| Sunday’s Super Bowl LVI will see the hometown team as the visiting team in its own stadium, and that’s not even close to being the quirkiest thing about it. The Los Angeles Rams against the Cincinnati Bengals is a Super Bowl filled with paradoxes, coming at the end of a season that was just like that, too. It will take place on a sunny day in one of America’s sunniest cities, in a stadium covered by a canopy. It is a game where the younger of the two quarterbacks, Joe Burrow, hails from a sleepy rural Ohio town and is proud of it, but walks around on game days in designer sunglasses and flashy mink coats. It is where the older QB, Matthew Stafford, sits on the cusp of a place in the Hall of Fame, but had never won a single playoff game before this season. It comes at a time when football tactics are more complex than ever and experience is worth its weight in gold, but where the Bengals will roll out two players older than opposition coach, Sean McVay. And where the Rams will have one (Andrew Whitworth), older than Cincinnati head coach Zac Taylor. It is the defining contest of a season that has been anything other than predictable, where the betting favorites have covered the spread less frequently than ever before, where home field was a wash and where reputations seemed like they counted for a lot, until suddenly, at the business end of the postseason, they didn’t. It is the Super Bowl, America’s grandest sporting day at a time when things aren’t quite normal again but are emphatically more so than last year, when Tom Brady won his seventh ring in front of thousands of cardboard cutouts. Something special awaits, we presume, because that’s what it typically takes to win the prize everyone wants. Beyond that, who knows what dramas and subplots will play out and in some ways that’s the best part of Super Bowl week, the delicious wondering, the reality that whatever happens now it is going to be something we didn’t see coming. This is the new order of things in the NFL, which is to say there is no order at all. Did you predict the Rams and Bengals as football’s last teams standing? No, didn’t think so. Pro football has become so intricate, so nuanced, so detailed, and the commitment to finding the most miniscule of marginal gains so ingrained now that even the best predictions amount to little more than educated guesswork. Precedent is no help. The Bengals began the year without a postseason win in three decades, with a quarterback who had won just two games as a starter and a head coach whose NFL record stood at 6-25-1. It was a year where the Rams, who took a series of big swings in the trade market and hoped for a few of them to pay off, ended up seeing them all come to fruition, with this being the outcome. Even then, had an untimely dropped interception by the San Francisco 49ers’ Jaquiski Tartt found the fleshy part of his hands instead two weeks ago, perhaps today’s column would have been about Jimmy Garoppolo, and perhaps Los Angeles would again have been flooded with visitors clad in red. So much has to go right to get to a Super Bowl, and just as much has to not go wrong. The Kansas City Chiefs and Aaron Rodgers’ Green Bay Packers probably felt at different times that this was their year of destiny, only to see their seemingly indestructible auras falter at the wrong moment. The Rams and Bengals are here because they weathered their storms and crises, playing well enough to put themselves in position and then getting some of the little snippets of good fortune needed to get across the line. So here it is and here we are. The 285th game of the campaign approaches, more important than each of the ones that came before it because of what is at stake — history, posterity and the positioning of legend. When underdog teams make it this far — these are a pair of No. 4 seeds, remember — is it easy to assume that the process becomes something of a freeroll. Don’t you believe it. Super Bowl opportunities are rare and fleeting and there is never any guarantee that they will come again. Just ask Rodgers, who can scarcely believe his only Super Bowl appearance is still the time he won it, 11 years ago. Or Drew Brees, who might have legitimately expected to return at least once after 2010. For Burrow, the youngster seeking to upset everything, and Stafford, the late-career stalwart who finally got to the ultimate game, the chance is here. The time is now. And the scene, one big enough to transfix the country at this time each year, is set. |
