Football Outsiders: Super Bowl LVI Mythbusters

Some pretty strong opinions in here worth reading....

Super Bowl LVI Mythbusters

NFL Super Bowl - The Cincinnati Bengals and Los Angeles Rams are very similar teams. The Rams are better. Amen.

The fact that that Rams are better than the Bengals does not mean that the Rams will win Super Bowl LVI. It does not mean that we cannot root for the Bengals or prefer the Bengals because we like plucky young upstarts better than favorites. It does not mean that the Rams have a better long-term future than the Bengals. It simply means that anyone staking money or reputation on the outcome of the game who looks at the matchup with sincere, well-informed objectivity is all-but required to pick the Rams.

Based on the graphic on the rail to the right side of this article, the Rams have a 65.3% chance to win the Super Bowl. I wouldn't bet the mortgage on a 65.3% chance. But I wouldn't bet a dime against a 65.3% chance, no matter how much momentum, mojo, or have you considered how the backup tight end stacks up against a strongside linebacker? hyperanalysis gets stacked up on the other side.

The Rams and Bengals both like to empty the backfield and throw deep to their exceptional No. 1 receivers. Both rely on quality cornerbacks to shut down opponent's No. 1 receiver. Neither team runs the ball all that creatively or spectacularly. Neither team is all that blitz-happy, and neither team is likely to blitz much when coping with the other's receiver corps on Sunday. The key matchups in this game are obvious. Ja'Marr Chase vs. Jalen Ramsey. Cooper Kupp vs. Chidobe Awuzie. Aaron Donald vs. the entire Bengals offensive line. Good Matthew Stafford vs. Evil Matthew Stafford. This is playground football, not a chess match.

But then we drill down to the players themselves. Ramsey is better than Awuzie. Donald is better than anyone. The Rams offensive line is better than the Bengals offensive line. In February of 2022 (as opposed to some time in the near future), Stafford and Kupp are better football players than Joe Burrow and Chase. The Rams win most of the meaningful comparisons, whether lined up position-by-position or offense-versus-defense.

DVOA tells us the Rams have a better run offense, pass offense, run defense, pass defense, and special teams, in some categories by a considerable margin. The Rams won more regular-season games against a far more difficult schedule. The Bengals scored the exact same number of points as the Rams during the regular season but allowed four more—again, against an easier slate of opponents. The Bengals beat the Chiefs twice, which was impressive. The Rams all but forced Tom Brady into retirement by beating his Buccaneers twice. More impressive. The Rams are a perennial playoff team full of veterans who reached the Super Bowl three years ago. Many of the Bengals stars were still in college three years ago. If home-field advantage is still a thing—and it probably is, despite a few years of data which suggests it has shrunk—the Rams have it.

I state all of these obvious facts because it's traditional to shroud the Super Bowl in manufactured suspense, imbue the underdog with intangibles (or tiny advantages gleaned from the corners of the coaching film or far reaches of the database) or mythologize the matchup with purple prose: The City of Angels has long awaited a new NFL champion, while the Queen City has shivered in the cold for generations. Well, my purple prose factory closed for repairs a few weeks early this year. And you are here at Football Outsiders: if you want to mine for Bengals advantages, you will find a bunch of them in the data, scattered among many more Rams advantages. (Or check out Aaron Schatz's data-intensive Super Bowl LVI pre-preview and the full preview coming Thursday afternoon.)

There's no mystery here. A better team—one of the preseason favorites—is playing a lesser team, though obviously a feisty one. Better teams don't always win, but they usually win. Everything else is salad dressing. The Walkthrough prediction: Rams 28, Bengals 17.

The Invincible Joe Burrow, and Other Narratives

Having performed a little whirlwind tour of regional radio stations and podcasts on Monday and Tuesday, Walkthrough knows what folks are talking about heading into Super Bowl LVI. And we don't like what we are hearing.

Engage "Get Off My Lawn" mode!

Joe Burrow is not Tom Brady 2.0.

Burrow is going out of his way to make me hate him. It's clearly personal. Seriously, check this out.

The only thing worse than an athlete strutting around on social media is an athlete congratulating himself for not strutting around on social media. Especially when that athlete is 25 years old but sounds like he's angling for a promotion at Strickland Propane.

The Burrow quote was pulled from Monday's Zoom press conferences. Zoom press conferences make regular press conference sound like ancient Greek symposia by comparison; if you thought gaggles of reporters shouting boilerplate questions at disinterested athletes lacked intellectual rigor, you should experience what happens when moderators can control who speaks, follow-up questions are impossible, no one can even see anyone else, and so forth.

Anyway, Burrow was asked to give advice to young athletes, he gave it, most of it was sound, and any social networking producer worthy of the esteemed title knew that Burrow's pull quote would resonate with a certain demographic and slapped the sucker on a graphic.

And I personally blame Burrow for all of it.

No, that's not true. The bigger issue is the fact that Burrow is being set up as the anti-Mahomes. That was supposed to be Josh Allen's role, but the Bills keep losing to the Chiefs, while the Bengals keep beating them. Allen is too physically gifted to play the part, anyway. Burrow, like Tom Brady, looks more like a traditional storage container for gritty underdog wish-fulfillment fantasies.

Burrow appears to be growing into a quarterback of the caliber of Mahomes, Allen, or Justin Herbert, but he's not there yet. And frankly, he deserves better than to be form-fit into a stock character archetype. Let's enjoy Burrow for what he is, not for what we want him to be or are pretending he has already become.

Matthew Stafford is not a Hall of Famer if he wins Super Bowl LVI.

There are surely some radio-television-podcast personalities out there ready to declare Stafford a Hall of Famer—wait, let me get the tone just right: a sure-fire, first-ballot Hall of Famer, and anyone who disagrees is an idiot—should he win on Sunday.

Nope. Not at all. Not even close.

This isn't the space for a 2,000-word examination of Stafford's hypothetical candidacy, and it's impossible to tell who he might share a ballot with if he retires in seven years or so. But a Super Bowl win would fit Stafford rather snuggly among Joe Theismann, Jim Plunkett, Jim McMahon, and Phil Simms: very good quarterbacks with one (or two for Plunkett) rings who fell short of Canton. Eli Manning, a borderline candidate, would still have a stronger case than Stafford, as would Russell Wilson, who is likely to hit the ballot at around the same time. Aaron Rodgers, to be clear, is in a separate category,

Of course, Stafford could win two or three Super Bowls with the Rams, just as Burrow could win 12 with the Bengals. Each can only win one game this week.

I have no idea what a "legacy" is, anyway. There are Super Bowl champions and Hall of Famers. Everyone else just becomes an old football player who had a fine career that many fans remember fondly but others forget. Stafford will be better remembered by history if he wins on Sunday than if he loses. That's self-evident. But it doesn't make great content.

The Bengals defense is not "underrated." It's probably overrated.

The Bengals defense didn't become great because Mahomes and the Chiefs pounded Jell-O shots at the goal line in the AFC Championship Game. Lou Anarumo's "brilliant" game plan, featuring lots of eight-man coverages, was a desperation ploy that worked because the Chiefs strutted straight into the ambush.

It's worth noting that the Rams have averaged just 5.1 yards per pass attempt with a meager 58.7% completion rate on the 46 passes they attempted against three-man rushes in the regular season and playoffs. (Source: Sports Info Solutions). So Captain Lou may dial up more three-man rushes. Of course, many of those Rams pass attempts came in desperate late-game situations, skewing the data. And Sean McVay, unlike Andy Reid, will shift gears and run the ball if the Bengals try that stuff in the red zone.

Otherwise, you have read enough from Football Outsiders and Walkthrough this year to know that the Bengals have an average-at-best defense which excelled at shutting down the Steelers and Lions and has performed somewhat better in the postseason. The Rams faced much tougher defenses in the NFC playoffs. That's likely to show on Sunday.

The Bengals' path to success can not be "copycatted."

I've heard several variations on the "copy the Bengals blueprint" question, including some weird Twitter gibberish last week about how the Bengals are proof that tanking works. (Joe Burrow is magical, you see? So if a team were to lose on purpose to get him, they would automatically vault into the playoffs! That's how causality works!)

Anyway, sure, copy the Bengals blueprint: finish dead-last, draft a quarterback as good as Burrow, nearly sack him into a wheelchair as a rookie, pick the best receiver prospect since Randy Moss the next year, grab some defensive free agents to build a league-average unit, hope your two divisional powerhouses simultaneously collapse, get hot in the playoffs, hope the conference powerhouse self-destructs when it's about to take a 28-10 lead, win Super Bowl. An airtight, logical plan.

If anything, the Bengals are further proof that tanking is silly: they went from worst to first in two years by being aggressive in the draft (tankologists would absolutely have drafted a left tackle instead of Chase) and free agency (the Trey Hendrickson and D.J. Reader signings did not really pass the analytics sniff test). Advocating for three-plus-year rebuilding plans is silly when teams like the 2021 Bengals and 2017 Eagles keep turning things around in two. The closest thing to the moral of the Bengals story is that no team should think, "Oh well, Aaron Rodgers is in our division, so let's just bide our time and conserve resources until we see a window of opportunity."

Yes, every Walkthrough segment is secretly a commentary on the Vikings.

The Rams' path to success cannot really be copycatted, either.

The Rams' "win now" roster management strategy succeeded: they upgraded a team that was mired in wild-card purgatory, and they did so in a way that should ensure at least one more year of Super Bowl contention in 2022. (The Rams are currently NFC favorites at +1000 to win next year's Super Bowl.) Win or lose, the Rams made the right decision to trade for Stafford, add Von Miller, and so forth, just as the Buccaneers made the right decision to risk it all on a Tom Brady retirement tour over the last two years.

That said, "Dream Team" tactics are still perilous and highly situational. The Broncos won't become automatic Super Bowl favorites by adding Aaron Rodgers. The Eagles won't become automatic favorites by adding Deshaun Watson. The Rams are in the Super Bowl because they drafted Aaron Donald and Cooper Kupp; acquired Robert Woods, Jalen Ramsey, Andre Whitworth, and others across multiple seasons by various means; installed a stable system; reached a Super Bowl; then went gee-glory gonzo for Stafford and Miller. It took four years and a few missteps for the Rams to go all in this year.

But hey, if teams decide that the clearest path to the Super Bowl involves chaotic offseason blockbuster trades, it makes my job easier and more fun. So have at it, guys!

The Sean McVay coaching tree is what it is.

McVay is clearly a great coach, despite iffy fourth-down decisions, shaky clock management, and a habit of appearing much more clever in September than December. Coaches don't just stumble into two Super Bowls with two different quarterbacks. As a talent developer, personality manager, and big-picture game-planner, McVay is more or less who he claims to be.

As for Zac Taylor … he has the good sense to let Burrow and Chase play sandlot football and to draw up enough play designs to keep Tee Higgins and Tyler Boyd busy when Chase gets quintuple-teamed. At best, he has improved as a coach from his first two seasons, when he alienated star players and gave poorly chosen assistants too much leeway. At worst, he's just short of holding the Bengals back with his predictable play calls and unwillingness to beef up Burrow's pass-protection schemes.

This is the first McVay vs. McVay Clone Super Bowl. There are sure to be others, since coaches of the McVay-Shanahan tree have dominated yet another head coach hiring cycle. A self-fulfilling prophecy is about to fulfill itself: one lineage of coaches gets all the best opportunities and therefore enjoys a disproportionate amount of success, creating justification for hiring even more coaches of that lineage. Meanwhile, Brian Flores howls in the wilderness, and Eric Bieniemy has become the lid on the Andy Reid coaching jar that no one seems strong enough to unscrew..

Yeah, Mike McDaniel and Kevin O'Connell look like swell new head coaches. But diminishing returns will soon start setting in as teams reach even deeper into the McVay/Shanahan cloning vats. That may have already happened, but it will be hard to tell, because so many McVays are going to get so many opportunities that some of them are bound to succeed simply by climbing over one another.

Super Bowl LVI is not a referendum on anything.

Some inside baseball …

One of my past employers obligated me to write on the exact same broad theme in several consecutive post-Super Bowl columns: This Year's Champion is About to Start a New Dynasty. My column ran on Monday mornings, and per the dictates of Internet journalism, Monday content must spin the story forward.

If you think about the storylines of the Super Bowls of the mid-2010s, you realize that it took some serious mental contortions to suggest that some of the teams led by aging quarterbacks were on the verge of a dynasty. I was getting paid shockingly well for those contortions, so I contorted, sometimes with ridiculous results.

Thank heavens Football Outsiders isn't demanding a "start of the dynasty" column for Monday. The Bengals are not starting a dynasty; they may be starting a threesome with the Bills and Chiefs, which will make for some sexy AFC football for the next few years, but no dynasty. The Chiefs and Bills (+700 each) are favorites to win the AFC in the 2022, with the Bengals at +1200. Those numbers probably won't change much come Monday morning. And we all know the Rams are built to last exactly one more year, then the deluge.

If we want to spin forward to 2022, we need to talk about Rodgers, Watson, Russell Wilson, Lamar Jackson's contract, Baker Mayfield's contract, Trey Lance, the Eagles' draft picks, the Saints' cap dilemma, the Chargers run defense, the post-Tom Brady reality, and a dozen other situations which are currently in flux. We can also talk about the Bengals importing the Saints offensive line or the Rams scouring Day 3 of the draft for cheap talent, but each is just one conversation among many. And again: win or lose, the Rams and Bengals will still face the same offseason issues.

We have a rare opportunity to let Super Bowl LVI be what it is: a football game to define the champion of a league that tens of millions of fans are enthralled by, not some era-defining historical turning point. There's no Brady to fuss over. There's less in-person hoopla due to the pandemic. There are Winter Olympics for casual sports fans who like personality-based storytelling. For the rest of us, there's a game between two big-play-happy teams we haven't had time to get sick of yet. Let's cherish it. And then let's get ready for 2022.