The thoughts running through my head after Sunday’s AFC and NFC championship games:
*Instead of a perennial contender matched up against a real feel-good story, Super Bowl 58 in a little less than two weeks will be made up of the top two contenders in the defending league champion Kansas City Chiefs, the NFL’s best team of the last half-decade or so, and the San Francisco 49ers, the No. 1 seed in the NFC and the conference’s best overall club over that same time period. That’s an attractive game for the football purists, who want to see the best versus the best.
*The Baltimore Ravens, the former Browns, melted at home in a loss to the Chiefs and proved yet again they’re not a postseason team. So sure was Chiefs coach Andy Reid that Baltimore quarterback Lamar Jackson would keep self-destructing that he played conservatively on offense once his team got a 17-7 halftime lead. In Reid’s estimation, and as usual he was right on point, there was no way the Ravens could catch up if the Chiefs didn’t turn the ball over. What an indictment on the AFC North champions, both now and going forward, and, as well, on Jackson, a franchise quarterback who isn’t. They are in the same boat with quarterback Josh Allen and the Buffalo Bills. Both teams are talented but their foundation — their face of the franchise — collapses under the weight of the postseason. They are, then, in the unenviable spot of being between a rock and a hard place. The rest of the AFC teams, including the Browns, are delighted. They keep pinching themselves to see if it’s real.
*The Detroit Lions are, of course, that feel-good story — the team that was trying to get to its first Super Bowl and win its first league championship in 66 years, in the middle of the Eisenhower administration — that blew a 17-point halftime lead because aggressive head coach Dan Campbell, other than eschewing field-goal chances by taking huge fourth-down risks, quit being aggressive overall with both his offense and defense in the second half. Instead of staying a step ahead of the 49ers, forcing the action and playing to win, they played not to lose by being reactionary. It was the 49ers, after playing like sloths in first half, who took charge by being the aggressors. It was a complete reversal of roles. Great rebound decision by 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan, the former Browns offensive coordinator.
*And speaking of Browns offensive coordinators, the one hired just the other day, Ken Dorsey, the former Cleveland backup quarterback during the Butch Davis coaching era two decades ago, is an interesting guy. Usually a team wants to hire a guy who is just coming off having excelled somewhere else. But Dorsey was fired by Buffalo halfway through this season. Hmmm. Is he inept as a coordinator? Or is it simply that he failed at the seemingly impossible task of trying to turn Allen and the struggling offense of the sinking-ship Bills into a postseason success story? Let’s start out being positive and believe the latter premise.
Steve King
