I’m fully aware that I could be jinxing the whole thing by just writing about it, but with the best possible winners surviving Wild Card weekend, but with the teams we have left in the tournament there’s pretty much no way we’ll end up with a snoozer Super Bowl. And if the games this weekend are any indication of the level of competition, and I think they are, Super Bowl 50 could be one of the best ever played.
If you’ve only been really watching or paying attention to football for the last 20 years or so, you have no clue how good you have it. When I was growing up, the Super Bowl was a fun party, but almost an afterthought. The NFC was so dominant throughout most of the 1980s and 90s that the NFC Championship was basically the real title game and the Super Bowl just served as a coronation. From 1981 to 1997 exactly one AFC team, the 1983-84 Los Angeles Raiders won a Super Bowl, beating the Washington Redskins 38-9. For the rest of that 16-year span the NFC ruled, with a handful of teams (the San Francisco 49ers, the New York Giants, the Dallas Cowboys and the Redskins) passing the Lombardi Trophy back and forth.
That all changed in 1998. The Denver Broncos came in as an 11-point underdog in Super Bowl XXXII. Quarterback John Elway had already lost three Super Bowls, all badly, this looked like it would be No. 4 as he was taking his team against the 13-3 Green Bay Packers led by Brett Favre right in the midst of his most dominant years. No one though the game would be close. Not only was it close, it was tied 24-24 with a just a few minutes left in the fourth quarter. The Broncos won the game 31-24 in what was probably the most important Super Bowl victory since the New York Jets won in Super Bowl III. The script was flipped and the age of the competitive Super Bowl had begun.
Two years later the St. Louis Rams and the Tennessee Titans would play what is, as of today, the consensus “best Super Bowl ever played” with the Rams winning 23-16 thanks to a tackle on the one-yard line in the final second by Rams’ linebacker Mike Jones on Titans’ receiver Kevin Dyson. A handful of blowout coronations have snuck in there since, but beginning on that January in 1998, 12 Super Bowls have been decided by a single score and 13 have been decided by a single play late in the fourth quarter.
So with that in mind, what is the best possible match-up for Super Bowl 50? I can tell you right now everybody in the NFL office wants the Carolina Panthers to take on the Denver Broncos. It’s a no-lose scenario for the league. Either Peyton Manning, the non-cheating face of the NFL, goes out on top, retiring as a World Champion or he officially anoints his predecessor, Cam Newton, who will take home the first of God only knows how many Lombardis.
Roger Goodell and the NFL would absolutely hate to hand a Lombardi Trophy to the New England Patriots this year after Brady embarrassed them in court so thoroughly. You’d think that any appearance by the Patriots would be a disaster from the NFL’s standpoint, but that’s discounting one thing; the NFL’s love of money. Everybody outside of New England hates the Patriots now, as they should, so all of these people, even casual fans, will buy into the hype of the Super Bowl just to watch the Patriots get beaten. If it’s by Newton and the Panthers or Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers, all the better.
The Pittsburgh Steelers? They’d be going for their record seventh title. The Seattle Seahawks could shake off their Super Bowl 49 hangover to make up for the worst call in Super Bowl history. The Arizona Cardinals would be going for their first title. And you don’t even want to think of the way the NFL would hype a Super Bowl 1 rematch in Super Bowl 50 between the Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs.
The duds are gone. There’s no chance of a Kirk Cousins vs Brian Hoyer Super Bowl match-up and for that we should all be thankful. We’re getting a good game and as long as the Patriots don’t win it, we’ll all be happy.
