NFL Playoffs: Super Bowl Predictions

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It's the matchup nobody wanted: The Philadelphia Eagles will be playing the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LIX. Neutral fans were pulling for the AFC runner-up Buffalo Bills, who have never won a Super Bowl before, and the NFC runner-up Washington Commanders who have had a historic turn around from being one of the worst teams in the league last year to being one game away from the Super Bowl this year. We picked the Bills to beat the Chiefs, but we got that one wrong. We did get the Eagles pick right, but we could not have predicted that they would win in such a dominant fashion and put up 55 points against Washington. 

With these two picks, we continue our perfectly balanced record of predictions we've been keeping since the playoffs began: We went 3-3 picking the Wildcard Round, then 2-2 picking the Divisional Round, and now 1-1 in the Conference Championship games. This makes us 6-6 picking the entirety of the playoffs, with only the Super Bowl to break that tie.


Kansas City Chiefs at Philadelphia Eagles

The incredible performance of Saquon Barkley last week has to have Kansas City's defense nervous. On just 15 carries, he ran for 118 yards and 3 touchdowns. They were winning by so much at the end of that game that they actually subbed him out for rookie Will Shipley. Jalen Hurts' injury concerns from the Divisional Round seem to have resolved completely, as he went 20-for-28 passing with 246 yards and a touchdown, while also converting three different "brotherly shoves" into touchdowns to give him 4 total scores on the day. There is a ton of momentum on this side of the ball.

The Chiefs faced their toughest test yet against the Bills and still came out victorious. Patrick Mahomes posted a statline of 18-for-26, 245 yards, 1 touchdown, and then added 2 more touchdowns on the ground. Kansas City entered the 4th quarter losing by a point, took the lead with 10 minutes left, watched Josh Allen march down the field to tie the game up and then went right back out and took a 3 point lead just a few minutes later. 

With both offenses operating at a very high level right now, the story of this game will come down to the defenses. This Eagles team has a better defense than anyone else the Chiefs have played this season. Consider the following stats:

The Eagles had the number one defense in terms of total yards allowed (278.4 yards per game) and the number two defense in terms of points allowed (17.8 points per game). They achieved this primarily by having the number one pass defense in the league (174.2 yards allowed per game) and a slightly lower ranked run defense (10th in the league, 104.2 yards per game). These are all regular season stats, but the Eagles still rank at or near the top of all similar categories throughout the playoffs. None of the Chiefs' previous opponents had defenses that could even come close to those numbers, and Kansas City's defense ranked closer to the middle of the pack in every one of those stats. It is for this reason that we are officially predicting that the Philadelphia Eagles will beat the Kansas City Chiefs with a final score of 27-24.

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