lastcat3 wrote:Jay Z wrote: I do find it odd that the 14-2 defending champs are being effectively dismissed by a number of people.
I think it is mainly because the Chiefs aren't your traditional dominant back to back Super Bowl team. You could see them easily getting beaten if the other team got just a couple breaks or if one of their three stars had a bad game.
The Chiefs are a very special team in the post 2005/10 era where most teams are just a few steps away from going 8-8 on either side. But most people on this board are more traditional fans where there were some truly dominant teams in the league. The Chiefs quite literally would probably get destroyed against pretty much any other back to back Super Bowl champion.
1979-80 is a ways back now, which is why I mentioned those Steeler teams. Particularly the Super Bowl against the Rams. Got outrushed, lost the turnover battle, then boom boom boom, beat the spread anyway.
The odds are different when your team can push the reset button and the other team can't. Case in point from last Super Bowl is when the 49ers are still up, Chiefs not doing much, 49ers have scripted it out exactly how they want. Then Mahomes drops back about 15 yards, in effectively unsackable position, and throws up a punt that Hill runs under, catches wide open for a 40 yard game. This not only plays to explosiveness but to the fact that this was a planned, scripted play the Chiefs had that they had held back for just such an occasion.
Even the analytics sites I think have a difficult time dealing with this. There has been talk, scuttlebutt, that the Chiefs have held their foot off the gas at times to keep things from getting on film, so they have them available. I think in today's NFL it is more strategic like that, you can't just smash someone into oblivion like the 1973 Dolphins. Hell, even at that time Landry would try to trick the opposition. It worked sometimes, sometimes he out tricked himself.
Summary is that your odds are worse when the other team can roll up 21 or 28 points in a quarter. Which the Chiefs can do. So you can't really talk about "bad game" until the clock hits 0:00 in the 4th quarter. From what I have seen, the Bucs need to play better to win. Not just Brady rolling his helmet onto the field and the game is over against the defending champs.