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KC “controversially” advance to SB 59 | 03:20
As the NFL went into conference championship weekend, the excitement was palpable. How cool could Super Bowl 59 be?!
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The Washington Commanders, a year after finishing 4-13 and picking second in the draft, were a chance of making it? And how about the Buffalo Bills, the loveable losers who were finally on the brink of getting back there with a shot of ending their infamous curse?
Except the NFL script-writers, if they somehow exist, stuffed this one up.
Because instead we’ve been given another Super Bowl between the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles. It’s the Chiefs’ fifth appearance in six years, and the Eagles’ second in three, plus their 2018 title still feels fresh in the memory.
While the 2023 Super Bowl between the teams was a thriller, nobody outside of Missouri or southeast Pennsylvania cares about that. They just desperately wanted to see something different.
The Eagles are at least slightly fresh; they’ve been good for a while now, but the brilliant season of Saquon Barkley has given them a nice coat of paint. He’s a game-changing superstar, at a position where it’s that much harder to be one these days. Few would begrudge him winning a title.
But the Chiefs? Really?! Them again?!?
And it’s not just the fatigue factor. Yes, we know, Patrick Mahomes has already had a Hall of Fame career and is probably going to have at least one more, all inside one NFL lifetime. Yep, Andy Reid is a mad genius. Of course, Steve Spagnuolo masterminding what was an infamously poor defence (which Mahomes had to compensate for) into one of the league’s best makes him one of the best assistant coaches we’ve ever seen.
Throw in the Taylor Swift of it all, and we’ve just done all of this already. Compared to the excitement of someone new making it out of the AFC – particularly the hard-to-hate Bills – and you can see where the frustration is coming from.
But, arguably dating back to the last Eagles-Chiefs Super Bowl, a bigger driver of Kansas City hatred has emerged – how they always seem to have the refs on their side.
Remember the end of that game? The Chiefs were driving at 35-all with two minutes left when James Bradberry was called for holding on receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster, allowing Mahomes to kneel out the drive before Harrison Butker kicked a last-second, title-winning field goal.
The call was there by the letter of the law, but it just felt wrong.
And throughout the 2024 season, the Chiefs kept playing in big games (because they’re the Chiefs and all of their games are big)… and seemed to keep getting the big calls.
There was the fourth-down pass interference on the Bengals in Week 2. The lack of a pass interference call in the end zone which hurt the Falcons in Week 3. The missed false start in overtime against the Buccaneers in Week 9.
And then came the playoffs. Even ESPN commentators Troy Aikman and Joe Buck couldn’t help but criticise the roughing the passer calls made on the Texans in the divisional round, and Mahomes himself was blasted for appearing to exaggerate contact.
“He kinda flops out of bounds … Mahomes trying to get a free first down,” Buck said at one point on a non-call.
“We knew it was going to be us against the refs going into this game,” Texans star Will Anderson Jr. said post-loss.
In the conference title game against the Bills, there were two major touchpoints.
First, receiver Xavier Worthy was judged to have made a contested catch on review, even though it appeared the ball hit the ground – and, if anyone had it, the Bills defender seemed the right choice.
Later in the game, Josh Allen seemed to have converted a crucial fourth down, but on review it was upheld as Chiefs’ ball – and bizarrely the ruling appeared to have been driven by the ref who couldn’t actually see the ball, rather than the one who could.
All of this creates a very easy narrative about the Chiefs and the refs. And in pretty much every sport, some teams will be accused of getting a better run than others.
Here’s the thing; the stats don’t back up the argument that the Chiefs get more good calls than any other team. It’s just that, because they’re always playing close ones and in the big primetime spots, everyone pays more attention.
Football analyst Ryan Heath tweeted last week that based on win probability numbers, the Chiefs were not the team most helped by penalties over the last two seasons.
While the numbers only included fouls called which resulted in a first down – so most notably they miss out on non-calls that should’ve been made – the Chiefs rank 11th and almost bang-on average.
Meanwhile earlier in this season after a Chiefs-Bengals game, ESPN’s Bill Barnwell debunked a theory around Patrick Mahomes being bailed out with how many of his interceptions were being overturned by penalties.
While the initial stat – that 17 Mahomes picks had been wiped off since the start of 2018 – sounded pretty bad, as Barnwell explained almost half of them came on plays were offsides was called early, and Mahomes knew he had a free shot downfield.
Mahomes had also thrown more passes than anyone in that period, so it’s natural he would have more chances to have his turnovers overturned. And on a per-throw basis, he was notably behind Cincinnati’s Joe Burrow, the QB he had just faced.
So yes, there have certainly been moments where the Chiefs have gotten favourable calls their way. But pretty much every team gets those at some point or another – it just so happens the Chiefs are always in the playoffs when everyone is paying attention.
But discourse around penalties, or free kicks, or whatever they’re called in your sport is always based more on emotion than fact. And fans are already emotionally attached to the Chiefs in a negative sense because they’re sick of seeing them.
That all creates another narrative – that the way the Chiefs are winning is turning off fans.
But while NFL fans may be desperate to see another team have success, they’re not so desperate as to stop watching.
Of the top 100 most-watched TV broadcasts in the US in 2024, a whopping 72 were the NFL – including the Super Bowl at No.1, the NFC Championship game at No.3, and the AFC Championship game at No.4.
The only reason the NFL didn’t take up more spots was the US election, with the sole Trump-Harris presidential debate ranking No.2. In 2023, without politics or the Olympics to compete with, the NFL produced 93 of the 100 most-watched broadcasts.
Obviously the Chiefs going deep into the playoffs every year means they’re going to feature in the most-watched games, but even their regular season games are bigger.
While the Thanksgiving games were the highest-rated non-playoff games, as always, Chiefs-Bills in Week 11 was the next-best, with it and Chiefs-Ravens beating several playoff games in the ratings. Chiefs-Bengals and Chiefs-49ers also made the top 26, showing they have surpassed the Cowboys as the perennial No.1 TV drawcard.
Sports media analyst John Ourand wrote for Puck this past week: “This season, the Bills and the Lions entered that conversation (as the most-watched team), but neither got close to matching the Chiefs.
“‘To me, the idea of viewer fatigue is simply teams that turn from being seen as the good guy to being seen as the bad guy,’ another executive told me.
“‘Everybody seemed to love the Chiefs a couple of years ago. Now, there’s going to be a higher percentage of people hate-watching to root against them.’”
Ourand predicted the record of 120 million viewers set by last year’s Chiefs-49ers Super Bowl would be broken, helped by the introduction of extra ways to watch the game (via streaming and a new Spanish-language broadcast).
The comparison is obvious – with their superstar quarterback, legendary coach and ability to seemingly always win the close ones, the Chiefs are becoming the new New England Patriots.
Most fans hated Tom Brady and Bill Belichick’s dominance of the league, helped by the fact they were involved in numerous scandals like ball deflation furore and their spying tactics – but the primary reason was they just kept winning.
“It’s apparent when you’re on top, everyone wants to try to bring you down,” former Patriots star Julian Edelman said this week on the Rich Eisen Show.
“It’s a bunch of baloney that the league is helping the Kansas City Chiefs. If you’ve got a problem with it, go beat them.”
He argued: “It’s always the team that makes the least amount of mistakes, and that’s what they do.
“They play mistake-free. They play situationally tight, and they lull you to sleep, and they beat you when they need to.
“A lot of these teams are sloppy – penalties, turnovers, abandoning their run game – that’s what gets you beat. Not them. That’s you.”
The Chiefs ranked 29th in the NFL for penalties in 2024, though on penalty yards they were 22nd and roughly equal with the Bills – while they lost more yards to penalties than their Super Bowl opponents the Eagles did.
And there were some pretty good teams who conceded a bunch of penalties, like Detroit and Baltimore, though both underperformed in the playoffs.
So that might be a slight simplification from Edelman – the Chiefs are also incredibly talented and schematically brilliant, and that’s the main reason they win games. But at the pointy end of the season, when every team is that good, those minor factors have a bigger impact.
Former Washington QB turned analyst Robert Griffin III declared this week “the NFL is not rigged and the refs aren’t cheating for the Kansas City Chiefs”, pointing to a number of stats showing they were nowhere near the top of the leaderboard for calls in their favour.
“STOP COMPLAINING AND WHINING ABOUT IT. Your favorite team just isn’t good enough to beat the Chiefs in the championship rounds of the game,” he said.
Meanwhile former NFL rules boss Dean Blandino argued while the Chiefs have “gotten the benefit of calls, but good teams make their own breaks. You think about the Patriots.
“My brother, who is convinced that the league is rigged, that is convinced that I signed a (nondisclosure agreement) when I left the league office that I cannot tell anybody that it’s rigged because I was head of officiating.
“We grew up in the same household, by the way. I said, ‘Listen, there’s no conspiracy. The officials, there’s too many variables, there’s too much going on.’
“To me, it’s the hardest sport — when you think about football with seven different officials, to say, ‘OK, I’m gonna rig this game,’ or the game is rigged from the league office down. The officials are just trying to get it right.”
It’s inevitable there will be a controversial call in the Super Bowl. It may well go the Chiefs’ way – and America may well be in an uproar.
But it doesn’t mean the league is biased towards them. Even if it feels like it.
