Super Bowl LVI: Bengals-Rams a clash of opportunists
This time, the ultimate opportunity belongs to a pair of opportunists. In two weeks, Super Bowl LVI will be contested between the Cincinnati Bengals and the Los Angeles Rams for a whole variety of reasons but only one that truly matters. Because, even when it looked like it wasn’t possible, they believed it to be so. When they had every reason to let doubt in — and doing so would mean the chance slipping by — the No. 4-seeded Bengals and the No. 4 Rams shut their ears and minds to the stack of evidence walled against them and plowed forward regardless. When the Bengals were rated at no better than +20000 to win it all in Week 3 and outsiders for both their own division and even a wild-card spot, they rolled with Joe Burrow and grew in belief as their precocious young quarterback did the same. When the Rams were up against a six-game losing streak to their NFC Championship opponents, the San Francisco 49ers, and faced with a “home” crowd stacked with visiting red and a 17-7 fourth-quarter hole, they provided the stronger late surge and did enough against perhaps the league’s best defense. When Cincinnati was up against an impossible machine Sunday, when the brilliance of Burrow and the defense caught bad luck, as the Kansas City Chiefs fortuitously recovered a fumble then won an apparently critical overtime coin toss, the team that just cracked a 30-year postseason win drought looked like the one that had been there before. When the Rams faced criticism about their toughness and slumped to three straight defeats at the season’s midpoint, they didn’t waver. As the calls that they were talented but mightily shaky grew in number, they showed the latter to be false. So here it is: the joint lowest-seeded Super Bowl we have ever seen. Never before has the National Football League’s showpiece been absent of all the 1 and 2 seeds. The Bengals and Rams lost 12 games between them in the regular season, and no, that has never happened before, either. Truth be told, this Super Bowl will be a little different. And it’s a difference that should be enjoyed. It isn’t the start of a new trend. It is almost certainly going to be an outlier. Regular-season dominance still matters, and it will persist as a worthy indicator of what will happen at this time of year. Just not this time. What went down the past few weeks is a reminder that the most important rule in the NFL, written or otherwise, is that any darn thing can happen, at any time. Football is a sport in which the more we think we know, the more we are taken by surprise, and never more so than in this wondrously bizarre campaign, in which predictions based on logic, form and numerology counted for little more than rolling dice or picking winners based on your favored color. There will be no megastars to grace the biggest game of all on Feb. 13, no figures who cut across sports and into popular culture, and that is perfectly fine. It is a juicy matchup, and there will be a champion we didn’t really see coming, especially once the Rams’ early-season burst fell flat. No Super Bowl since the 2012 season has taken place without a quarterback assuredly destined for the Hall of Fame. All the recent ones had at least Tom Brady or Patrick Mahomes or Peyton Manning, and sometimes Russell Wilson, too. Rams signal-caller Matthew Stafford probably needs at least one more win to get to Canton. Burrow might end up there one day, but it’s early for him, early enough for him to have firmly outstripped even the most optimistic projections for his career timeline. Even when the Bengals made the postseason, few saw things going this far, especially once the matchup with the Chiefs was inked. They could have lost against the Raiders, too, and needed a late field goal to get past the Tennessee Titans. The Rams, bidding to become the second team in as many years to host a Super Bowl in its own stadium, kept on chugging. Stafford got them to the NFC decider with a big, late drive that likely ended Tom Brady’s career, and he made the moves that mattered late Sunday, which was precisely the reason Los Angeles made a bold trade to get him last year. “I’ve spent a lot of years in this league,” said Stafford, who endured his fair share of losing through all those seasons with the Detroit Lions. “It has been a long time coming.” He was talking, of course, about the opportunity, the one all youngsters dream of and the one every football player with a pulse aspires to. The Bengals and the Rams weren’t the most obvious suspects, and if we’re being brutally frank, they’re probably not the best two teams in the league. But they’ve earned their chance and deserve their moment. Because, quite simply, they took it. |
