LAS VEGAS -- In the end, it was the Kansas City Chiefs, somewhat inevitably. In another Super Bowl it looked like they would lose, and at the tail end of a season that looked for long stretches as if it would never come together, it was once again the Chiefs holding up the Lombardi Trophy and Patrick Mahomes as Super Bowl MVP.
I don't know how many times in the course of our weekly exercise in overreaction this season that we wondered whether the Chiefs might not be able to pull this one off. Their offense looked lackluster. Too many drops. Not enough receivers. A pair of early-December defeats left them just a game in front of the Denver Broncos in the AFC West. A Christmas Day loss to the Las Vegas Raiders just when it looked like Kansas City was getting it together. So yeah, the Chiefs gave us plenty of overreaction fodder. Even in the glow of another title after beating the San Francisco 49ers, the Chiefs admitted there were times this season when things didn't look great.
"This one means more," Mahomes said of his third Super Bowl title in five years and second in a row. "To battle through that adversity and come out on the other side, it just means a lot."
It was the Chiefs again, because when the chips are down, Mahomes, Andy Reid, Travis Kelce, Steve Spagnuolo and apparently Mecole Hardman Jr. are the kinds of players and coaches you can count on to get back up and deliver in the biggest of big moments. We never should have doubted them, and that is not an overreaction. That said, enjoy the 2023 season's final overreactions column, in which we judge potential takeaways.
Jump to:
Mahomes catching Brady?
Reid catching Belichick?
OT mistake for the 49ers?
Spagnuolo should be a head coach?
Shanahan will never win it all?
Mahomes will end up winning more Super Bowls than Tom Brady
The math: Brady won seven, his last when he was 43 years old and playing for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers after winning six with the New England Patriots. Mahomes is 28 and has already won three. Eerily, when Brady was 28 and entering the 2005 season, he had won three and had just won two in a row -- something no one else would do again until Mahomes and the Chiefs did it just now. So yes, Mahomes is on track, and he seems motivated to keep up the chase.
"I'm going to celebrate tonight. I'm going to celebrate at the parade," Mahomes said Sunday night. "And then I'm going to come back and do everything I can do to be back in this game next year and get that three-peat."
Verdict: NOT AN OVERREACTION
The true greatness of Brady is that he maintained as long as he did. He made the changes in his game that he needed to make as he aged, but he retained his chip-on-shoulder determination, focus and work ethic throughout a 23-year career. This is no small thing, and there's no guarantee that Mahomes or anyone else will ever be able to do it again.
Mahomes has been in the league seven years, a starting quarterback for six of them. He has a long way to go. But we've never seen a player with his level of breathtaking ability, which gives him a head start. And he has proved more than once that he has a Brady-esque will and determination to win -- to elevate those around him. Asked after Sunday's victory about the season Chiefs rookie wide receiver Rashee Rice had, Mahomes said, "Luckily -- well, I don't know if it's luck for him or not -- he lives in Texas. So, he'll get to see me a lot this offseason as we continue to work to make him one of the best receivers in the league."
The dude just won homecoming king and the state championship, and he's thinking about his summer homework. In other words, Mahomes has a chance here.
Reid will end up winning more Super Bowls than Bill Belichick
It sounds hard to believe. For so long, Reid was the coach who couldn't win the big one, whose clock management would always do him in, who never got over the hump with the Philadelphia Eagles. But Sunday night's win means Reid is halfway to Belichick's total, with three Super Bowl titles as a head coach to Belichick's six.
Belichick isn't winning one next season, and Reid made it pretty clear at the end of his postgame news conference that he intends to come back to try to win another. Retirement rumors have swirled around him for weeks, but asked whether he'd be back next season, Reid said, "Yeah. I haven't had time to think about it, but yeah, sure, yeah. I'm mad at Belichick and Pete [Carroll] because now I get asked all those questions."
With Belichick no longer coaching in New England and Carroll no longer coaching the Seattle Seahawks, Reid is the NFL's oldest current coach. He will turn 66 next month, and all three of his titles have come after age 60. (Per ESPN Stats & Information, he joins Belichick as the only NFL coaches to ever win three or more championships at 60 or older.)
Verdict: OVERREACTION
What? How can it be an overreaction for Reid and not Mahomes? Aren't they a package deal? Yeah, for now they are. But again, Mahomes is 28 years old and could have 10 to 15 more years at this. Reid is about to be 66. It's easy to say he'll coach as long as Mahomes is his quarterback, because who wouldn't want that setup? But there is no guarantee that Reid will want to coach long enough to catch Belichick.
Reid is a Mount Rushmore NFL head coach at this point. But unless he's going to win the next three in a row (I suppose you really can't put anything past this group at this point), he probably doesn't have the same kind of time that Mahomes does to run down the record.
The 49ers made a mistake taking the ball to start overtime
This is an interesting one, because it was the first OT playoff game to be contested since the NFL changed the overtime rules for postseason games to guarantee each team a possession in overtime. The general thinking: Why wouldn't you want the other team to get the ball first, so that you know what you must do once you have possession? But the 49ers won the overtime coin toss and elected to receive.
Coach Kyle Shanahan explained later that he wanted to have the ball third, because that's when things become sudden death in this new format. His logic assumed each team would score the same number of points on the first possessions. But this, of course, did not turn out to be the case, as the Niners kicked a field goal, and the Chiefs scored a touchdown to end the game. Had the Chiefs had the ball first and scored a touchdown, Shanahan would have known his team also needed one to keep the game going.
Verdict: NOT AN OVERREACTION
The Chiefs players and coaches were asked about this, as well, and they all said they'd spent the past couple of weeks planning for this eventuality and would absolutely have chosen to kick had they won the toss.
"I'm not going to question Kyle, because he's brilliant," Reid said. "But that's what our studies showed us was the right thing to do."
Chiefs linebacker Nick Bolton said Shanahan's decision made sense to him because he figured the 49ers' defense was tired after the long final drive of regulation and the coach might not have wanted to put that unit right back on the field. But Shanahan's explanation about sudden death didn't make a ton of sense. Again, if the team that has the ball first doesn't score, then it's the other team that gets the ball first in the sudden-death portion of the game.
I'm not going to say the decision cost the Niners the game, because it didn't. But it's hard to find a good reason that you wouldn't want to know exactly what you need to do to win the game when you get the ball.
Spagnuolo deserves another shot to be a head coach
The Chiefs' defensive coordinator had as good a season as any coordinator in the league on either side of the ball, and he capped it by becoming the first coordinator -- offensive or defensive -- in league history to win a fourth Super Bowl title. After the game, in answer to a question about his coordinator, safety Justin Reid bellowed, "In Spags we trust, baby!" Other players and fellow coaches were similarly effusive.
"He's a phenomenal football coach, first of all," Reid said. "Most of all, he's a great teacher. And when you have young guys like we've had, our whole staff does a great job teaching them, and he leads the parade on that."
Since he has been with the Chiefs, Spagnuolo has consistently shown an ability to design playoff-game-winning plans on defense. On Sunday, he did it again. Niners quarterback Brock Purdy had the third-best QBR in the league this season when blitzed (84.5), and Spagnuolo blitzed him on 49% of his dropbacks and got pressure when he did. The result? Purdy became the fifth quarterback in Super Bowl history to be blitzed on more than 40% of his dropbacks and also face pressure on more than 40% of his dropbacks. None of the five won his Super Bowl.
Purdy's overall numbers against the blitz on Sunday were solid -- 12-for-19 for 131 yards and a touchdown -- but he was just 2-for-6 when blitzed on third down. Spagnuolo knew the right time to dial it up and as a result cashed in with another Super Bowl title -- his third with the Chiefs to go along with the one he won as defensive coordinator for the 2007 New York Giants.
Verdict: NOT AN OVERREACTION
Spagnuolo didn't have a ton of success in his three-year stint as the St. Louis Rams' head coach (2009 to 2011), but that was more than 12 years ago. And while the years that followed weren't kind to him, either -- the 2012 New Orleans Saints, for whom he was defensive coordinator, still hold the record for most yards allowed in a season -- he has completely restored his reputation since arriving in Kansas City in 2019.
Spagnuolo is 64 years old, and the head-coaching market leans hard toward young, offensive-geared coaches. But it's still baffling that no one even reached out to interview him when eight jobs came open this offseason. It might be that Spags is just better as a coordinator than as a head coach. Some coaches fit that description. But the work he has done in Kansas City is worthy of some team finding out if he can be as good in the big meeting room as he is in the small one.
Shanahan will never win the big one
This was Shanahan's second Super Bowl as a head coach. Both times, he had a double-digit lead on the Chiefs. Both times, he lost. He also wears, to some extent, the most brutal Super Bowl collapse of all time, as he was offensive coordinator for the Atlanta Falcons team that blew a 28-3 lead to the Patriots, and some of his second-half playcalls cost those Falcons a chance to bleed the clock.
Shanahan has a reputation for being too conservative as a playcaller in big games, though he pushed back hard on that with a gutsy fourth-down call during a second-half scoring drive Sunday night. And some of his decisions in Super Bowl LIV four years ago have been held up as part of the reason the 49ers lost that one. Another bitter defeat in a game in which he had a lead only adds evidence for those who want to say he'll never win it all.
Verdict: OVERREACTION
Shanahan is still just 44 years old. He and San Francisco general manager John Lynch have shown they can build and maintain a roster capable of reaching the Super Bowl. One of these years, Shanahan has to break through, and he has a lot of chances in front of him. Heck, the coach who just beat him on Sunday is the ultimate example of why we shouldn't write someone off like this so early in his head-coaching career. One of these years, things will break right for Shanahan. And maybe one of these years he'll get to the Super Bowl and someone besides Reid and/or Mahomes will be on the opposite sideline. He can always hope!