Teams meet in Miami for culmination of
NFL seasonEmail Bryan with your thoughts or tweet @BryanAGrahamSuper Bowl LIV: our writers’ predictions for the game 9.42pm GMT
Patrick Mahomes will become the fifth-youngest quarterback ever to start a
Super Bowl today. The Kansas City phenomenon (24 years, 138 days), who’s won 27 of his 35 career starts (and never had a bad game), will look to do better than Miami’s Dan Marino (23y, 127d) in the Super Bowl after the 1984 season, Pittsburgh’s Ben Roethlisberger (23y, 340d) after 2006, Miami’s David Woodley (24y, 97d) after 1982 and the LA Rams’ Jared Goff (24y, 112d) last year, each of whom came up on the losing end.
Our Andrew Lawrence wrote about how Mahomes, whose Chiefs are favorites today, is on the verge of becoming the face of US sports.
In football, it is customary to pick the best team over the best player. And yet, for Patrick Lavon Mahomes II, many are more than willing to make an exception. Understand: there’s a reason why they call it a gridiron. The game flows in two dimensions, along an x-y plane. Young quarterbacks in particular are trained to move laterally and longitudinally along the grid to evade pressure and are dismissed as serious prospects in an instant for not adhering to a prescribed set of throwing mechanics. Keeping the arm at a 90-degree angle, tracking the elbow up and over the shoulder, setting the feet perpendicular to the target, never throwing off the back foot, etc. Mahomes? He throws overhead, side armed, damn near underhanded; he throws fadeaway passes, no-looks – and finds his man 66% of the time. And when those options are off the table? He’ll run right past you. It’s a lesson the Titans learned the hard way in the AFC Championship game. And if you weren’t rooting for them or the Chiefs, well, what else could you do but giggle? Or kick yourself if you were one of the nine teams that passed on Mahomes in the 2017 draft.
Related: Stand back LeBron and Serena. Patrick Mahomes is the new face of US sports 9.16pm GMT
If you’re an
American viewer worried about tonight’s game finishing late, spare a thought for our European friends. Here’s an email from Giovanni Pisoni, who checks in from Italy:
Hi Bryan,
the Superbowl is scheduled at an absolutely awful time for normal Monday to Friday workers, especially in this part of Europe... starts at 12:40, likely to be over at something like half four. I do want to watch it this year, but being a teacher I couldn’t go to work on two hour’s sleep, so I’m trying something different: I’m about to go and lie down next to my sleeping kids (normally good at inducing sleepiness), alarm set for 12:35, hoping to get three hours in before the game. Anyone else employing strategic plans to amend their routines either tonight or tomorrow?