Learning From Thy Enemies
live feed of my rooting interests during the game
In football, everyone’s looking to be ahead of the curve, not on the backside of it. But in doing so, it’s important to discern outliers from trends and trends from universal truths. The Niners have been both good at this–starting the resurgence in star feature backs with the CMC acquisition, our entire offensive scheme–and bad–drafting Trey Lance for his mobility and big arm, everything involving special teams.
This Super Bowl was littered with takeaways–some legitimate team-building lessons and others powered more by fortunate circumstances. As always, it’s important to differentiate between the two lest we go down the wrong path. So before we dive into our roster needs, let’s try to separate genuine takeaways from fool’s gold through the lens of the Super Bowl.
TRUTHS
You Win In The Trenches. Football is still a game that is won—most commonly—along the offensive and defensive lines. If this game didn’t hammer that home, try to remember the last Super Bowl champion who was worse along both lines. A lot went into the Eagles’ blowout, but the primary factor was this–they dominated both lines of scrimmage. This is vitally important for us to understand as we approach an off-season where we have significant holes on both lines.
Rosters are Built Through the Draft. Yes, the Eagles have a few big name free agent/trade contributors–namely Saquon Barkley and AJ Brown–but depth and staying power is ALWAYS built through the draft. After some notable whiffs early in his tenure, Howie Roseman has built up the most talented roster in football by accumulating picks and making intelligent value plays–particularly in the first two days of the draft.
It’s Fine To Make Mistakes, As Long As You Learn From Them. But let’s talk about those whiffs. Roseman had some massive misses early, especially at wide receiver–JJ Arcega-Whiteside, Jalen Raegor, Nelson Agholor–and when choosing and extending the wrong franchise quarterback (Carson Wentz). These mistakes set the Eagles back but didn’t cripple them because he was able to recognize the mistakes, jettison them, and correct them. After all those wideout misses, Roseman promptly traded for an established top-tier veteran at a low price (AJ Brown) and then drafted a Heisman winner in the first round (Devonta Smith). He learned the importance of the position and addressed it accordingly.
This Is What It Looks Like When the Chiefs Are Called for Holding. Once more for those in the cheap seats. The Chiefs have come out like this in the first half of four of their five Super Bowls. We’ve seen this before. The big difference this time was that the refs didn’t allow them to hold their way back into this game. How many uncalled holds and pick plays on third down have we seen that jumpstart the Chiefs? That get them back into games that could otherwise become blowouts? We’ve now had two Super Bowls where the refs call the Chiefs for holding—where they actually make them play the same game as the other team—and they just so happen to be Chief blowout losses where they got overwhelmed by an opposing pass rush. The Eagles were considerably cleaner and more dominant than we were in either of our matchups against KC, but they also got to play in a game that was appropriately officiated (and where the Chiefs even had some ticky-tack calls against them). That makes all the difference. If you still don’t think those calls matter, that they can swing a would-be blowout into a nailbiter, and that those calls have overwhelmingly benefited the Chiefs (especially against us) and laid the foundation for their dynasty, I don’t know what to tell you.
LIES
Winning Only Close Games Just Means You’re “Clutch.” Actually, it probably just means you’re lucky. And the more extreme your run of one-score wins becomes, the more extreme your regression to the mean is likely to be. Just like that first Rams Super Bowl run, this Chiefs team was far too good at winning games that could have been decided by a single bad bounce of an oblong football. We like to attribute that to some preternatural skill, when—realistically—it mostly comes down to luck. The regression was coming. And boy did it ever.
An Elite QB Means You Don’t Need Skill Players. We saw it with Josh Allen the week before and with Mahomes yesterday/this entire season. You can’t just throw the ball to absolute randos and expect that to work. Just like an offensive line needs to block, receivers need to get open. To be fair, Mahomes played HORRIBLY in the Super Bowl, but—on a macro level—there’s only so much scheming you can do to get guys open when you’ve pieced your receiver corps together with duct tape and bubble gum and your future Hall of Fame tight end can only get open against soft zone and with the aid of pick routes. This trend feels like the natural overreaction to an overemphasis (and overpayment) of the quarterback position meeting GMs big-braining themselves into thinking they’ve cracked the code. Speaking of which…
You Can Get By With Shitty Tackles. If the Chiefs had won this game, we were about to see a bunch of GMs try to Moneyball themselves into thinking you could “hack” an elite offense by spending big on the interior OL, cheaping out on offensive tackles, and leaning on an inside rushing game and a mobile QB to make their lesser tackles “right” in pass pro. It didn’t matter that the Chiefs offense was far from elite this season. Or that—for much of the year—they weren’t even good. The wins and—in this alternate reality—the Super Bowl would have sent many a GM down this dark path. But after the Chiefs’ OL was so thoroughly extinguished last night, that’s no longer likely to happen.
KC spent all season being “just good enough” on offense, finding peak (yet plodding) efficiency late in games by relying on an interior power run game and letting Mahomes avoid the first guy that their woeful tackles let through. Late in the season, they pushed Pro Bowl guard Joe Thuney out to left tackle, improving their offense by providing it one decent tackle but giving up interior dominance in the process and creating a red flag at left guard with his replacement. Their problem at tackle was so bad that they had to break up their one dominant position group—the interior OL—to fix it. This change seemed to work, but only because they went up against teams that weren’t talented enough upfront to exploit it.
While it seems insane, the Chiefs had far more yards in the Super Bowl than they did in their divisional round win against the Texans. And while some of that was effectively in garbage time, the big difference in the two outcomes were backbreaking turnovers and the Texan’s offense imploding opposite their defensive effort. We knew that this offensive line structure shouldn’t be able to sustain itself for a championship run because we assumed that—at some point—the Chiefs would run into a good defensive line paired with a functional offense (or just hold that defensive line repeatedly and get away with it).
OUTLIERS
It’s Fine To Have Glaring Holes in Your Scheme. Speaking of lucking into matchups, I wouldn’t take too much away from Jalen Hurts’ Super Bowl stat line or the Eagles’ passing numbers as a whole. Props to him and the rest of the team for doing what they do best, but they also ran into a matchup where they didn’t have to do anything they’re bad at. Powered by an elite offensive line, Saqon, and Hurts’ legs, this Eagles team can run with the best of them. And when defenses are keying that run game, they can throw the deep ball outside and over the top with their two No.1 receivers and underrated tight end. But they cannot, for the life of them, throw over the middle or hit timing routes.
In this case, it didn’t matter. The Chiefs’ wide array of bracket coverages are made mostly to stop inside-breaking routes. The type of routes the Eagles don’t throw. And any would-be double coverages were made moot by the fact that they needed numbers in the box to stop the run. You can’t bracket someone on a go route without putting yourself wildly out of position against everything else, and the result was a lot of one-on-one deep balls to two receivers who specialize in exactly that.
The Eagles were able to run train on the Chiefs because they were considerably more talented and the Chiefs couldn’t matchup against any of their weaknesses. Good on the Eagles for building a roster and scheme that can punish teams who can’t force them to do that one thing they’re terrible at. But they were fortunate that their three playoff matchups included two teams with woeful run defenses (Rams, Commanders), a rain game to nullify their passing disadvantage (Rams), and a Super Bowl against a team whose defense was built around taking away an entire section of the field that they just ignore. The matchups won’t always be that favorable.
No team is matchup agnostic, but the last thing we want to take away from this Super Bowl is the idea that “next time (if there is a next time) the matchup will be better” and we should just “do what we do.” There’s a difference between having an offensive identity and something to hang your hat on and being one-dimensional. We should continue to hone our strengths and play to them, but we also need to spend this off-season patching up weaknesses and evolving schematically. Otherwise, we’re leaving a whole lot up to chance. And if there’s one thing we should all agree on, leaving things up to chance has not served us well in the playoffs.
Go Niners 🏈👍