Loving a Beatdown in a Dangerous Time | GRUFF, Vol. 12

The Philadelphia Eagles, as you know, took Kansas City to school, upheld Football Law, imparted lessons about leadership, and reminded you that you don't need an out-group to enjoy sports.

Feb 12, 2025

Note to selves: this is not a Super Bowl recap three days late. Just a collection of semi-private thoughts for an audience.

i. Fade the pageantry

Be it resolved: one will, with few exceptions, watch big games for the thrill of competition, or the stop-stop-he’s-already-dead schadenfreude of seeing a Very Special Evisceration.

Call that an act of active, critically distanced, resistance. Ya can’t take away our football, at least not yet. Being able to just want to see a great game while fading all the dressing-up of the production, is your quiet act of rebellion.

Now, three days after this rare Super Bowl blowout, it is a little late for ‘banalysis’ from the high-backed chair. Briefly, the Philadelphia Eagles of Jalen Hurts, Josh Sweat, Jalen Carter, et al., averred that lines win championships is the rule of football law. The fivesome in front of once-doubted Hurts kept him upright to complete his passes, and scramble to buy time.

On the other side of the ball, Carter, Sweat, and and others made the pass protection of Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes crumble like it was made of bread sticks, paint and shellac. They nearly matched a sacks record entirely with four-man pressure.

At one point, the Eagles had pressured Mahomes on more than half of his pass plays without blitzing him once. They had the State Farm pitchman running like an health insurance profiteer.

Too soon?

Depression dulls your emotions, but you had to like that. I’m not so emotionally dead that I couldn’t enjoy the obvious of the Eagles “(throwing) the two-time defending Super Bowl champions around the field like mattresses being ejected from a bedbug-riddled dorm.”1

It was sweet that a rare Super Bowl blowout happened to the Kansas City team that the NFL media and Corporate America have shoved down our throats for a half-decade plus. The higher the climb, the greater the exposure and the harder the fall. It only took 48 years, but Federal League all-rookie team goalie Denis Lemieux finally got his answer: Eagles defensive coordinator Vic Fangio.

Given that Eagles patron Jeffrey Lurie was a President Obama donor, you could say that Neoliberalism beat Christian Nationalism by three scores, which was an extremely flattering scoreline. That is not the spirit of the thing, not after the ‘L’ that neoliberalism took on Nov. 5, 2024.

At least a Canadian, Eagles safety Sydney Brown of London, Ont., is now a Super Bowl champion. Brown’s hometown needs a winner after Western gave up half-a-hundred points against Laurier in the Yates Cup in November.

A great team played a near-perfect game. A pretty good team had their leaks exposed. Everything has been wrapped up in a neat little package, then.

So there is that. Well, that and, “the United States allow(ing) itself to be turned into a wholly-owned subsidiary of a ketamine-addled white supremacist and his junior partner, a thin-haired retired game show host.” When the U.S. sneezes, Canada catches cold, they say. What analogy is there when the U.S. collapses on itself?

One certainty is sports will be needed, in some form, in whatever landscape there is in 5, 10, 15 years. Being aware of that, and zeroing in on the game for its sake, well, that’s a game in itself.

Think of watching some sports at a time when no satirist could ever come up with anything more outlandish than reality as a goal.

ii. Closing the hoopla

The way I watch a mass-appeal sports event now is to focus almost entirely on the competition. That owes somewhat to needing sensory breaks. The games are enough of a good thing. Some of it is absorbing a line from Ta-Nehisi Coates in the early passages of The Message about the value of being “an anti-thrill-seeker.” It also borrows from a lesson paraphrased from Culture Jam author Kalle Lasn — his idea that ‘in the future, the cool people will steer clear of the spectacle.’

Mute the commercials, mute the halftime show, mute the ever-expanding panel of talking heads — FOX, do you really need six men behind a desk to make extemporaneous remarks?

It is the best way to, cliché ahead, be mindful and present, and give yourself the grace to enjoy something. It is all ephemeral, anyway. No one is being raptured, although Drake might be wishing for it after Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show. Lamar’s performance surely inspired some sort of “Colin Kaepernick won the Super Bowl” essay somewhere.

This does not mean one ignores this is far from a neutral space. You cannot divorce politics from sport. Politics determine the paths to the starting line in any athletic arena, and how much resource and support each competitor gets. Being an adult about sports means applying this basic version of systems theory.

As best as I can understand it, that means you don’t look first at the individual player or their team, even though one gets a lifetime of heavy conditioning to do so. You look at the whole field, who decides when and where the games and competitions will be held, and the why of which actions get the most reward. In a roundabout way, it gets you to remember all the players are three-dimensional, and why it’s preferred that they only exhibit two.

This is a long-winded way to say that having the Lamar halftime show on a muted TV was confusing. It has been praised for “subversive genius” (David Dennis Jr.), “joyful resistance,” (Wajahat Ali), and a call for “an ‘all of us’ project” expressed through “cooperative political art” (Dave Zirin.)

I learned all of that on Monday, through reading before listening to the music. That’s just a matter of apportioning out, and not needing to analyze it all in real time. Wait a day, go on Reddit, and find out FOX had to point the cameras away from the dancer who was displaying the Sudan and Palestine flags, in front of you-know-who.

Now, granted that hope is a social construct, that energy is organized and gets put to securing fair and free elections. That goes for Canada too.

iii. To the house

Analysis! Philly’s last touchdown, from Devonta Smith late in the third quarter, highlighted two trends. It also brought up a bit of football psychology.

Clock management is a bane and a scourge on the entertainment value of football. Making fans sit for minutes on end to watch a field goal, or kneeldowns by the quarterback, is not fun. Often, it is not even fun when your own team is kicking the walk-off field goal from a ‘makeable’ distance, since jubilation deferred is jubilation diluted.

The 40-second play clock in the NFL means a team can melt off the last two minutes without running a competitive play. As per uje, the CFL rule — only a maximum of 20 seconds of game time runs between downs — is superior and fan-friendly.

Every NFL team has in-house analytics staff, which is a net good. It has driven the increase in fourth-down gambles. Better to ride or die on your offence than die with your booters of the ball. But analytics is culpable in the multipling of low-risk, methodical, one-first-down-at-a-time strategies that are a little too curated.

American coaches have always loved the time-of-possession stat. Now that there is more data that points per possession matters the most, too many teams think an 18–play drive is football nirvana. It really isn’t. In fact, from reading the site Football Archaelogy, I learned that there was once an argument about a cap on the number of plays a team could run before having score. It’s a non-starter, since football is likely in its final form. It’s a big enough ask to get new fans to understand down and distance.

So, flashback to the sequence in question. Down 27-0, Kansas City left Mahomes and his offence out on fourth-and-4 from their 46-yard line. This isn’t even a big gamble. Avonte Maddox, the Eagles cornerback, closed on out-cutting receiver DeAndre Hopkins. Pass deflected, incomplete; turnover on downs.2

There was 2:40 left in the third quarter. And the FOX booth analyst Tom Brady immediately mentioned the Eagles had a chance to use up the rest of the time in the third quarter.

The other playcalling rubric is shooting your shot after a sudden change, where the opposing defence is back out in its own territory. Eagles offensive coordinator Kellen Moore went for it and Hurts connected with a wide-open, single-covered Smith in the end zone for the points.

That was how it should be. Run up the score and run the opponent out of sufficient time to rally in the fourth quarter.

It’s always amusing when that sequence, of a turnover and an immediate long passing touchdown, happens. How do defences fall for it so often?

iv. Phillysophy Class

Some author who studies leadership and organizational thinking will probably pitch the Eagles on privileged access for a book soon enough. It should have Autumn Lockwood, the associate sports performance coach who achieved an NFL first, on the cover.

Lockwood is the daughter of a coach, but also built her cred through the Bill Walsh Coaching Fellowship. The late great 49ers coach continues to have the greatest coaching tree of all.

This hews to thinking of sports narratives from both below and on high, and by looking at the people who look at the whole field. They, like Lockwood, study what is improvable. Let’s cast that on the waters before facing the reality either Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni or general manager Howie Roseman on the cover of this book.

How have the Eagles kept up the vibe up through whatever comes their way, and be positioned to take the bundle when opportunity knocks? Two Super Bowl wins, in three appearances, across eight seasons in a salary-cap league is at least as impressive as what second-rung dynasties — think the 1970s Cowboys and Raiders, the Joe Gibbs-coached ’80s-to-early-’90s Washington teams — did before the installation of the cap and free agency.3

I want to read about how the Eagles have avoided self-imposed ceilings, and not been afraid of falling through the floor, like they did during a 4-11-1 campaign in 2020 when Hurts had to play as a relatively raw rookie. I also want to read about how they avoid the galaxy brain that, going off a piece Ryan Nanni wrote at Assigned, comes out in “the mistakes and poor judgment of their competition.”

As Nanni notes, that rough season in 2020 also gave the Eagles a more advantageous draft slot in ’21 to manoeuvre and add Smith and left guard Landon Dickerson. Remember, though, drafts are immoral and inefficient.

And, as well, it would be good to see how the Eagles avoid getting in their own way while assessing potential. Hurts, after all, was initially drafted with a notion to being a specialty player. Part of why there was such a great symmetry to that touchdown pass to Devonta Smith was that it was reminiscent of Smith making the college national championship-winning touchdown for Alabama seven seasons ago, from Tua Tagovailoa after Hurts had been pulled in the third quarter.

And the left tackle, Jordan Mailata, is a converted Australian rugby player. In that regard, the Eagles embody something about fair and free competition.

Simply put, you can win in sports for a while by being a bit different. Eventually everyone copies and adapts. Hopefully this doesn’t lead to a run on ball-control offences since there are scarcely fewer running backs with the dynamism of Saquon Barkley.

The other piece of the book would explore how a sports franchise, contrast to the ‘Legacy of Failure’-type meme culture, is not prisoner to its past.

The Eagles have been through futility and false hope. The subtext for that Mark Wahlberg-Elizabeth Banks movie Invincible is that the Eagles had 15 losing seasons in a stretch of 16 (1962-77) during the NFL’s Early Modern period.

Long after the fact, you can see some illusory quality any time the Eagles had some success. They had some of the right guys at the wrong time when hall-of-fame edge rusher Reggie White and prototype dual-threat quarterback Randall Cunningham were disruptive and field-tilting on defence and offence in the early 1990s. The Philly version of the Andy Reid-and-Donovan McNabb brains trust in the early aughties was only good enough to be in the Super Bowl conversation, which is only good enough if the franchise owns a Super Bowl title.

And none of that burdens them, seemingly. Why is that?

v. Both-siding Mahomes

It is hard enough just to play sports for a living without being expected to be someone else’s political avatar. Chuckle at the ‘MAGA Mahomes’ memes to flush the haterade from your system until the middle of next season, of course, but remember the aggression that proscribes Patrick Mahomes from offering an update to “Republicans buy shoes, too.” That’s at least one non-Super Bowl season and a midterm elections cycle away.

However, there is no amount of split-level thinking that abides “(leading) a voter registration drive in 2020”4 with being officially neutral about SOPO movements (Suppressors of the Public Organizing). Law after law gets passed in the U.S. to shrink the electorate to the benefit of MAGA; seek out the reportage of Greg Palast. I live in a province where the grifting incumbent party is trying to have an election under the cover of February darkness.

The appeal of sports, even within the last 20 years in North America, was you could high-five a stranger next to you and not concern yourself with how they voted. That piety goes out the window when there is a concentrated effort to erase and eliminate participation, sorry/not sorry.

I am a cishet man, so I present in-group. Being a loner with myriad under-the-hood issues, my mental health diagnoses, probably factor into why I get annoyed at out-grouping, since it sets everyone back. Some validation was starkly underlined by Maude Schoblocher of Game Over Ottawa recently.

There’s people who don't want to see you at all, or don't want to see you thrive. Continuing on and doing your best, and being who you are regardless of what people think. That’s important to me.
Continuing to exist in spite of it all. Pushing forward. (Game Over, Feb. 7)

There is no two-waying it with the power of political participation. That whole paradox-of-tolerance deal means accepting most people will not vote for your preferred outcome, and greater turnout would not change that.

But it is about democratic values. Please, media, ask a simple, open-ended question: to what extent do you believe everyone should have a fair chance to vote freely? It’s a simple, non-cloying question from one adult to another.

vi. The Super Bowl we didn’t see

In time, it might look like Kansas City reached a third consecutive Super Bowl simply by force of habit. A play here or there in the previous two rounds and it easily could have been Bills-Eagles or Ravens-Eagles.

Either team’s quarterback, Josh Allen or Lamar Jackson, would have been better-suited than Mahomes to getting outside the pocket and away from that continuous four-man pressure.

The ultimate insult is that even the other AFC conference semifinalist might have put up more fight than the Kansas City collective. Fall behind 34-0 after 42½ minutes of football? Challenge accepted, say the Houston Texans.

vii. Come savourez, come savourez avec moi

The tragic part of tribalism and partisanship is that it can zap your capability to just enjoy a good game. Who stands to benefit from that? Not you, and not I, said the guy in bear mode.

So, it is fine to get a hate-on, but you can’t just walk around with one in public all of the time.

One counter-programming is that you and I do not have to enter every situation with an in-group and out-group. Admit you have a team, love it even when you do not like what they did this time, and enjoy this for as long as we have it.

Or savourez. Got that off Canadian cans of Coca-Cola.

How did this approach hold up through the past football season and the climax of the competitions I follow? Self-evaluation is important. It was work in progress, starting from the first.

Grey Cup (CFL): Toronto Argonauts (champion), Winnipeg Blue Bombers (runner-up)

This is the exception to the rule. Out-group the Argonauts since they sanewashed misogyny by not telling quarterback Chad Kelly to hit the bricks after he harassed and harmed a female strength and conditioning coach. I can never look at Michael (Pinball) Clemons, heretofore hailed as a true gentleman of the sport, the same way, for trying to fashion a redemption arc for someone who has had about 19 second chances.

The Argonauts won the Grey Cup going away against the Blue Bombers. It was a one-point game at three-quarters time and ended up with a 2½-touchdown margin (41-24). A convincing win for sure, but not a moral one in any sense.

Vanier Cup (U Sports): Laval Rouge et Or (champion), Laurier Golden Hawks (runner-up)

Going in, the dude could abide either outcome as a “fair enough.”

Mighty, megabucksed (by U Sports standards) Laval would try to slowly impose their will on the Canadian university football championship game. Laurier, and their NFL-radar quarterback Taylor Elgersma would shoot their shot to try to become the fourth Ontario conference team (OUA) to defeat Laval in a national playoff game.

In the end, Laurier took their shot, and it was not quite enough. Laval won by less than a touchdown (22-17) without scoring a touchdown to claim their 12th national title in the last 25 seasons. Credit the behemoth for boring their way to victory.

College Football Playoff Championship (FBS): Ohio State Buckeyes (champion), Notre Dame Fighting Irish (runner-up)

This required a thin-slice. The postseason is a ESPN-produced tournament appended to a regular season that asks semi-pro teams to play 12 or 13 games. As suggested in many quarters, there should be some recognition that one team has the best regular season and one gets hot in the playoffs.

The Michigan Wolverines are my fair-weather favorite team when it is competitively convenient. There was no tension, though, involved in having two of their rivals, Ohio State and Notre Dame, end up in the final matchup.

Ohio State blasted through the first 12-team CFP after a defeat against Michigan. Good for coach Ryan Day’s charges that they won their four games against highly credible teams by an average of 17½ points, and still it has been 1,901 days and counting since they defeated Meechegan.

The only grating part was the prospect of Notre Dame winning in an upset. Shutting out hat noise means muting any of that Rudyfied underdog-narrative spin.

Super Bowl (NFL): Philadelphia Eagles (champion), Kansas City (runner-up)

It took until about 2½ hours before the Super Bowl kickoff to get comfortable with the idea that Kansas City might win and there would be no end of insufferability. That cut it close to the wire.

By the same token, though, the Eagles stacked up as the clearly better team with the better storyline, and it turned out to be a very open-and-shut game for them. It’s been over a decade since a team won a Super Bowl so convincingly, but the next blowout will come along much sooner, once the Vikings get there.

Take that as you wish.

viii. In conclusion, Philadelphia is a land of contrasts

From a Canadian vantage,

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I post about current affairs in Notes and on Bluesky (n8sager). Hopefully, this is enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind.

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