And so we’ve arrived at a Super Bowl that was, in many ways, never supposed to be.
This Sunday’s showpiece features two franchises, the Los Angeles Rams and the Cincinnati Bengals, who have, in reaching the NFL’s biggest game, made a mockery of some its most established theories about what it takes to build a championship-winning team.
With their win-now urgency and cavalier recruitment, the Rams have shown such brazen disregard for the playbook that they may as well have burnt it, while the Bengals have at the very least streamlined the thing, rewritten a bible as a pamphlet after their remarkable transformation from statistically the league’s worst team to potentially its best inside two years.
American sport is obsessed with long-term structure and strategy, admirably so when you consider the win-or-bust irresponsibility that has infected English football and led several historic institutions towards the latter fate. Baseball’s Moneyball philosophy, brought into the mainstream conscious by Billy Beane, Michael Lewis and Brad Pitt, is perhaps the most famous example, but across the country’s major leagues you will find legions of fans accepting of years in the doldrums in the name of Trusting The Process, even if the team that made that mantra famous, basketball’s Philadelphia 76ers, have still not won a championship since 1983.
Patience is the name of the game, time the enabler, but the Bengals have shown that it does not have to be this way. They kept faith in a young head coach, Zac Taylor, despite a dismal first season, capitalised on the chance to draft Joe Burrow, the best quarterback prospect in years, empowered the league’s smallest scouting team to surround him with dynamic talent - most notably college teammate turned offensive rookie of the year Ja’Marr Chase - and then watched it all come together in an overnight resurgence.
Scan the States’ regional press this week and, in the spirit of all news being local, you will find scores of outlets, from Atlanta to Detroit, Texas to Jacksonville, pointing out why the Bengals’ example means success could be right around the corner for their own ailing sides. (Some are so scarred by years of false-dawns and butchered rebuilds that they also explain why it won’t be).
But the Bengals’ success comes with a warning with regards to the much-discussed fetishising of draft picks. Increasingly, there is a shrewd belief that picks have become overvalued, the mystery and allure of unknown upside masking the inherent risk in staking the future of a franchise on unproven potential. Burrow, the first quarterback ever taken No1 to reach a Super Bowl within two seasons, might just be the exception that proves the rule.
The Rams have not been fooled, instead betting the farm - and bucketfuls of sought-after picks - on established pros, the likes of Von Miller, Jalen Ramsey and quarterback Matt Stafford the most obvious examples, each acquired at the expense of serious draft capital. Stafford, for instance, cost two first-round picks, a third-round pick and Jared Goff, himself a former No1 overall selection, when he arrived from Detroit last summer. But while Goff is on holiday and three unknowing future Lions are looking forward to spring break, Stafford is gunning for the Vince Lombardi trophy. A Ram in the Super Bowl is worth four in the bush, it seems.
The mid-season signing of Odell Beckham Jr. as a free agent added to a team built - as has become cliche - in the image of its City of Stars home, concerned not with the future but with the here and now, a focus intensified by the fact that Sunday’s finale takes place in their own SoFi Stadium.
The concept of dynasty-building has been overly romanticised, perhaps unsurprisingly so following an era of unprecedented, elongated dominance by the New England Patriots, whose run of six Super Bowls in the last two decades has raised unrealistic expectations.
The Rams and the Bengals are among the 20 franchises who have not won any in that period. For both, after long waits and turbocharged journeys against the grain, any win, by any means, will do.
