WHO'S READY FOR THE FUCKING SUPER BOWL??
2024 EDITION: The Chiefs need to be taken down.
The baseline mainstream conversations around football are still pretty dumb, so it can be easy to miss how far these conversations have come and how far they have devolved over the last couple of decades. There are a lot of things in the culture like this, although that real but hugely relative progress and decline are easier to notice in football than it is in other, more significant areas in which the United States is both greatly improved and shockingly barbarian. Given what a towering bummer those other things are to talk about, and also given that there is a very important football game coming up on Sunday, it makes sense for this edition of This is a Newsletter! to focus on the football stuff. The Pfizer-sponsored, Taylor Swift-endorsed Kansas City Chiefs are Super Bowl-bound again. Our lord’s year of 2024 was already set to be bleak, and the deep state is still firmly in control.
I’m sure I’m not the only one to think the entire playoffs have been rigged so Travis Kelce can propose to Taylor on the field after they win the Super Bowl. You’ll likely be able to put money on that with all the prop bets they have every year. This is a bit of a tangential sidebar, but Travis Kelce looks like a 29Palms Marine who drives a Ford Raptor, has three baby mamas, makes great grilled cheeses, and has a meet-up with his Grindr matches in a Wal-Mart parking lot for backseat cuddle sessions. And if you’re a genuine Taylor Swift fan, you should be rooting for the demise of this relationship; there is no way she could deliver a “good” album if she’s in a happy and fulfilling relationship. She’ll just drop what is essentially Chance the Rapper’s The Big Day (Taylor’s Version).
As two sophisticated and forward-looking teams prepare to face off in the Super Bowl, there is a lot of interesting think-y football stuff to talk about in earnest, most of which would contextualize and conceptualize why this year’s matchup is so tantalizing. The two teams left standing have defied widely held theories on how to build a winning team in the NFL: Kansas City dared to ask how many roster holes could be masked by an elite quarterback making half a billion dollars while San Francisco is starting Mr. Irrelevant at the most position in sports while fielding a star-studded cast at nearly every other spot. The debate around Brock Purdy—the quarterback of the best team in the NFC and the player who led the league in yards per attempt, passer rating, and explosive plays—is whether he is actually good or not. Meanwhile, Patrick Mahomes has undergone a metamorphosis from a demigod of three-quarter arm angles/release-point trickery/no-look passing into a surgical and cerebral on-field general who can drag his team through the AFC despite having a receiving core plagued with butterfingers.
The complexity and contingency of this kind of analysis have arrived at a new equilibrium, and something like a consensus, so it is time to return to the gossip churn and wild depravities of paying appropriate deference to Taylor Swift. Her dominance of the American headspace is not normal and deeply unhealthy, and the ways in which the idea-averse NFL has contorted itself to pander to Swifties speaks to the current state of the football aesthetic and the league’s notorious copycat tendencies.
Apparently, Taylor Swift is also beefing with MAGA mongoloids, which represents the detritus of a busted culture and an ever-quickening decay of the American empire. This story combines the nuthouse indignance of right-wingers, culture war binarism, deranged celebrity worship, mandated poptimism, the contemporary liberal urge to portray powerful people as victims, and the overwhelming tendency for media dorks to appear as The Right Kind Of Person. This is the left’s inversion of the Bud Light debacle, politics-as-consumer-choice that compels the Unbearable NPR Types to insist that people who are annoyed whenever an NFL broadcast cuts to Taylor Swift cheering from a luxury box must be gatekeeping women out of football or whatever. Growing tired of an overexposed celebrity is an entirely common affair and a sacred American tradition. But paired with a fervent anti-MAGA narrative, Taylor Swift’s rabid, vengeful stans have all the pretext for declaring that if you aren’t a devoted Swiftie then you must be a literal fascist. Given football’s legacy caveman tendencies, some of this backlash is undoubtedly sexist, so dunking on Taylor Swift has been soiled by too many people hating on the right things for the wrong reasons, like roasting Disney for being “too woke.”
The shared constant sense of grievance and feeling disrespected makes Swifties and Chiefs Kingdom the perfect demented marriage. Both fanbases combine preening self-satisfaction and arrogance with a massive persecution complex. The kind of persecution complex that comes from rooting for a female billionaire whose concert ticket prices require some people to delay mortgage payments and whose fame has been described as having “risen from ‘star’ to ‘molten cosmic supercluster from which galaxies are born.’” Chiefs fans combine the smirking, self-impressed entitlement of Cowboys fans with the whiny self-pity of Browns fans while they watch the media pick their team as perennial Super Bowl favorites and give their quarterback a career-long blumpkin. These tomahawk-chopping dopes remind me of the Chris Christie-esque Jets fans I’d come across who constantly seethe and mope around and periodically yell “It’s about respect” while waiting in a deli line.
If this rant was something of a step down from the high-minded first half of this post, it’s important to remember that all of this is a dialectic, and a process. It is always the first act of 2001 here, and I’m also a petty bitch who wants Tom Brady to remain the undisputed GOAT because it is the only solace I can take as I watch Mac Jones lob cross-body ducks that immediately turn into pick-sixes while the Patriots begin its slow descent into Cowboys-style delusional mediocrity. For all that is good and pure about football and the broader culture, the Chiefs need to lose this weekend. We do not need more media fawning over how the magical love between Traylor/Travis powered the Chiefs through hardship and adversity or why Patrick Mahomes is the greatest athlete to grace this planet or why the Chiefs are the greatest football dynasty ever. I have resorted to rooting for the Bills, the fucking Ravens, and now the 49ers.
I also just want more Budweiser frogs. That was innovation.