The Eagles Rewrote Kansas City's Super Bowl Script
Super Bowl LIV could have followed a number of branching paths, but Philadelphia forced it to track with their best outcome.
The story of Super Bowl LIV was, of course, about the winning Philadelphia Eagles: the excellence of Jalen Hurts, the acquisitions of key players like Saquon Barkley and Zack Baun, their ferocious play in the trenches and elite balance across both sides of the ball. But by nature of whom they beat, the story was also about the losing Kansas City Chiefs — whose bid for the first Super Bowl three-peat fell one win short in the end.
It’s no secret that many of the Chiefs’ wins have followed a familiar script in recent seasons. The team might have gotten slightly ahead, fallen behind early or simply kept things close throughout, but their defining feature was the ability to consistently win tight games, coming up with the important plays they needed to put opponents away. Here’s a chart of their record in games of different margins since Patrick Mahomes became their starting QB in 2018 — with a particular focus on the potential three-peat seasons of 2022-24 — as compared with the average Super Bowl winner since 2000:
Clearly, the recent Chiefs were much better than the usual champ at pulling out close wins, and prevailed less often relative to typical Super Bowl winners in games with big margins. This is why a common take going into this week’s Big Game in New Orleans was that, if the game was close late, Kansas City had a huge edge, but that a blowout was more likely to end in an Eagles victory (particularly considering the higher ceiling of play Philly had previously shown).
So the game script that Super Bowl LIX followed would be important. In each of their previous wins, the Chiefs had trailed by double digits — and were trailing by some amount during the second half in general — but in each case, they were able to turn the tide quickly once they got rolling, often with Mahomes delivering big plays in the clutch. On the other hand, their loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2020-21 saw them never really be able to build any kind of momentum in a game that got out of hand early in the second half.
To see how each of these games played out, check out this chart of Kansas City’s win probability (using the nflfastR model) by time elapsed in each of their Mahomes-era Super Bowls, including last night’s game:
The general pattern in each game was a trend of declining win probability during the second quarter (and often into the third), with the wins featuring big spikes in the fourth quarters and/or overtime. But each loss saw the Chiefs continue to bleed WP until they had very nearly no chance left by early in the third quarter.
(It’s actually pretty uncanny how similar the plot from last night’s game is to the plot from that loss to the Bucs in Super Bowl LV. The WP dips just got shifted even earlier against Philly.)
Because of these previous blueprints, it might be useful to envision Super Bowl LIX as potentially taking any of three diverging paths based on how things might have broken for K.C. — or against them:
The first path that the game might have followed was perhaps our prior baseline expectation: a repeat of Super Bowl LVII between these same teams just two years ago. The 2024 Chiefs were in worse WP shape near the end of the first quarter, but both teams had roughly the same not-so-great odds of winning early in the second period. K.C. got back into it from there with a fumble return TD in 2022-23, and it wasn’t unreasonable to wait for something like that to happen this time around as well — or at least for a few plays that allowed the Chiefs to stay within striking distance ahead of their patented endgame tactics.
The other path that would have allowed for a Chiefs win wasn’t a Chiefs win at all. But it was a win by another GOAT QB: Tom Brady and the 2016-17 Patriots’ epic 28-3 comeback against the Atlanta Falcons in Super Bowl LI. Maybe it was because of Mahomes’ comparable greatness, or because Brady himself was in the booth last night, but even when the Chiefs kept digging a deeper hole for themselves against the Eagles, it was hard not to think that maybe K.C. would be capable of something similar — if not simply based on how hard they have been to put in the ground for good during recent seasons.
Indeed, the lines from both games tracked barely above zero percent as the third quarter waned last night. But instead of making the kinds of mistakes that saw the Falcons leave the door cracked for Brady to inch through, the Eagles slammed it shut with more knockout blows. By the start of the fourth, it was clear which shape this game was taking — that of Super Bowl LV, a different kind of Brady victory.
From the first few minutes of the second half onward, the Chiefs’ win probability never crept above 1 percent again, and the three-peat evaporated into the New Orleans night. It was a testament to the Eagles’ ability to wrest away control of the Super Bowl script from a team whose victories have seemed all too inevitable in recent seasons.
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Completely agree with the focus on the Chiefs here, but I don't see the Eagles script as being followed to a T as you suggest at the outset. Quite to the contrary.
Consider that the Eagles had a total of 64 offensive plays excluding kicks. Of that, they foolishly dedicated 31 of them (48%) to Saquon Barkley. He objectively had an awful game and generated a paltry 97 yards or just 3.1 Yards Per Attempt. That rarely speaks to Super Bowl victories.
But, the media's "heads we win, tails you lose" narrative was two-sided of course. It went that "if they focus on Barkley, A.J. Brown will just take over the game." Nope...he was barely better than Jahan Dotson on the night with just 3 catches for 43 yards. Then sprinkle in that the hyped Jalen Carter and Nolan Smith were both at the bottom of the defense stat sheet - literally silent all night long.
Not quite the script as written.
This hard reality places much of the responsibility on Mahomes and the Chiefs where it belongs. But a lot of bad 2024 Philadelphia narratives died on the field last night too. Perhaps none more notable than the often repeated and embarrassingly wrong, "Jalen Hurts and Nick Sirianni are the weak links of the Eagles' Super Bowl aspirations."
I suspect the script will be different next year...