The sports drama transcends the Super Bowl spectacle
At some point, the Super Bowl stopped being just about football and evolved — or is devolving — into a corporate carnival with lavish parties, halftime extravaganzas and commercials whose budgets seemed to rival those of a blockbuster.
The culmination of that transformation came when the NFL scheduled this year's event in Las Vegas, where the prevailing ethos might well be that a belly full of anything is hardly enough.
But Super Bowl LVIII, with its accompanying flash — and America's favorite football fan, Taylor Swift, drinking a beer in a private box — demonstrated Sunday night how sports differ from other forms of entertainment.
If the Kansas City Chiefs' 25-22 victory over the San Francisco 49ers had been as tightly scripted as Usher's elaborate choreography, the teams might have been pelted with rotten tomatoes or booed off the stage at halftime. Above all, it was a night of bungling and bungling: two fumbles, an interception, a muffed punt, a blocked extra point, a series of untimely penalties — and for the 49ers, enough regret to last a lifetime.
But all those mistakes and all those field goals — seven in all — would ultimately be submerged in the tension that unfolded in the fourth quarter and continued into overtime of what would become the longest game in Super Bowl history.
The unexpected drama continued until the final play, when Patrick Mahomes, the great quarterback from Kansas City, threw a touchdown pass to a wide-open Mecole Hardman – who had left the Chiefs as a free agent after last season to join the Jets and then traded back to Kansas City in mid-October. It was his first touchdown catch of the season.
As the Chiefs poured onto the field — and red and yellow confetti poured from the ceiling — the 49ers trudged off and absorbed their second blow in the Super Bowl loss to Kansas City in five years.
The tidy ending nicely bowed out what would have been unfathomable not so long ago: the NFL placing its big event in the nation's gambling capital. A big part of that identity is sports betting, which remains verboten for players and league employees even though the NFL has licensing deals worth nearly $1 billion over five years.
While Las Vegas has diversified and shifted toward entertainment, gambling is what sets the city apart from Broadway, Disneyland and Branson, Mo.
Meanwhile, the NFL released another TV spectacle.
Although Allegiant Stadium is covered, a flyover and fireworks from the roof were still part of the pre-game festivities. The halftime show with Usher and his friends was orchestrated down to the minute. And an American flag could be seen on the outside of the Sphere, the new futuristic concert hall.
The commercials also managed to worm their way into the conversation: Beyoncé used one to announce her next album. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. insinuated himself into the political conversation. And Carl Weathers showed up just over a week after his death.
(One detail may have been overlooked. As the Kansas City players stormed out of the tunnel before the game, they were greeted by a tomahawk chop chant as they ran through the end zone, painted with “Chiefs” and bordered by an NFL message: End racism. .)
This NFL season has been marked by the presence of Ms. Swift, who has been a regular at Chiefs games since shortly after she started dating Travis Kelce, the team's star.
Suddenly, at least anecdotally, more girls and young women have become excited about a sport that has led them to learn the language of so many football-watching men in their lives. As if the country's most popular sport needed a boost.
So there was Ms. Swift, joined in the Kelce family's box, flanked by actress Blake Lively and singer Ice Spice, slam a beer with the clapping approval of Travis' bushy-haired older brother, Jason. The older Mr. Kelce, who plays for the Philadelphia Eagles, has followed his brother's team on what seemed like a bare-chested pub crawl through the playoffs. On Sunday he kept his shirt, along with his yellow-red-checked overalls.
Travis Kelce was also excited. Frustrated with the offense's early struggles, Mr. Kelce yelled in coach Andy Reid's face on the Kansas City sideline. He might have done well to listen to Ms. Swift's song, “You Need To Calm Down.”
As the Chiefs began celebrating in a cigar smoke-filled locker room, Mr. Kelce struggled to open a golden Ace of Spades bottle of champagne. When the bottle's cork finally popped, he spat the spray onto his teammates, many of whom were already wearing large goggles over their eyes. Mr. Mahomes carried a replica of the World Wrestling Entertainment championship over his shoulder at his nearby locker.
Before reaching the dressing room, Mr. Kelce received a hug from his mother and hugged Ms. Swift, who planted a kiss on her friend.
The scene may have been enough to spark a new round of right-wing conspiracy theories about Ms. Swift, with her legion of devoted fans, as a Pentagon mole sent to influence this year's presidential election.
(Sean McManus, former chairman of CBS Sports, made fun of this joke last week when he said the NFL warned him the game could go to two overtimes. “You pay $2.1 billion, you get double overtime,” he said.)
To anyone else, the embrace between Mr. Kelce and Ms. Swift seemed like a tender, unrehearsed moment celebrating the culmination of a months-long journey.
The Chiefs' win gives them three Super Bowl titles in the past five seasons and makes them the first team since the New England Patriots in 2004 to win back-to-back titles — perhaps the only one that fit the script on Sunday night.
Emmanuel Morgan And Kevin Draper reporting contributed.