Looking forward, backward

The NFC and AFC championship games were played this weekend and the winners were Andy Reid’s Kansas City Chiefs and Andy Reid’s former team the Philadelphia Eagles. The Eagles blew out the San Francisco 49ers and the Chiefs pulled out a last-second victory over last year’s Super Bowl runner-up Cincinnati Bengals.

The AFC championship game matched last year’s foes once again in what has become an evenly matched rivalry.

Winning in the NFL consistently is not an easy thing. Last year’s Super Bowl champion Los Angeles Rams fell on hard times because of injuries. Super Bowl MVP Cooper Kupp was injured and was out for the season followed a few weeks later when QB Matthew Stafford was injured.

Repeating as a champion is never easy. Dream seasons happen for a reason and keeping healthy players on the field is not an easy task especially with a 17 game season. I’m old enough to remember when the season was only 12 games.

In less than two weeks, we will see the hype again. QB Patrick Mahomes will still be doing his insurance commercials. What happened to Aaron Rodgers? Apparently, he isn’t a very good insurance salesman like Patrick and even Coach Reid with his mustache drawing. Hopefully, Aaron finds another way to make ends meet.

So, for the next 10 days, we will hear the breakdown of the Super Bowl and how the Eagles had that dream season and how the Chiefs tweeked a bit here and there to get back to the Super Bowl.

We will hear about how Mahomes rehabbed a high ankle sprain and hobbled the Chiefs to a big win. Having two weeks to heal up is a lot better than the one week he had before the AFC championship game.

Eagle QB Jalen Hurts was injured late in the season and sat out two weeks and was replaced by former WSU QB Gardner Minshew. The Eagles lost those two games but Minshew played well enough to oversee one or two wins but didn’t get them. But Hurts and the Eagles had a great season and have an opportunity to win another Super Bowl. I didn’t watch a lot of NFL games this year, but I will watch this Super Bowl because it should be a really good matchup.

It isn’t every season that the Top 2 seeds play each other.

For the first time in Super Bowl history, brothers will be playing on opposite sides of the field in Glendale, Ariz. The Kelce brothers will not line up against each other as Jason is the center for the Eagles and Travis plays tight end for the Chiefs. Now neither player will spend much time watching their brother play as they sit on the side line figuring out ways to defeat the other team’s defense but at some point in time maybe the two will sit down in the same living room and watch a repeat of Super Bowl LVII. The Kelce brothers are important cogs in the offensive machines for their respective teams.

Before we know it we will be watching a pregame Super Bowl show that is 8 or 9 hours long. We will find out more about these guys than we should be allowed. And yes I’m looking forward to the Super Bowl game before I start looking backward as to what happened on that particular Sunday.

— Email Dale at [email protected].