Super Bowl: Kansas City-San Francisco rematch is, well, boring

Another Super Bowl appearance for Kansas City — a fourth in five seasons.

Good for its fans, the ones who had to wait 50 years after winning Super Bowl IV to get another shot at a title, as well as those who have just become aware of the sport through the romantic interests of their favorite pop star.

Good for Patrick Mahomes and Andy Reid and the rest of the front-facing members of the organization who have been compiling Hall of Fame resumes in recent years.

And good for the town — that geographical oxymoron named for a neighboring state — which remains one of the smallest but most loyal markets in the league.

But . . . good for football?

That’s debatable.

Kansas City already is a full-fledged dynasty, a distinction that will grow even stronger if it wins Sunday’s game. And dynasties by definition are boring — unless it is your team riding the wave.

The last time it faced the 49ers in a Super Bowl, just four short years ago, Kansas City represented fresh new faces after a decade of the same old same old. KC ended a streak of three straight appearances by the Patriots as the AFC representative. Before that, the Broncos had gone to the big game twice in three years (with those pesky Patriots sandwiched in between).

Every once in a while, a Ben Roethlisberger or a Joe Flacco would break through to upset that dominance, but most of the 21st century was ruled by a very select few franchises that made a habit of controlling the outcomes of football’s biggest holiday.

Kansas City, many surmised when it reached and won Super Bowl LIV in Miami, finally put an end to that era.

Nope.

Turns out it just became the next phase of it.

And now KC is back to face the 49ers. Again. Even with its new quarterback and his improbable narrative, San Francisco, too, suffers from the boredom of the reigns it helped create in the 1980s.  

Same cast of characters

The Super Bowl should be unique and exciting and fresh and cutting-edge and unpredictable. It should be like football itself. Instead, thanks to this long lineage of legacy teams that keep returning over and over again, it’s taken on an unhealthy staleness.

The same characters in the same helmets keep showing up, right on schedule, year after year. The NFL has turned into the MCU.

The sport has done just about all it can to avoid such repetition. Salary caps, free agency and drafts are designed to create parity and prevent monotony. They’ve barely slowed the handful of franchises that have mastered them, though, and see those elements not as obstacles but as tools.

This really felt like the season when that was about to change. Kansas City went 11-6 in the regular season but spent most of the fall months tripping over itself offensively and looking decidedly middle-class against the NFL’s upper crust.

Baltimore, Buffalo, Miami — even, for a few weeks, Cleveland and Houston! — those were the squads that from September through December looked ready to take over the conference crown. New names and logos and storylines to explore!

But then January came along. Those other teams faltered. And Kansas City became, well, Kansas City.

The Kansas City we have come to expect. Super Bowl Kansas City.

Ho-hum.

This is the column that’s supposed to start banging the drum about how awesome the coming week is going to be, about all of the fun narratives that are about to clash. It’s hard to muster that level of excitement for these teams when we already know them so intimately, though. What more can be said about Mahomes or Travis Kelce or Nick Bosa or Kyle Shanahan? At this point, even Brock Purdy with his remarkable rise from the last pick in last year’s draft to this game seems like an overtold bedtime story.

Maybe this shouldn’t be such a surprise. The Super Bowl was born from inevitable dominance. The first two incarnations of the game — including one against Kansas City — barely veered from expectation. Then along came the Steelers in the 1970s, the 49ers in the 1980s, the Cowboys in the 1990s. Soon enough, Tom Brady was winning championships at a clip never before seen. And now, it seems, it is Mahomes’ turn to carry that legacy onward.

At least with those earlier teams, there was a sense we were watching history unfold. Now it seems as if we are watching history on repeat.  

Wait till next year!

But the Super Bowl games and champions we remember most — cherish most — aren’t the ones that went according to such conforming plans.

They are the ones that upset the hierarchy of the sport, as the Jets did in Super Bowl III. The ones that gave the traditional power a rare taste of defeat, as the Giants did in Super Bowl XLII and the Eagles in Super Bowl LII to the Patriots. The ones that show us, occasionally, that the status ain’t always so very quo.

In Super Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas on Sunday, Kansas City may win another title. It would make Mahomes one of just four quarterbacks to win three or more Lombardi Trophies — joining Troy Aikman (three), Joe Montana (four) and Terry Bradshaw (four) — and put him, at age 28, within conceivable striking distance of Brady’s record (seven). It would raise Reid to a new echelon of coaching ranks; after spending a good portion of his career stigmatized as a coach who couldn’t win “the big one,” only Chuck Noll and Bill Belichick would have more Super Bowl titles than Reid.

Those would all be very impressive accomplishments. And the manner in which one of these teams wins within the 60 (or more?) minutes of play could be as dramatic and titillating as any in memory. They could blow us all away with their displays of athleticism and acumen.

It probably won’t, however, have the scintillating charge that comes from a newcomer to this grand sports stage. It won’t capture us and dazzle us and challenge the limits of our imaginations.

Maybe the coming years will bring a string of variety to spice up our Super Bowls and pique our interest. Quarterbacks such as Josh Allen and C.J. Stroud and Justin Herbert and Lamar Jackson seem capable of reaching their first Super Bowl in the near future, not to mention Joe Burrow — the only active quarterback to beat Mahomes in the playoffs — who certainly is poised to return to another at some point.

Heck, maybe even the Jets can keep Aaron Rodgers healthy beyond the first four snaps of the 2024 season and make a wild run at the ’ship.

Twelve NFL teams have never won a Super Bowl. Four have never even made it there.

This year we get Kansas City again. We get San Francisco again, too.

Good for them. For the rest of us, though, maybe not so much.

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.