphia. ↩
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