SVP’s One Big Thing: Reflecting on the AFC and NFC Championship Games
More Teams. More Games.
Scott Van Pelt says a Super Bowl rematch four years in the making was fueled by the Chiefs’ stellar defense and the 49ers’ resilience on Sunday. (3:10)
The first Super Bowl in Las Vegas is set and it’s the Kansas City Chiefs vs. the San Francisco 49ers.
The first game on championship Sunday followed a script — no, it was not scripted, but followed the obvious clues that were right there. The top two scoring defenses in the NFL were the Baltimore Ravens and Kansas City. It is far more interesting to do TV shows and podcasts about the quarterbacks. But the Ravens and Chiefs, in that order, were the stingiest all season and Sunday in Baltimore was every bit of that.
After the Chiefs scored on their first two drives, it settled into an absolute brawl. Throughout the season, it was suggested that as great as Patrick Mahomes is, this Chiefs team is as great as it is in large part because of the defense. Steve Spagnuolo’s unit held the presumptive MVP of the league, Lamar Jackson, largely in check.
L’Jarius Sneed, who has been brilliant all season, forced the key turnover of the game at the start of the fourth quarter, which kept the margin at 10. Jackson was picked off in the end zone on the next drive and the Chiefs storm to their fourth Super Bowl appearance in five years.
I said all season I just wanted to see Patrick Mahomes just go on the road at some point in his playoff career. Now he has left broken hearts in Buffalo and Baltimore in the past two weekends and has a chance to get to three Lombardis before he’s 29. It’s astounding work.
Before we pivot to the nightcap — how about targeting Marquez Valdes-Scantling to ice the game? The man who dropped the ball against the Philadelphia Eagles in a Monday night loss. There was doubt at times about this team. Who are they? What are they? They’re the AFC champs… again.
They face a San Francisco team that pulled off payback almost 70 years in the making. Kezar Stadium in 1957, San Francisco had a 24-7 halftime lead over the Detroit Lions in a Western Conference playoff game. The Lions erased the deficit, then smashed the Cleveland Browns for the NFL championship. On Sunday, the exact same story and score played out in reverse. It sets up a payback opportunity far more of us can recall from four years ago: Chiefs vs 49ers.
It’s a gutting chapter for the Lions, who have rewritten so much of the perception of who they are this season. They remain one of the four NFL franchises who’ve never been to a Super Bowl. San Francisco, which has volumes of books on shelves that tell its history, has five Lombardis.
I must admit this portion of the script had to be more than tweaked in the second half and I had a snarky comment about Journey singing “Don’t Stop Believin'” at halftime. It took a combination of San Francisco staying present and committed to the next play as Detroit committed enough costly turnovers and drops to create a lane for the 49ers to crash through.
There will be mountains of content to devour for all our morning and daytime shows. Should Campbell have gone for it? Or tried to go up three scores? Not sure what we do with the Brock Purdy game manager conversation for now. Hey, maybe you can run that one out in a couple of weeks if he loses to the guy who is 14-3 in his playoff career and is somehow an underdog again in the next game despite what happened the past two weeks.
We’ve got only one more game left to enjoy and the next two weeks to sort it all out.