Sam Darnold Is An Exorcist

It won't be the lead in anyone else's analysis of Sunday's NFL conference championship games, but the news that the Malignant Tangerine In Chief will not be going to the Super Bowl breaking too late to save the turgid New England/Denver game and just soon enough to undercut the NFC nightcap could well have been the biggest story of the weekend. Instead, the Seahawks and Rams delivered one of the finest games in a postseason full of them, and managed to make the president a footnote in the process.

You may judge that a coincidence, but we would suggest that knowing that they were competing to play in a game that Donald Trump would definitely not be attending inspired the Seahawks and Rams into delivering the brilliant showdown that riveted a traumatized nation. You got a better explanation? Keep it to yourself. We know what we want this to be, and since we don't like the news, we're just making up some of our own. And if all that wasn't actually what inspired the action in the NFC championship, the end result was pretty inspired all the same.

Of course, the mudslide-in-a-suit blamed his decision not to attend the Super Bowl on a long flight and the presence of Bad Bunny and Green Day, which in and of itself should earn the aforementioned musical acts and whoever invented time zones Congressional Medals of Honor. But, again, this is less interesting than Sunday's two football games and starkly disparate they were.