Welcome to the Athletic Football Show. I'm Robert Mays. Super Bowl, baby. This is the Super Bowl

recap. We did this live from the concourse at the Superdome with me and Derek Classen. Pretty

surprising game, with all things considered, I would say. No matter what you thought about these

two teams coming into this game, even if you thought the Eagles had a significant talent advantage, which would be a totally reasonable place to land. I don't think any of us anticipated a game like this, an unbelievable performance for Vic Fangio in that defense, especially that defensive line, the Josh Sweat game, man. I'm not sure how many of us saw that coming, but he took it to Joe Tooney, an incredible performance from that unit. Jalen Hertz played about as well as you want Jaylen Hertz to play in these moments. The really good version of Jalen Hertz that they need him to be when a team is going to challenge those guys on the outside. They hit every single goal ball, seemingly they were challenged to hit. Just an organizational victory for a team that has done it the right way for a very

long time.

Me and Derek Classen dug in to all of that, chatted about the issues that the chiefs had on

offense, what things are going to look like for Kansas City moving forward.

Let's get to that conversation with Derek right now.

I think say.

Of all the different ways this game could have gone,

of all the iterations, a game between this Chief's team and this Eagles team could have gone,

that is not one that I expected.

Even if you thought the Eagles were better,

which is a totally fair place to land, that is not what I expected to watch today. There was a point in this Super Bowl where it might have been midway through the second quarter, our producer, Michael Beller, was slacking us a bunch of different stats and all this stuff. And it was mostly about how the Chief's offense just could not move the ball. I literally slacked him. There is not a universe you could have convinced me that existed where this game went exactly this way. Because I think you could have convinced me that the Eagles got out ahead and they started to sit on the ball, all that stuff. The way in which we arrived there didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. A ton of stats that we're going to throw out as part of the show that the first thing i'll say you mentioned the second quarter with beller in the third quarter i was looking at the chiefs over the cap page to start figuring out who their free agents were and how much money they had to spend this off season you said the fact that you're looking at this in the middle of the third quarter is all you need to know about what sort of game we're watching right now. And it was completely warranted. There was no reason for you to be doing anything else at that point in the game. We were wondering what the Mahalms versus Eagles defense matchup might look like. The Eagles had been by a lot of measures, the best past defense and the best defense in football for a huge chunk of the season. They're number one in defensive DVOA. They're number one in EPA per drop back. They're a really good run defense. But with the way that the Chief's offense had been playing in the playoffs, I expected it at least be a good matchup. I mean, Mahomes was in his best three-game stretch of the season by the time they got to the Super Bowl. The Chiefs' offense looked the best it had all year. You know, the couple lingering concerns about what their offensive line looked like, what their left tackle had looked like. I still expected them to be able to move the ball fairly efficiently against the Eagles, even if it was going to be a tough matchup given who was on the other side. To see them dismantled in the way that they were. And all the game-long stats in this game are completely meaningless, right? The 22 points, this is not a 40 to 22 game. This is a 40 to 6 game. Mahomes ended the game with eight yards in attempt. Yeah. That is not real. None of that is real. So some of these stats I'm going to throw out are more so about the first half or the first three quarters of this game.

At halftime of this game today, the Chief's offense had a 5% offensive success rate.

They had three carries for three yards from the running backs in the first half.

Mahomes had a 17% dropback success rate at halftime.

His previous low in a game in his career was 27%.

And that's not even the worst stat.

At halftime of this game per next gen stats,

Mahomes had negative 1.36 EPA per dropback.

That probably doesn't mean anything.

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