49ers may not get to next Super Bowl, but 49ers stadium will
Wasn’t it Jim Mora Sr., then coaching the Saints, who, when asked about games with unexpected results, said, “You don’t know, you can’t know, you never will know”? Mora's insight comes to mind when reflecting on what happened in the Super Bowl.
Or if you prefer, what didn’t happen.
Oh yeah, one thing we do know: The next Super Bowl, LX, will be held at Levi Stadium, where the San Francisco 49ers play home games. And one more thing we do know: the Niners won’t be in that Super Bowl, because they are in the same conference as the Philadelphia Eagles—who crushed Kansas City Sunday, 40-22 in this Super Bowl—the Los Angeles Rams, the Minnesota Vikings, and the Washington Commanders.
Unless somehow they can rebuild as quickly as they came apart last season. Defense wins. It was never more evident than how the Eagles stopped the supposedly unstoppable Chiefs and their excellent quarterback Patrick Mahomes.
Kansas City was trying to become the first team ever to win 3 consecutive Super Bowls. It couldn’t be done. The thinking here is that it never will be done. There are too many factors. The Niners won two in a row and appeared very much about to defeat the New York Giants at Candlestick Park for the so-called “Three-peat.” But it was not to be. A Roger Craig fumble, a Montana injury, and five field goals by the New York Giants, who won 15-13 without a touchdown.
Kansas City was a 1 to 1 ½ point favorite, but the Chiefs were never really in the game. Still, it wasn’t until they trailed 34-0 late in the third quarter that Fox TV announcer Kevin Burkhardt grudgingly conceded that Philly was going to win.
This is not to fault Burkhardt, who had a better game than Mahomes. TV people want to keep you watching. Otherwise, those ads, which sold for $8 million for half a minute, would go unseen. Burkhardt also fell into that new method of describing how far a team is in front or behind. When the Chiefs trailed by that huge deficit, 34-0, he said it was a five-score game.
Until the Super Bowl, Mahomes and the Chiefs had survived by winning games thanks to things like late missed field goals by the opposition. Good teams find ways to win—that’s why they’re good teams. And that’s why KC was a narrow favorite. But the Chiefs fell behind so quickly, with the Eagles running the ball effectively and picking off passes, that Kansas City barely knew what hit them.
A year ago, the 49ers lost to the Chiefs in overtime in the Super Bowl and went on to struggle throughout the 2024 season. The unfounded description is “Super Bowl hangover”—the idea that a team, for one reason or another, can't regain its footing after a tough championship defeat.
What’s going to happen to the Chiefs? Will they be as effective and successful as they were before the Super Bowl? Or will that one awful game stay with them in the coming months?
To use one of Jim Mora’s observations, “You don’t know.”