Students, staff debate Super Bowl results

Sam Klein
Podcast Editor

Super Bowl Sunday is one of America’s biggest sporting events. Last year it raked in $485 million. This year it had the third largest viewing in history according to Variety.

Like every year this year’s show had excitement surrounding it especially in the Midwest with the Kansas City Chiefs facing off against the Philadelphia Eagles. Since the Rams left St. Louis many St. Louis fans have begun rooting for the next closest team: The Kansas City Chiefs.

The 2023 Super Bowl took place in Arizona at the University of Phoenix Stadium when the Chiefs, led by their quarterback and MVP, Patrick Mahomes, played against the Eagles, led by their quarterback Jalen Hurts.

By the end of the season both teams had a record of 14-3.

The Super Bowl ended in a score of 38-35 with the Chiefs coming out on top after their kicker Harrison Butker made a field goal in the last 11 seconds in the game, making it hard for the Eagles to bounce back.

Latin teacher and lifelong Chiefs fan Jeff Smith reflects on the game’s score. “Yeah, I thought it would be high scoring for sure because the Chiefs [defense] can’t stop anybody.”

As an explanation to his attack on the Chiefs defense Smith said “Well with the salary cap you can’t pay everyone a billion dollars, right? So we spend our money on a certain quarterback being Pat Mahomes, and I’m pretty sure if I was a Bears fan I’d be glad to spend money on Pat Mahomes, so you gotta cut losses where you can. So we spend our money on offense.”

Junior Louis Getz, a football fan who took the Eagles side in the Super Bowl due his original team getting knocked out of the playoffs had a different idea of how the score would’ve gone. “It was higher than I thought, but yeah it was a little disappointing.”

Getz thought the score would be lower, and he said, “My educated guess wasn’t very educated.”

Getz said he chose to support the Eagles so as to not jump on the “bandwagon” that the Chiefs had going on.

Near the end of the fourth quarter of the game there was a holding call called on the Eagles which resulted in a five-yard penalty which granted the Chiefs’ ability to get a field goal and take the game.

This call was heavily debated immediately following the game.

Smith shared his thoughts. “It wasn’t really that much of a call. It was, the guy even admitted it. Should they have called it? I don’t know, but Pat Mahomes still could’ve done it. He ran 29 or 26 yards on a bad sprained ankle and outran half the defense. So really, that didn’t lose the game for those people. The Eagles gotta learn to tackle.”

Getz agreed that the call was a valid holding call.

Junior Owen Corlis grew up as an Eagles fan after being raised in Philadelphia. He shared his thoughts after the loss. “I definitely knew that it was going to be evenly matched. Um, it was going to be close either way. I was hoping that the Eagles were going to win, but you know it didn’t turn out that way. I definitely knew it wasn’t going to be a blowout like completely one sided. I knew it was going to be evenly matched and a good game.”

Corlis agreed with the call made at the end of the game and mentioned that the player admitted to the holding call. “He admitted to grabbing him in the locker room after the game so I mean if he said he did it, he did it. I think if it was any other game besides the super bowl it would’ve been called, but he sold the game for us.”

After the game there was speculation surrounding whether Mahomes had taken performance enhancement drugs to improve his performance in the second half. However, this was proven false when the Tweet that had started the rumors was shown to be a satire account that posted fake headlines.