It’s the Chiefs and Eagles All Over Again
For a second consecutive season, the Super Bowl is a recent rematch.
Historically speaking, it’s rare to see the same teams meet up again and again for the Lombardi Trophy.
Before last season, the Super Bowl hadn’t seen a recent rematch — meaning the teams met in the previous decade — since 2011, when the New York Giants and New England Patriots reprised their big-game matchup from four years earlier. (There were technically a couple of franchise rematches in between — Pats vs. Rams and Eagles vs. Pats — but both of those happened at least 13 years after their first meetings.) Only seven pairings of franchises had ever met in multiple Super Bowls at all, and only four of them had happened within a decade’s span.
But then we got Super Bowl LVIII last February between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers, a rematch of Super Bowl LIV four years earlier — just the fourth time in history that two teams played each other multiple times within a five-season span. And now, we’re getting an even rarer rematch: Super Bowl LIX will feature the Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles meeting for the second time in three seasons, revisiting K.C.’s 38-35 victory in Super Bowl LVII.
The only rarer type of Super Bowl rematch came in 1993, when the Dallas Cowboys and Buffalo Bills met in consecutive seasons — still the only time that’s happened in NFL history. Cowboys-Bills and, now, Chiefs-Eagles are the only cases of multiple matchups in the big game within a three-season span.
And this Chiefs-Eagles Super Bowl will be much more like a traditional rematch than last year’s was.
As I wrote last year, Chiefs-Niners was kind of a weird rematch. The principal players and tactics had changed some — Christian McCaffrey and Brock Purdy had supplanted Jimmy Garoppolo and Raheem Mostert for San Francisco, for instance, while the Chiefs had transitioned from an offensive-minded team to one that relied on its defense (outside of asking for Patrick Mahomes heroics in the endgame).
In terms of Approximate Value (AV), only about a quarter of the value produced by either team came from players who had been on the roster for the first matchup. Some of the big names were familiar, sure — Mahomes, Travis Kelce, Chris Jones, George Kittle, Deebo Samuel, coaches Andy Reid and Kyle Shanahan, etc. — but a lot had also changed. That won’t be as much the case this time around, however, as the Eagles have gotten 57 percent of their AV from players who were also with the club in 2022, and K.C. has gotten 67 percent of their AV via players returning from 2022 as well.
That’s not the roughly 90 percent of team AV that came back for the 1993 Bills-Cowboys rematch, nor is it even the approximately 75 percent that came back from three years earlier for the 1978 Steelers-Cowboys rematch. (In a pre-salary cap era, it was a lot easier to run back the same group year after year after year, as many of those dueling 1970s dynasties can attest.) But it does mean we’re in store to see many familiar faces this time around, from the Chiefs’ returning core — every member of their Top 8 AV players1 was around in 2022 — to the Eagles’ passing connection of Jalen Hurts to A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith, with Lane Johnson, Jordan Mailata, Landon Dickerson and Cam Jurgens minding the offensive line.
The most notable differences are the ones that Philly hopes will turn the tables this time around, as compared with 2022. Neither of the Eagles’ two leading AV players in 2024, running back Saquon Barkley and linebacker Zack Baun, were on the team for the previous Super Bowl against K.C. Barkley was toiling for the New York Giants that year, while Baun was with the New Orleans Saints; both were named first-team All-Pros for Philadelphia this season, and by themselves they account for about one-third of the Eagles’ AV that has been added since 2022.
With no offense intended to Miles Sanders, who started at RB for the Eagles in Super Bowl LVII, Barkley is a particular upgrade from that earlier rendition of the team.
Barkley’s ability to snap off massive runs (his two long TDs in the Divisional Round accounted for 40 percent of Philadelphia’s total yardage versus the Rams), and to generally carry a rushing attack that tied an 85-year-old playoff single-game record with seven team TDs on the ground in the NFC title game, is something the Chiefs haven’t really had to reckon with since perhaps the opening week of the season against Derrick Henry, Lamar Jackson and the Baltimore Ravens.
But that factor might be the only significant element that will prove unfamiliar from the last time these teams met on a Super Sunday. I’m not sure whether the past two years are ushering in a golden age of repeat Super Bowl matchups — 40 percent of all cases where teams met multiple times in a five-season span have happened in since 2023 — but we’re due for another one two Sundays from now. And based on how both the first edition of Chiefs-Eagles and last year’s Chiefs-Niners rematch went, we’re probably going to get an exciting game that comes right down to the wire again.
Filed under: NFL
Jones, Mahomes, Creed Humphrey, Joe Thuney, Trent McDuffie, Nick Bolton, Kelce and Trey Smith.