The Super Bowl is Set: Chiefs-Eagles will face off in Arizona
The Good, Bad, and the Ugly from this past weekend of NFL football
After 21 weeks of regular season and playoff football the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs, likely the two most deserving teams in the NFL, will play in Super Bowl LVII.
The Conference Championship games gave us one good game and another bad-turned-ugly game. Here’s how Philly and KC got to football’s ultimate stage.
The NFC Championship game was anything but a game. The Eagles scored on their first possession and never looked back. 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy — aka Mr. Irrelevant — was riding a win streak worthy of a Hollywood script entering the NFC title fight, but was injured on San Francisco’s first offensive possession of the game. He suffered a torn UCL on a hit as he was releasing a pass. Initially called incomplete, the subsequent review showed his arm wasn’t moving forward on the pass attempt when the ball came out, resulting in a fumble.
Fourth-string QB Josh Johnson entered the game for Purdy, but was ineffective before suffering his own injury early in the third quarter — a concussion on a hit by Ndamukong Suh. At that point it felt like even quarterback whisperer Kyle Shanahan was out of magic with his signal-callers1; the 49ers did not eclipse the 50 percent win probability threshold at any point in the game.
The Eagles won pulling away 31-7 in a game that finished in the bottom third in Game Excitement Index (GEI2) at 2.32 (-1.57 below average). Neil Paine of FiveThirtyEight summarized it perfectly this week:
“…I would have liked to have seen a full game of the 49ers with Purdy against the Eagles. It’s a huge what-if, and we were robbed of what was supposed to be an NFC title game classic.”
GEI rank (this game/all games): 240/283
Meanwhile the Kansas City Chiefs and Cincinnati Bengals played on Sunday night in a rematch of last year’s AFC Championship at Arrowhead. Unlike the first game on Sunday this one was a barnburner that eventually came down to the final play.
Patrick Mahomes, who suffered a high ankle sprain in the divisional round limiting his marquee mobility under center, took off on a crucial third-down play in the dying seconds of the game. A boneheaded hit-out-of-bounds by Joseph Ossai sent the All-Pro QB sprawling into the bench resulting in a 15-yard penalty for a late hit and put the Chiefs squarely in field goal range.
Harrison Butker hit the ensuing 45-yard kick through cold with 3 seconds to go, all but punching Kansas City’s ticket to the Super Bowl with a 23-20 victory.
With a GEI of 4.96 it was among the most exciting games of this year’s playoffs (not saying much though).
GEI rank (this game/all games): 68/283
The 49ers lost starters Trey Lance and Jimmy Garoppolo to season-ending injuries earlier this year.
Game Excitement Index (GEI) is a way to measure how exciting an individual game is, as the name implies. I calculate it similar to what Luke Benz has done in college basketball. The approach is to sum the absolute value of the win probability change from each play and multiply by a normalized time parameter. This gives us an index by which we can rank each game’s excitement factor. The way to interpret, for example, a Game Excitement Index of 4.0 is that the win probability changed by a total of 400% over the course of that game. The higher the number, the more exciting the game.