Super Bowl LX Was The Beatdown That Will Leave No Trace

For a half, the Super Bowl's Most Valuable Player was either Jason Myers or Bad Bunny, and you could have gotten equal odds on either one. But bad games rarely stay bad forever, and because the second half more resembled a normal game with exotic things like touchdowns, we would not be subjected to a choice of potential MVPs between the Seattle Seahawks place kicker and the star of the halftime show. In the end, there would also be Seattle punter Michael Dickson.

Such was the comprehensive beatdown that was LX, a 29-13 Seattle triumph over the New England Patriots whose final score actually flattered the Pats. No matter what statistic you could pull from the game, if it did not lead directly to a tale of the Seahawks' utter dominance, it was a lie. Drake Maye threw for 295 yards that didn't matter. Kenneth Walker The Third ran for 135 yards, which was about 100 less than it looked. The bad part of that is, because almost everyone expected the game to be a rout for the Seahawks, there is nobody to mock today. Everyone was right, from your grandfather who's been saying "defense wins championships" since you were crib-bait, to the lowliest pundit who ran out of ideas four days too soon, to the mugs in Las Vegas who took all the New England money they could get and nearly got a group hernia from the stifled laughter. You couldn't find anyone outside of Bill Simmons who saw a happy ending for New England, and now you know why.

The truth was simple: The much better team behaved like it because it was never forced to do anything but be the performative bully it was advertised to be. Nothing complicated or video breakdown-worthy. No highlight package that could even qualify as a discovery motion. Seattle's two best plays came after the game stopped mattering—a stripsack/pick-six by Uchenna Nwosu that killed off all Patriot delusions, and a subsequent 49-yard touchdown run by Walker The Third that was nullified by a Jalen Sundell hold. One sensed that they could have been recreated any time the Seahawks saw fit to repave their lead. As it was, neither did anything but make a long-decided game even less palatable for Patriot apologists. This could and probably should have been significantly more lopsided than the scoreboard said it was, and the scoreboard was plenty derisive on its own.