NFL Versus the Country
Why? Ask yourself who you were picking. Which for most of us is a two-part question. Who are we rooting for, and who do we think will probably win? Rooting choice tends to be, with exceptions, geographical. Unless your team is playing — not much chance of that — you’re likely to be taking sides in the ancient rivalries: East vs West, North vs South, Middle America (however conceived) vs the Coastal Elites, etc. Betting choices tend to be based on the record, this year’s season, past winners of the NFL championship, and personal hunches about who’s lucky, whose turn it might be in the scheme of things, where the game is being played, and what if any role NFL politics is playing in the minds of everyone involved this year.
These all come down, I’ll note, to very personal preferences and perspectives. The reason I’m doing this post is that I suddenly realized the President of the United States has a perspective uniquely different from our own. His geographical sphere of interest is the whole country, not a single city, state, or region that commands a competitive loyalty. As a politician, he doesn’t want to offend anyone by his pick, which is why most politicians would fend off the question with fake neutrality, and why Trump probably felt compelled to be brave enough to commit himself to choosing a winner. Winning is kind of his whole thing. Why did he pick the KC Chiefs? Let’s look at the record as if we were POTUS and see how we’d pick. It turns out to be kind of an interesting exercise for a Monday morning after the Super Bowl.
The most relevant timespan to the CIC is the two most recent Presidential terms. Why we’ve got nine games bookending the Trump and Biden terms in office. The first eight reflect what’s already history, and the ninth is some kind of a possible pointer about the beginning of the new term in office. Ideally, the history will tell us something interesting about the country as a whole and about the NFL’s place in it.
So who was there and who wasn’t there in the Trump years and the Biden years? From 2018 (2017 season, 1st year of Trump term) through 2021 (2020 season), we have six different teams in the Super Bowl. Two from the coastal northeast, two from coastal California, one from the coastal south, and one from the exact middle of the country, i.e., the heartland. From 2022 though 2025 (the Biden term of ‘21>’24), we have two from the heartland, two from the California coast, and one from the northeast. Does this tell us anything significant? Probably. But it’s hard to see until you look at how the games worked out over the whole timeline and who in particular has been winning:
They rejected my proposed team name for the new NonRedskin team: The Dear Leaders.
All right. I’ll save the other petty grievance stuff for later. Just being honest. I’m an old-time NFL fan, and no matter how I try to discipline myself to look at the facts objectively, that fan is still there under the surface of the stats, and you deserve to know it. My advantage in striving for a big picture view now is that as an old-time fan, I haven’t been much interested in the NFL since the Kaepernick revolt in 2016. I watched the Eagles win a National Championship on TV in 1960 and then come up empty for the next 58 years. During that time, I rooted for Eagles, of course, but also formed strong attachments to other teams and strong aversions to still others. I always had a rooting interest in any game that was on. I was a Vikings fan, a Raiders fan (sadly, still am), and when they were flirting with glory from time to time a Browns fan, a Bears fan, a Colts fan, and even a Dallas fan (when Staubach was QB and the Philly team was the “Beagles”). You can guess who I didn’t like: the Steelers, Patriots, Chiefs, Rams, and Forty-Niners. Respect, yes. Rooting interest, generally opposed.
It wasn’t only Kaepernick that turned me off the NFL. The openly partisan politicking of ESPN, team owners, and overpaid players was grating. The runaway impact of free agency had the impact of reducing the importance of geographical allegiance for fans like me. It was hard to keep up with who was and wasn’t on this year’s team, as compared to last year’s. Also, too many years of watching teams overspending on first round QB picks, starting them too soon, and getting them injured before they learned how to stay healthy in the NFL Stopped believing all the hype about who was going to be the next Brady, Manning, or Unitas. None of them. The pocket is your career, the open field is the end of your career.
For all these reasons, I don’t know much about any of the seven teams who have played in the big game during the past two presidential terms. I do know that the very longstanding NFL dream of “equity” among teams from among the poor and rich cities in the league has become more gossamer than ever. Somehow, even the poorer cities have too much money to make wise “Moneyball”-type decisions now that they’re all flush with sky-high ticket prices and television contracts. Even the rich teams can’t figure out how to win when they spend more money than the competition on worse personnel decisionmaking. Why no New York, no Dallas, no Houston, no Miami, no Washington DC, no New Orleans, no Pittsburgh, no Baltimore in eight years. What does Trump see when he looks at this tiny lineup of repeat survivors in the Super Bowl sweepstakes?
He sees a lot of elite power and influence from the Old-Money Northeast and the California nouveau-riche headquarters of conspicuous consumption. True, Philadelphia has become the poor relation of the Deep State world of Boston/NYC/DC noblesse-oblige (i.e., entitlement), but despite their shabby blue-collar image (pounded home by NY media), they’re still the Cradle of Liberty, and the Main Line row of millionaire suburbs still has that imperious attitude of “we were here first” only Boston still tries to compete with. But the 17th century legacy of Massachusetts is witchcraft trials, and the 17th century legacy of Philadelphia is Quaker peace treaties with the Indians. Boston doesn’t have these:
Or the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and Ben Franklin.
Makes it seem as if Trump would have picked the Eagles for symbolic reasons consistent with his mission to restore the Founding Fathers to a place of honor. He didn’t though. He picked the Chiefs. Who elected him? The infamous Flyover States all the elite A’holes make fun of. Only one other flyover city in eight years of Super Bowls, and they lost their one game. People were talking all week (me included) about games being rigged for the Chiefs. Maybe there has been rigging, but maybe not by the usual suspects. In that eight years, they’ve won three Super Bowls while Jerry Jones still gets a lot more press for his monomaniacal obsession with getting his hands on the Lombardi trophy again. And how did Andy Reid manage to coach all those teams to consistent victory? A question we Philadelphians are more qualified to ask than any talking head on ESPN. He was 14 years in Philly with talented teams who made it consistently to the playoffs but only once to the big game, which he lost. We came to dislike him for his terrible time management, haphazard playcalling, and unchanging refrain after every loss of promising to do better, get better… How does this man suddenly mutate into a coach who’s compared to Lombardi and Belichick and Shula?
Maybe it was all meant to be somehow. This club, located in the exact middle of nowhere USA, picked on and pressured about its non-PC name, famously scoring near the bottom in player surveys of team facilities and fan surveys of stadium safety… maybe this club was meant to be the rugged example of the people in the forgotten and overlooked parts of America politicians try to use without trying to serve their needs. Don’t forget it was the Chiefs victory in the second Super Bowl against my invincible Vikings that crowned the union of the flamethrowing AFL with the stodgy old NFL in 1969. And here they are again, reminding the world that football is still a game of blocking and tackling and, yes, flamethrowing by cornfed hicks from all over.
Kind of a MAGA team when you think about it. I understand Trump’s pick, probably more a betting pick than a preference. But I’d like to point out that these were the two perfect teams to face each other in this game. The Eagles did survive the Andy Reid doldrums and have made it to three Super Bowls since, second only to KC in number of appearances during the eight years of two POTUS terms. Together, they account for more than half the victories won by the seven teams who competed in that timeframe. And Philadelphia is special precisely because it has been so overlooked and disrespected as an also-ran in the DC-Phila-NYC-Boston power corridor of the Northeast. All stops on the Metroliner train that shuttles the elites to their meetings and social engagements. It was on the Metroliner that I had my first ever in-person sighting of a Philadelphia sports legend. Pete Retzlaff, star receiver for the Eagles when I was a kid, a big handsome man in a beautiful suit when I saw him as a teenager en route back to school after a holiday. I was too shy to ask for an autograph, but I remember the moment, which is more important anyway. At some point it became fashionable for the other NE cities to look down on Philadelphia, its sports teams, its Ivy League university (3rd oldest of the 8), its me-too lefty newspaper, its ‘Philadelphia lawyers,’ and its bruising collisions between Mafiosi and hard-bitten cops like Frank Rizzo. Nothing bad that happened in Philly failed to happen in the other cities; the City of (not-so) Brotherly Love became an easy distraction from their own gradually accelerating decline.
Well it’s time for a new day in both Kansas City and Philadelphia. Yes, they’re winners. Have been and will continue to be winners in this era of second chances. Transition time for both. The Chiefs will be back. So will the Eagles. One way I know this? Kelly green.
That’s the color the Eagles wore in 1960, when Chuck Bednarik ended the championship game by stuffing Frank Gifford into the turf. It was the current owner’s wife who thought the Kelly green was déclassée and should be replaced by teal, a shade women could relate better to. When the decision was made to resurrect the old color for the sake of variety, I felt my heart leap. But I knew the teal would be worn in the New Orleans game, and I thought that was a bad omen. I was wrong. It happens.
Here’s hoping I’m not wrong about a big comeback by the forgotten ones in flyover country and in the Dem-damaged cities of the northeastern U.S.
Fly Eagles Fly.
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