Before long, they stopped looking like plays. The barricade had broken down and the poor souls left in the backfield were grabbing collars, hurling their shoulders into chestplates and trying to pick themselves off the ground.
The Kansas City Chiefs’ backfield looked like one of those pencil illustrations of the Revolutionary War. Individual portraits of agony and confusion. Some kind of echelon, phalanx or wedge that, once orderly, had been bludgeoned and discarded.
The Chiefs had tried everything within reason to stop what was Super Bowl LIX’s most glaring mismatch in what ended as a 40–22 Philadelphia Eagles rout. The team in white jerseys tried to double-team Josh Sweat with Travis Kelce and Isiah Pacheco. Sweat would manhandle Kelce then back-elbow Pacheco like a swinging saloon door. The team tried to double-team Jalen Carter, with the behemoth defensive tackle simply ripping his way along the defensive line, picking up extra blockers and leaving the backfield exposed to the other Eagles rushers. The Chiefs tried a bigger blocking back, but on the other side of the line, there was Joe Thuney, out of position but hanging on, toes pointed skyward, slipping backward like a gin hound on roller blades, as Sweat was pushing him straight into the hip of Patrick Mahomes.
Perhaps the one lingering question at the end of this clubbing was whether Thuney should have been removed from left tackle and placed back at guard. But insisting this matters is ignoring the depth of what can only, in its kindest terms, be referred to as an ass-kicking.
We could tell you that this was the worst half of football played by a quarterback in the Super Bowl since the turn of the millennium. There are ways in which we can measure expected points per dropback and how a quarterback elevates his receivers above an expected outcome. We could tell you that Mahomes was under duress on more than 50% of the snaps he took despite zero—count them, zero—first-half blitzes from stoic defensive coordinator Vic Fangio. But bringing that into the conversation after Philadelphia’s absolutely dominant win would infer that Mahomes had anything to do with it.
In reality, for the first time since Super Bowl LV, the Super Bowl was not a game whatsoever. It was a demolition derby. Pure ruin. It was insects under the magnifying glass of your favorite detention frequent flyer. It was reminiscent of Super Bowl XLVIII, when the Legion of Boom plastered a rickety Peyton Manning because a young, wunderkind defense had completely decoded all of the frantic hand motions and backfield theatrics of a quarterback.
Super Bowl LIX was different in that no amount of game planning would have changed the outcome. No amount of Navy SEAL training and subterfuge would have stopped what we knew but refused to acknowledge: The Eagles were bigger and badder. They were stronger and faster. They were younger and edgier.
And, it’s important to mention, that even if Mahomes had time to pick his head up and look downfield, he would have seen nothing. Fangio sat in quarters as his monstrous four-man front perforated the line. Mahomes couldn’t even throw the ball away.
God bless the small handful of Chiefs fans who forked over a mortgage payment thinking they’d see the cementing of an all-time dynasty instead of a wake-up call. It can’t be won on a razor’s edge every week. It can’t be won—ducks—by the whistle of someone wearing stripes. Steve Spagnuolo can’t blitz every opposing quarterback into oblivion. Like the last time Kansas City lost a Super Bowl against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, this was a reminder about the limits of a superhuman quarterback’s capabilities.
Walking the concourse before the game, it had the feel of a blowout. Eagles fans outnumbered Chiefs fans four-to-one. As they filed into the stands, they booed any glimmer of red on the Jumbotron. Man. Woman. Child. Iconic pop star who has very likely never heard that sound before. They booed Jon Hamm. They booed the war chant. But this was not simply the battle cry of the blighters that grow and multiply in the southeastern corner of Pennsylvania. This was a foretelling buoyed by some of the most physical, middle-finger-in-the-air moments during a playoff run that we’ve seen in recent years. If we didn’t see this coming, then what were we watching throughout the playoffs on the 72-yard run in the snow? Amid the 50-burger laid on the Washington Commanders?
Everything translated to a game against the Chiefs that didn’t even necessitate the unsheathing of Saquon Barkley. Like a dusty 1-iron, he was left in the bag as a specialty club.
The Chiefs did not have a drive lasting more than four plays until the third quarter, at which time the team managed just the second of their 12 total first downs. By then, by the time they had played Mr. Brightside, the stadium was more like an Eagles trade show. The spaces between Chiefs’ plays were silent, save for a few drunken whistles.
Long ago, the snaps stopped mattering anyway, once it became clear that this was far less a matchup between the league’s two best teams. One team got here through that nebulous and unsatisfying explainer of knowing how to win. The other—the winner—was simply created to destroy.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as The Eagles Were Built to Destroy, and That’s Just What They Did to the Chiefs.
