The Moral Misalignment of the NFL

Why I’m Rooting for the Eagles on Sunday

All Hail Lord Patrick Mahomes! Automatic Chiefs Win!

I take no pleasure in the fact that I will be rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles this Sunday, Super Bowl LIX (that’s 59 for those who don’t read Cicero on the regular). As a lifelong fan of the Dallas Cowboys, it pains me. As a lifelong fan of the NFL, and of fairness, and of justice – not to mention a lifelong hater of bullshit – I find that the league has left me with no other choice.

I’m no fool. I fully understand the moral trade-offs here. Eagles fans are to Earth what Orcs are to Middle Earth. But if rooting against the Chiefs obligates me to cheer side by side with these creatures, then so be it. Let’s chop down the Ent Forest together.

Why do I want the Chiefs to lose? To be clear, I don’t hate the Chiefs, but as this season went on, especially the postseason, I have become increasingly burdened by a sense that the moral forces of the sports universe are grossly misaligned, and that there is an urgent need to straighten them out again. Justice demands that they lose.

A good part of this sensation is rooted in a feeling of sports déjà vu, as the entire leadup to this game has been an eerie exercise in history repeating itself. In 2017, the Eagles played Tom Brady’s Patriots in Super Bowl 52. So overwhelming was my belief that Tom Brady could not win another championship, I also rooted for the hated Eagles in that game. This was the same Tom Brady whose championship run started with a rule made up on the spot – the “tuck rule” – which propelled the Patriots to the Super Bowl, and which rule was never cited before or since. The run was later supported by not one but two instances where the team was literally caught cheating, not to mention years of callous roster management, running up scores, receiving favorable treatment by the officials, and an all-encompassing reality of a team and organization doing whatever it took to gain every conceivable advantage at all times.

This Chiefs run is starting to feel like those Tom Brady years – decades – where, towards the end I would often gaze upon the heavens wondering whether there was any justice to be found in the universe. Alas, there was no clear redemption to be found, as there was never a real comeuppance for Brady, the Patriots, or their fan-base. Sure, Brady had his tough losses – the Giants ruining the Patriots undefeated season was special – but for every tough loss he seemed to be able to string together two or three more championships. It just didn’t seem fair.

In a league where teams are so comparable in talent, all 30 (!) of them, and the game so prone to be decided by the slings of fortune, it should not be the case that any team can reach the pinnacle as often as the Patriots or the Chiefs have over the past 24 years. Here’s a quick history lesson:

You know why it doesn’t seem fair? Because it’s not.

I’m neither a Communist nor a sore loser. Lord knows the Dallas Cowboys haven’t sniffed any of this over that entire quarter-century. I also don’t believe that the other 28 teams should go to the Super Bowl because it’s their turn. But, to put in into perspective, Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs have won 17-straight games decided by one score or less. I’m not an analytics nerd, but the odds of that happening in today’s NFL must be astronomical. There is a huge contingent of NFL fans and followers, casual and diehard, who ardently believe that the NFL has intentionally rigged the games to favor the Chiefs. This is a real problem for the league. Even before this season, my kids would send me AI-generated videos of referees saying things like “during the play, personal foul, violating Patrick Mahomes’ personal bubble, the result of the play is first down, touchdown, and Chiefs win by 50 points. Hail Patrick Mahomes.”

These bits are not generated out of nothing. They are based on what our eyes and ears are telling us. They tell us that the Chiefs have been on the receiving end of a disproportionate number of favorable calls by the officials, especially in the postseason. These favorable calls take the form of, usually, penalties against the other team, but, as we saw in last week’s game against the Bills, not one but two bad spots on consecutive plays in the fourth quarter, which led to the Bills turning the ball over on downs. Two years ago, in the AFC Championship Game against the Bengals, the officials literally gave the Chiefs an extra play while the game was tied in the fourth quarter, then, oblivious to the significance of their error, proceeded to call two penalties against the Bengals on that same drive, which directly led to the game winning score for the Chiefs. Incredibly, those very calls brought the Chiefs to the Super Bowl that year, where they beat these same Eagles – in part – because of a holding penalty called against the Eagles with less than two minutes to play in the game. All of this shit adds up.

There are some who deny or obfuscate this reality. They are called Chiefs fans. There are others who acknowledge this reality but nonetheless defend it by arguing that great players “deserve” to have close calls go their way, that they have somehow “earned the benefit of the doubt.” They will invariably mention that Michael Jordan used to get all the calls as well, as if somehow that makes it acceptable. The people who argue this are wrong. It is not a good thing but a bad thing when the superstars get special treatment. It is not a good thing but a bad thing when the scales of justice get tilted so that the rich get richer. It is not a good thing but a bad thing to the extent that that special treatment contributes to the championship monopoly described above. There are 28 other teams in the league whose fans would kill for a chance for their team to reach that point, even once. Yet here you have another fanbase conditioned to expect to make the Super Bowl every year. I’m sorry, but there needs to be a comeuppance.

Mahomes is a great quarterback, for sure. Like Brady, he is brilliant, creative, and ultra-competitive. They are both probably nice guys. But, like Brady, he is a flawed human being who knows he has a structural advantage by virtue of some combination of reputation and renown, yet cannot help seeking out greater and greater advantage.

It is easy to say that it is not Patrick Mahomes’ fault that the Chiefs have been on the receiving end of an inordinate number of favorable calls. Except sometimes it is. This year’s Divisional round game against the Texans serves as a good example. In a game that was close until well into the fourth quarter, the officials called two crucial 15-yard personal fouls against the Texans, both times for tackling Mahomes. Both were bad calls, the second, in which Mahomes was scrambling as a runner and simply got tackled, was downright awful. Here’s the thing: Mahomes visibly lobbied for both calls.

Mahomes is 6’ 2”, 225 pounds, yet the officials treat him as if he’s a slight, slender woman running naked across the sand. And, let’s be honest, he sometime acts like one.

His fourth quarter “flop” later in the same game marked a low point in my level of respect for Patrick Mahomes. It’s also not the first time he’s done it. He has perfected the move (Patent Pending) of running with the football, intentionally slowing down before going out of bounds to draw the hit, then exaggerating the impact of the contact to try to trick the officials into throwing a penalty flag. Incredibly, the officials did not fall for it this one time. That is so out of character for them, I imagine the other officials probably hazed the side judge after the game. If my 12-year-old son pulled that in a flag football game, I would have taken him off the field in the middle of the game and drove home. That’s because there is a word we use for such dishonorable conduct in competition. It’s called cheating.

(As a side note, I have seen Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson pulverized time and time again without a second thought of whether there should be a penalty. They also don’t gesticulate wildly every time they get knocked down. And yes, they’re both sitting at home right now, so you are free to derive your own lessons. I’m no Eagles fan, but I respect the fact that Jalen Hurts takes his hits like a man.)

As for those fans who believe that the favorable treatment by the officials is evidence of intentional rigging by the league, I do not believe this to be the case. As I’ve written before, NFL officials are defined by a diabolical combination of cluelessness coupled with a “we know better than you” attitude. They are not competent or clever enough to pull any strings. They are trying and failing to keep up with the game action, throwing penalty flags arbitrarily and without a shred of common sense, and then, with bureaucratic air cover, sticking their middle fingers up at the fans. With all that going on, who has the time and wherewithal to rig games in favor of one team?

The reason many fans assume this is all intentional is because of the celebrity factor. The theory goes that the presence of one particular very famous person creates a financial motivation for the league to ensure that her team advances to the Super Bowl, thus leading to intentionally biased officiating. I understand the logic, but to me it is more likely that the officials are subconsciously motivated to not piss off the rabid home crowd, which crowd, like all crowds, believes it is entitled to anything it wants. I also believe that the only celebrity that the officials regard when they watch any Chiefs game is Patrick Mahomes, which is probably why they overreact when someone has the temerity to knock him down. It must be like watching someone throw Timothy Chalamet off a garage roof. This is also why they seem to tolerate Travis Kelce instigating and taunting without accountability. It is likely the case that no official wants to be responsible for a TV cut to a shocked and angry pop star idol due to a close call that went against the Chiefs.

Travis Kelce being a dick after scoring a touchdown.

This is all a roundabout way to get to the other big reason why the Chiefs need to lose on Sunday: the trappings of celebrity and tackle football do not go well together. Although many of us are used to it by now, none of it changes the fact that having the most famous female pop artist celebrity in the world present – omnipresent – to view a violent sporting competition has always been a distracting sideshow.

Sure, some contingent of viewers tune into games because they want to not only see a beloved famous person in the stadium, but they want to engage in an everyday activity contemporaneously with that famous person. It’s almost as if they were there vicariously in the luxury booth with the pop star and her hangers-on so-called friends. Those people are not sustainable fans. Travis Kelce is 35 years old and had to be preserved in carbon freeze to be physically intact for the postseason. All fame is fleeting, and there is no fame more fleeting than second-hand fame. (Note to the other members of the Kelce family, third and fourth-hand fame are actually the first to go.)

The people who are actually the core fans of the league, whether because we actively root for a team or because we play fantasy sports or because we gamble on the games like the league wants us to, for those of us who represent the vast majority of the audience, we have had enough of this bullshit.

You have sixty minutes, Eagles. Don’t let us down.