This is the third year in a row that Kansas City is playing in the Superbowl.
Kansas City is returning to the big dance after winning two Superbowls in a row. Multiple teams have won two Superbowls in a row. Heck, the first two were both won by Green Bay. (Others include Miami, Pittsburg (twice), San Francisco, Dallas, Denver, and New England.)
Two teams have won three times in a four year period: Dallas and New England.
Nobody has ever won three in a row.
But maybe that’ll change on Sunday.
The main problem is that everybody is pretty much sick of both teams (with the notable exception of the referees who remain big fans of KC).
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are still dating. (Remember how last year the rumor was she might miss the game due to a concert on the other side of the globe? You won’t have to bite your nails this year. She’s reportedly already there. It is unknown whether Ice Spice or Lana Del Rey will also be there but I hope Lana Del Rey is. I think she’s great.)
Jon Batiste will be singing the National Anthem.
Trombone Shorty and Lauren Daigle will be performing America the Beautiful.
Ledisi will be singing Lift Every Voice and Sing.
Kendrick Lamar will be the main performer at the halftime show and SZA will be showing up (presumably to throw down “All the Stars”).
And, yes, both Trader Joe’s and Costco were like Thunderdome on Friday. Even when it’s crazy, it ain’t crazy like *THAT*. But they did have six-packs of Pringles that included a couple of cans of Loaded Hot Dog.
Every time the team you’re not rooting for gets a touchdown, you have to eat six of those. Seven, if they get the extra point.
Rumor has it that the Eagles will be doing the “rush 4, drop 7” gambit.
May the best team win.
So… who are you rooting for?
If you’re Travis Kelce and half the world is expecting you to propose after the game, what do you do? (I mean, besides finding a proxy to make the appropriate wager ahead of time). Are you basically forced into it due to expectations?Report
I’m obnoxious, so would propose secretly in advance, then tell Taylor to flash the giant diamond during the game.Report
Only if KC wins does that happen.
All the more reason to watch. Does the Cigarette Smoking Man want the country to change the subject for a week?Report
Welp. He-Who-Should-Not-Be-Named is not only going to the game but giving a speech first.
Has Trudeau ever even gone to the Brier?!?Report
I am pretty bored with the Chiefs but for whatever reason they do not annoy me to anywhere close to the degree the Belichick/Brady Pats dynasty did. I also despise the Eagles. This one is easy for me from a rooting perspective.
I let my oldest pick what we’re doing for dinner and he (somewhat unexpectedly) said 5 Guys. So I’ll be off to spend like $70 on burgers and fries that are better than McDonalds but probably not the 3 to 4 times better the price would imply.Report
Everything I read suggests everyone in the sport who has met Andy Reid likes him. I suspect that he’s sort of “America’s coach” ever since he did the State Farm commercials where he’s stealing fast food from Mahomes and Jake. IIRC, after he coached his last game at Philly, where the owner said nothing bad about him, he went to the airport where other owners’ private jets were lined for interviews.Report
Yea Reid is much more likeable.
I still hated him when he coached the Eagles but that seems so long ago now.Report
Kansas City booed out of the building.
The iggles getting cheered from here to tomorrow.Report
Huh. Baptiste made “brave” the tough note to hit rather than “free”.Report
REFS ALREADY GIVING KANSAS CITY THE BALLReport
Trending in the United States:
The Refs.Report
Already there are more gambling commercials than last year.Report
Huh. Kelce had an incomplete.Report
HOLY CRAP AN INTERCEPTION.
17-0. Oof.Report
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Both Led Zep’s “Whole Lotta Love” and Who’s “Baba O’Reilly” showing up in ads.
What year is it?Report
That and “Groove Is In The Heart” by Deee-Lite.Report
I’m looking forward to a sequel to the Meta commercial featuring Chris Evans, Christopher Lloyd, and Christina Ricci. (Not because I plan to buy the things, I just hope they keep rolling the joke.)Report
There are thirteen seasons of The Masked Singer?Report
Someone on Twitter pointed out that there’s an entire Normie TV Universe that online people have absolutely no awareness of. As they said, “I love that the finale of succession, one of the few big tv events of the decade that felt inescapable online, could not even reach half of the average viewers of The Rookie, a nathan fillion cop show no one has heard of that has six full seasons”Report
As Halftime shows go…
Well, I understand that there are artists who make *AMAZING* albums but aren’t great in concert and other artists who have *AMAZING* live shows but the albums are merely okay.
But I was going to make a joke about how Weezer should do a halftime show and then realized that Weezer would put on one heck of a halftime show. Bring out Weird Al as special guest star.Report
I thought it was pretty meh.
But I also think hip hop sucks generally.Report
Our watching-party had the attitude that it was a well-executed show that was very much not for us. (Based on a read of social media the people who it was for all seemed to dig it.)
I’d say I was happy that they managed to do a whole performance without saying the F-word on TV one single time but between my old ears and my unfamiliarity with the lyrics I mostly didn’t know what he was saying. Other than “it was the right time and you picked the wrong guy”, which we thought was a pretty good attitude to open the show.Report
Kelce got a completion!
Wait. “This is America” is the song for Ozempic?
WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON DID WE SWITCH TIMELINES AGAINReport
Chiefs finally get a touchdown.
As a Broncos fan, I get it.Report
A STRIP SACK!!!
Wait, I thought this was a family show.Report
That’s gotta be up there in the list of Awful Announcing.
As someone on Twitter put it, “Time to see what Mahomes has got left–” (car-crash noises)Report
Well, that’s enough of that. The final score ended up being a much less embarrassing 22-40, but that might be the worst Superbowl I’ve ever watched.Report
That last meaningless KC TD made people with 2-0 squares extremely happy.Report
It probably ticked off the people in KC who wondered where those guys had been all game who could easily complete a 40-yard bomb into double coverage.Report
At that point the Eagles had moved into more of a prevent, keep the ball in front of you defense. As soon as KC failed to do anything on the opening possession of the second half the clock became a factor. Objectively KC was shut out and as crazy as it is to say, in context of the game every single KC point was scored in garbage time.Report
I mean, it did certainly show that the Eagles defense had been doing something, because when they let up KC scored just fine.Report
Oh yea, Eagles defense won that game, have to give them 80-85% of the credit. They pressured Mahomes without blitzing. He looked off all night and no one was ever open. All the Eagles offense had to do was not screw it up and they didn’t.Report
Paradoxically, what helped the Eagles offense was that they weren’t doing fantastic at first; they were only playing well. The worst situation for the Eagles is when they get a big lead early, because then they figure it’s all done and start fooling around, and when the other team catches up they’re worn out and can’t crank it back up.
The other part was that KC’s defense focused on Barkley (and very effectively!) to the detriment of pass coverage, which the Eagles figured out.Report
Yea the whole thing went the way the Eagles season has gone. Really good defense and ‘good enough’ offense to play keep away. You can sell out against Barkley but Hurts is still solid in the pass game, especially if he’s going to benefit from field position and turnovers.
Washington played them better in all 3 meetings than the Chiefs did last night because they approached all of those games with an underdog mentality (i.e. go for it on 4th from the beginning) and still only went 1-2.
Who knows what happened behind the scenes but KC played the whole thing way too risk averse. Like, why not try a fake punt? Why not try a designed QB run? It’s the freaking Super Bowl!
Not sure if a scouting failure or if they were just overrated all season long like many suspected.Report
I think that there was a general impression among defenses that going hard for Mahomes would draw a penalty, and for whatever reason the Eagles decided they weren’t worried about that (and the refs decided not to call it).
I did note that most of the sacks were in a scrum, not the usual “Mahomes is running all over the place with four guys trying to stomp him”. It’s a lot less likely to get an unnecessary-roughness call in a situation like that.Report
I think Philly’s d-line is just that good. They can get pressure and sacks without help.
But really all the more reason for KC to try to do something that might draw some of those calls. Or anything at all to catch a break or change the momentum.
Instead they looked like they were playing an out of conference game at 1 PM in early October.Report
My two takeaways:
1. Tom Brady is a B- media personality; too much Tom Brady. Also, he’s not that good of a color commentator; the novelty has worn off.
2. Now that I’m no longer the target audience for the Halftime show, my usual experience has been… oh, so that’s who does that song I heard on repeat in Vegas. That didn’t happen at all this time… is Vegas getting old too?Report
I keep hearing that Kendrick Lamar is for young people, but you can find posts on this very site about him from 2013. Dude is almost 40 and has been around since the Aughts. It ain’t age that’s creating a cultural barrier here.Report
Theater Kid Rap is niche. Kendrick may be the biggest superstar in Theater Kid Rap and he may have delivered nigh-John Oliveresque destruction to his greatest rival…
But there is enough room to not enjoy Theater Kid Rap for reasons above and beyond the reasons that Jesse Helms would have been livid watching the show.Report
But isn’t it more fun if the music you like says something profound about you and your various failings as a human being? Be better!Report
We could have had LFMAO.Report
I’m interested in what you think his performance said about the failings of anyone other than Drake (and maybe his own, with the narrative of walking the line of having a message and making the sort of music that gets you a gig at the Super Bowl halftime show).
He definitely had a political message (I don’t think it was revolutionary, or in 2025, all that radical, but whatever), but if you came away thinking that message was about people’s personal failings, I suspect we interpreted it very differently.Report
Ha I didn’t really think about it on that level and maybe I misread you. I am but a humble metal head. No act I like will ever, nor should they, play the super bowl for no reason other than the fact that everyone watching would absolutely hate it. Maybe one day when the members of Metallica reach their 80s they’ll go embarrass themselves in a similar way that a lot of rock acts from earlier eras have over the years.
Knowing I will not like the music means I watch for spectacle, not really anything else.Report
Metallica’s time has past, but I could totally have seen them doing a halftime show during the height of their popularity after the Black Album. Probably not any other metal band, though.
The cultural barrier is definitely non-hip hop fans. I was at a Super Bowl party last night that was mostly white, all Xers and geriatric Millennials, save one Boomer (and the children), but almost everyone wanted to watch the game specifically to see the halftime show.Report
Fair enough.
I watched it with 2 of my buddies (also old millennials) and my 7 year old. None are hip hop fans, but also no one had any particularly strong reaction to it in real time, pro or con. It is possible I am being knee jerk because my Facebook feed is currently full of smug reprimands (including by one of those friends!) aimed at people who did not like the half time show. A lot of ‘white people am I right?’ kind of stuff. There is also a really conspicuous lack of people complaining about the half time show, not that I doubt the existence of people complaining about the half time show. Feels very twitter circa 2020 and I hate it.Report
I have seen a ton of racism on Facebook and elsewhere in the last ~24 hours, so I have a hard time blaming the people who are like, “White people, right?” If it’s not in reference to you — and I’ve never seen you say anything racist, so it probably isn’t — no reason to take it personally.Report
I dunno what to make of the label Theater Kid Rap in reference to one of the most popular and influential rappers on the planet, one whom everyone in hip hop and outside of it (even WAY outside of it, like Taylor Swift) has had do a guest verse, one pretty much recognized by all hip hop fans as the best of his generation, one who wins Grammys (which are effectively awards for popularity) every time he releases music, one whose albums are routinely labeled “Best Album of the Year” by genre and general publications alike, nor am I sure how any of this makes his music “niche.”Report
(As the person who wrote those Kendrick posts 12 years ago, basically declaring him the best thing in hop hop since Nas, I may get a little defensive of him, but also, dude is wildly, and widely popular.)Report
It’s in the genre of “Hamilton”.
As for niche, it’s the niche of selling albums to people who still buy albums.
How many units did To Pimp A Butterfly sell? One Million. It went legit platinum.
How many units did Hootie’s first album sell? Seven Million.
Jeff Foxworthy’s “Games Rednecks Play” sold more units than TPAB.
I’m not saying that he’s not talented and I’m not saying he’s not gifted and I’m not saying that he doesn’t deserve the accolades that the various magazines still in print give him.
I’m saying that his appeal is clarified in the modern era and his very broad base for the modern era is different from the very broad bases that used to exist.Report
DAMN is at about 4.2 million now; Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City at like 3.8, and was still one of the most 50 or so most consumed albums in the U.S. for over a decade. In the age of streaming, those are pretty much Hootie numbers, especially for hip hop albums. To Pimp a Butterlfy, which I’ll say again I consider one of the best albums of the century, was clearly not meant to have wide popular appeal, but still sold 1.5 million or so.
Comparing Kendrick to Hamilton is wild.Report
I’m not sure it’s meaningful to compare sales numbers from opposite sides of 2010. Foxworthy’s album came out in a time when you couldn’t just go watch his entire routine for free on YouTube; if you wanted to hear it you had to buy it. These days I can listen to everything Kendric Lamar ever did, for free, as many times as I want, and without even as many ads as I’d get listening to the radio.Report
And his videos combined have views in the billions. The three biggest singles from DAMN, his most commercially ambitious album, have over 1.5 billion views (HUMBLE. is over a billion by itself). He has 7 music videos with over 200 million views and 15 total with over 100 (2 more in the 90s, some someday it’ll be at least 17). I dunno that Theater Kid Rap gets a billion views for one song, or 200 million for that matter.Report
On top of that, if you listened to “they not like us” on the radio, it’s very likely that you’d miss a good chunk of the song due to radio edits. (Indeed, I wondered “which bars is he going to be singing at the show?” when I listened to it in prep.)
The fact that we’re no longer limited to radio edits nor physical music production/distribution is a magnificent boon to artists that also results in a weird atomization for music.
There’s no town square anymore. You’re not going to walk past (this genre) in the music shoppe to get to (that genre) and how many physical posters of album covers are you going to see?
Most new music needs to have something of an introduction. “Hey, when you listen to this, pay attention to the…” (whatever). The lyrics. The production values. The drums. The bass. The background singers. The thing his voice does when he spits the lines about his mother.
Without that, you’re listening to a genre that you’re not particularly familiar with and may not be able to tell the difference between a good track and a great track.
I listened to To Pimp a Butterfly and thought “It’s no Aquemini.”Report
Ok, I’ll bite … since this seems obliquely connected to my post
Yes… there’s very little hip-hop on any of my playlists; I have ‘ordinary cultural exposure’ to a lot of music.
Way back at the 2022 Superbowl this line-up hit the stage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdsUKphmB3Y
While not a single song would be on any of my playlists — pretty much all of the songs were known to me as part of a cultural backdrop (hence my deprecating Vegas comment). And, while listening to it for this comment, it’s ironic (to me) that the only song that I still hadn’t heard *and* which made absolutely no memorable impact was the song by… Kendrick Lamar.
I’m not saying that he’s not popular; based on his Spotify profile, he’s a bit more popular than Nickelback! And, I’ll note for the record that when I play Nickelback’s 1B hit song? I don’t know that one either.
My de gustibus comment is that even going and seeking out his music? For me there’s no hip-hop hook, sick beat, melody or anything memorable. His profile says: “Kendrick Lamar is known for his top-tier lyricism, virtuosic microphone command, and sharp conceptual vision”. I’ll take everyone’s word for it. The music didn’t grab me…Report
Try DAMN. It’s effectively a pop rap album. Or the big hit from what I consider to be one of the top few albums of the century to date:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-48u_uWMHY
This is, at least on one level, a classic West Coast hip hop jam.
Lamar has always vacillated, sometimes in the same album, sometimes even in the same song (seriously, watch the linked video) between, er, art and pop (I don’t think these are two mutually exclusive categories, mind you, but he’s often trying to say something very obliquely, through metaphor, allegory, and other forms of symbolism (the halftime show was full of visual symbolism on top of, or perhaps underneath, the in your face “Uncle Sam vs Kendrick” theme), while also trying to have a broad appeal, with hooks (“I’m gonna be alright!”) that will make the songs more broadly listenable.
Think of him like the artists at the forefront of jazz in the post-bop era, who felt limited by the audiences to whom they had to appeal to make a living. This comparison won’t feel so far fetched if you listen tracks from his more jazzy phase, like this (which was a live performance on Colbert Report, though it’s hard to find the visuals online anymore):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM6VCk3iadAReport