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Oh, I Suppose I Must

One of the inescapable duties of every sports opinionator is to pick the winner of the Super Bowl. Nowadays, we're also expected to pick against the spread and the over/under. It's a bother. For one thing, none of your audience remembers the right picks in that trio, just the one or ones that went wrong.

Last year I went with the Patriots giving points to the Rams. Like everyone else on Earth, I predicted a high-scoring game making the over as well. The only fact anyone will remember about Super Bowl 53 a decade from now is that at 13-3, New England won the lowest scoring Super Bowl ever. Hard to say two out of three ain't bad when the third is a bad guess of historic dimensions.

Which brings us to tomorrow's Super Bowl 54. Once again there is "expert" consensus, this time across the board, from the numbers crunchers at Football Outsiders to the men and women who crush a very different set of numbers in Las Vegas. The Chiefs and 49ers are an even match. The Kansas City minus 1.5 spread says so. The nearly 50-50 split of "expert" (some of these people really are football experts, mind you, but no one is an expert in forecasting one game, not me, you nor Bill Belichick) opinion says so. Hell, even the two uniforms say so. The shades of red used by the Chiefs and 49ers are separated by one 127-128, on the scientific color scale.

There is a consensus choice on one element of tomorrow's game. Both teams are expected to score a bunch of points. The over/under is 54.5. That means Vegas expects a score around 28-27 or 27-24 given the game it and the public expects to be close.

I'm not touching the over/under this year except to say this. If there's another 13-3 Super Bowl, the NFL owners will pass a rule eliminating the safety position.

For my prediction, I was tempted to just flip a coin, but there's no change in my desk drawer. In the interest of brevity, let's summarize the conventional wisdom on each team's strengths and weaknesses.

The 49ers offense runs the ball effectively and at times, as in the NFC title game, with frightening prowess, whereas the Chiefs defense, while improved from last season's sorry lot, has been mediocre to poor at stopping opposing runners.

A strong point, that. A team need not run to win, indeed most don't, but a team that cannot stop the run will surely lose. The Patriots had the NFL's leading defense this season, and its inability to limit Derrick Henry is the main reason Tom Brady had so much free time on his hands last month.

The Chiefs real running defense is Patrick Mahomes. A two touchdown lead has always been the ultimate run stopper. The ability of Kansas City's offense to score points in bunches in very little time negates what makes running the football work, the control of both time and space. In football physics, scoreboard trumps both those dimensions.

Not to give short shrift to the KC defense, but the case for a Chiefs win rests totally on its offense. One of the league's top three quarterbacks and its fastest offense. Never out of any game. Immune to the awful sense of impending doom that impacts so many Super Bowl losers who were trailing by 10 midway through the third quarter. Can outscore anyone.

This argument would impress me more had I not seen its history in Super Bowls ranging from XXV (Giants 20-Bills 19) to XLVIII (Seahawks 43-Broncos 8) to, well LIII (13-3, remember). For the record, teams which reached the Super Bowl relying wholly on defense have a spotty history as well. Ask the Purple People Eater Vikings of the early '70s. Having more than one plausible path to victory is a decided advantage in any sport.

I yield to no one in my admiration for Mahomes.  Maybe it's my childhood spent rooting for Wilt Chamberlain going up against the Celtics, but I am skeptical of teams dependent on one player's heroics. That's in basketball. In football, with more twice as many players in action on every play, that skepticism increases a thousandfold.

The 49ers offense is not one-dimensional at all. Jimmy Garoppolo has been more than competent in 2019. His receivers may not be as fast as the Chiefs' lot, but they're almost as good. Maybe just as good. San Francisco is capable of winning an amusement park fire shootout (see the Saints game) as are the Chiefs and its defense is much more capable of preventing one.

So that's two, maybe 2 1/2 plausible paths to victory for the 49ers to one for the Chiefs. Nice as it would be to see Andy Reid win a Super Bowl, if only to shut up Boston sports talk radio on one topic, I cannot in good conscience predict it. Kansas City is gonna need a lot more funny bounces, turnovers, enemy penalties, special teams screwups, etc., than the Niners do. The Chiefs need more luck to win. I never bet on luck.

49ers 34-Chiefs 24. For amusement purposes only, meaning any reader is free to laugh at me on Monday.

posted by Michael Gee @ 10:36 AM