What Went Down In Super Bowl LV

One of the least stable aspects of offensive performance is third downs, so unsurprising to see Tampa Bay not start as hot as against Green Bay.

The quarterback is the most important position in football, and it’s arguably the toughest position to play in all of sports. In a video as part of our Greatness Files, Josh examines what makes Mahomes stand out: He excels at the parts of the game that make this position so damn tough.

The Chiefs blitzed Brady the second most of any QB they faced in their earlier matchup, according to ESPN Stats & Info: 20 times. He went 11-for-20 with two picks. The other 157 times he was blitzed this year, three picks. So far, the manufactured pressure again has worked.

Brady and the Bucs converted a ton of fourth downs early in that win over Green Bay. Not so much this time.

A quick three-and-out for the Bucs. Not a bad way for the Chiefs defense to start!

They alluded to QBs from “two different generations.” But which generations? Brady was born in 1977, so he’s clearly a Gen Xer. And born in 1995, Mahomes is the youngest of the Gen Z cohort. Millennials can’t ruin this QB matchup!

So Brady is officially the Greatest of All Time now? How many of his seasons has he been generally accepted as the best QB in football? Three? Four?

Can someone confirm if that is Brad Pitt narrating this video about Tom Brady?

Whatever the over is, I would take it.

We should have taken bets on how many times Romo and Nantz talk about this being “a game for the ages.”

In her tweet before this game, Gorman said she will honor three heroes who exemplify “human connection when we feel siloed.” In her reading just now, she says, “while we honor them today, it is them who every day honor us.” Great stuff once again from her.

The Gorman poem was tremendous. My analysis, not so much. It looks like I lost on two bets and pushed on the team name prop. The chalk cashed. The shame is great.

Amanda Gorman continuing to be amazing.

Chiefs supporters took issue with our story describing them as “lucky,” but playing to win games close is a pretty risky strategy in the NFL. If Kansas City doesn’t start aggressively on offense, it could very much regret letting the notoriously slow-starting Brady hang around.

If you’re watching the game primarily for the ads, we’ve got you covered. Here at FiveThirtyEight, we love Super Bowl commercials — so much, in fact, that we watched more than 200 spots from the biggest advertisers this century and (of course) analyzed and categorized them all. We found some unique, bizarre and even downright disturbing groups of ads that combine seemingly incompatible criteria into a single commercial. Come see the eccentric clusters of ads we found and relive some of the weirdest commercials from past Super Bowls as you look forward to the time between snaps in this year’s big game!

Much has been made about the quarterback matchup in this, so I dug into it using our QB Elo Ratings. According to pregame ratings and our friend the harmonic mean, this matchup ranks 10th in Super Bowl history:

The reimagining of the national anthem by Marvin Gaye remains undefeated.

This anthem is gonna go over for sure.

Neil, the Vince Lombardi video is the second NFL-based CGI this week. They did this with Al Davis and Pete Roselle in a 30 for 30 documentary. It’s a little Uncanny Valley for me.

The effect is that it seems more dangerous than it actually is, which is … interesting.

Apparently there are 25,000 fans and 30,000 cutouts in the crowd tonight.

H.E.R. really can sing anything.

I’m very interested in penalties in this game, a very live prop. I wrote a story in 2014 for The Wall Street Journal about how aggressive Carl Cheffers and his crew (who are calling this game) were with regards to penalties. The over/under is 10.5 penalties down from 11.5 to open. Cheffers was over the NFL average in the regular season — 12.4 per game, to 11.2 for the entire NFL. The Super Bowl average this century is 11.4, while the regular season in this period is 12.8. Through the 12 postseason games so far, it’s 8.2 per game. Cheffers had eight in his one playoff game (Ravens-Bills). The smart money is the under in penalties, but I’ll bet you a beer we go over with Cheffers.

This fake Vince Lombardi is setting a strange tone already.

The 2020 NFL season was quite the journey. When we started back in September, none of us had any idea what this season would look like. In the end, despite playing in a pandemic and everything that went along with it, the football itself looked … pretty much the same.

The defending champion Kansas City Chiefs were the preseason Vegas favorites to win it all and the favorite in the FiveThirtyEight model. They face a Tampa Bay Buccaneers team that was a trendy preseason pick after acquiring GOAT QB Tom Brady before it faltered at midseason and then came roaring back.

That doesn’t mean the season didn’t see its fair share of ups and downs — and it doesn’t mean we know what to expect from tonight’s big game. We’ve examined the game itself from every angle; now there’s nothing left to do but to sit back, watch … and live-blog. Thanks for joining us, and please tweet at me — @saramziegler — with any questions you want answered. Let’s do this!