Kansas City has the better team. San Francisco has the better story.
Who’s your pick?
Kansas City has the best unit in the game in its defense and the best player in football, quarterback Patrick Mahomes, going for his third Super Bowl ring in six seasons. San Francisco has the last player picked in the draft, Mr. Irrelevant, Brock Purdy, going for his first ring in his second season.
Who needs to win more?
Kansas City has the best coach in the game in Andy Reid, who can become the fifth coach to win three Super Bowls. San Francisco has the unluckiest coach of them all, Kyle Shanahan, trying to shake the narrative of losing two, double-digit Super Bowl leads in his career.
Who’s helped more by winning?
In many ways, Sunday’s Super Bowl is a perfect day of all-American ingredients on steroids: The biggest day in the biggest sport, the biggest day in gambling gone legal and the biggest pop star in Taylor Swift cheering from a suite for her beau, Kansas City’s Travis Kelce, to oddly rankle so many.
In other ways, it’s a sports story of contrasts. Not just the disparate ideas of these quarterbacks and coaches. It’s the timeline of these winning teams.
Kansas City has achieved the difficult thing in a salary-capped sport by maintaining greatness even as its best players like Mahomes get paid. They show Miami Dolphins fans the hard road ahead as players grow into big contracts.
Kansas City’s management made difficult decisions like trading receiver Tyreek Hill to the Dolphins. They’ve drafted well in rebuilding a defense. They constructed an offensive line off the scrap heap. They’ve changed their manner of play from a high-scoring offense to a defense-first team.
They’ve become America’s villains for winning so much, too.
“For some reason, everybody used to love us, we used to be one of the most favorite teams,” Kansas City defensive tackle Chris Jones said this Super Bowl week. “Now everybody’s like, ‘We’re ready for the Chiefs to lose.’
“I don’t know why, what changed. What dramatic incidents happened to where everybody felt like we should lose now, but that’s OK. They can continue hating.”
San Francisco has reached here another way. It was the Dolphins attempt this past season. It drafted nine players who made Pro Bowls. It traded draft picks for stars like Christian McCaffrey and left tackle Trent Williams (and overcame a dud trade with the Dolphins to move up and draft quarterback Trey Lance).
It kept established players thanks to young players on cheap contracts like Purdy. It all works because of Shanahan, who is too young at 44 to consider his legacy only lacks a Super Bowl title. He could use some luck, though. His 49ers led by 10 points in the third quarter of the 2020 Super Bowl and watched Mahomes lead the Chiefs back. He was Atlanta’s offensive coordinator when it blew a 28-3 third-quarter lead against New England in 2017.
“When you go into these games, what makes you prepare, I just don’t want regrets,” Shanahan explained. “I just want to do everything that makes sense to myself, that makes sense for our team. And when you do that, that’s what I have found, no matter how hard something is, or good something is, you always keep perspective of what it really is.”
It’s easy to root for San Francisco with a coach trying to overcome previous Super Bowl failure. And with a quarterback no one wanted. And because they’re playing a franchise on the cusp of New England-style dominance over the NFL. And, yes, if you’ve tired of camera cutaways to Swift for some reason.
But the better stories don’t win in sports. The better teams do. Since these playoffs started, Kansas City has played like the best team. There’s no reason for it change Sunday.
Kansas City 24, San Francisco 21.