For those of us living in this rain-sodden time zone, there are few sporting events more dependent on a fast start than the Super Bowl. The thing doesn’t even begin until 11.30 at night and you’re looking for some fireworks early doors to keep yourself interested.
On Sunday, all we had was three field goals and zero touchdowns in the first half, so I called it quits and caught up with the second half the following morning, without knowing the full-time score. I had a fair idea how things were going to pan out.
The Seattle Seahawks have had a punishing defence all year, but they also had the benefit of playing against the second youngest quarterback to have started a Super Bowl in the game’s history. The New England Patriots’ Drake Maye could become a great football player, but he was painfully unprepared for his moment on Sunday.
He was let down by his offensive line (the large men paid a lot of money to stand in front of him and stop the other crowd’s large men from getting near him, for the uninitiated), but after a brilliant season, he froze on the big day. It happens. He only just missed out on being named the NFL Most Valuable Player (MVP), in the closest vote for that award since 2003. But he couldn’t handle the Super Bowl.
In truth, the winning quarterback on Sunday, a man by the name of Sam Darnold, didn’t have to do much, such was the dominance of his defence and the quality of his running-back, Kenneth Walker. But it was an astonishing redemption arc for Darnold, having been let go by the Minnesota Vikings last season, even though he had led them to 14 wins in the regular season.
Seattle Seahawks quarterback Sam Darnold weighs up a pass during the first half of last Sunday's Super Bowl against New England Patriots at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California. Photograph: John G Mabanglo/EPA
Seattle Seahawks quarterback Sam Darnold weighs up a pass during the first half of last Sunday's Super Bowl against New England Patriots at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California. Photograph: John G Mabanglo/EPA
A 14-3 record is really impressive . . . but when push came to shove, in the playoffs, Darnold had fallen apart. For the Vikings, that was enough. Darnold was a journeyman pro. He had bounced around the league. The 14 wins were all well and good, but when the pressure came on, this guy was a busted flush and he was discarded. Seattle were the beneficiaries.
I’ve been thinking about both of them in the context of our GAA All Star teams, which have been getting a bit of a hammering over the course of the last few years. The biggest criticism is that they are defined by the biggest games at the end of the season and are full of players from the All-Ireland finalists.
This has led many people to believe they should be picked after the provincial championships, or after the All-Ireland quarter-finals . . . or at some unspecified date when every team will have played a reasonable amount of games but before we are waylaid by the history the winners inevitably get to write.
I’ve always thought that was wrong-headed and Super Bowl LX proved the point pretty decisively. Of course we could pick a football or hurling All Star team before the All-Ireland semi-finals are played, but that would only mean we were picking players that had not yet passed through the highest levels of competition, for better or worse.
The NFL choose their MVP based solely on the regular season, across the 17 games that each team gets to play. It has a certain logic to it. But for all the votes that he received, Drake Maye proved conclusively on Sunday night that he is still deficient. It seems unthinkable that the winner of such a prestigious season-ending personal award could be shown up so brutally in the game that then defines the whole year.
Darnold would not have gotten his moment of redemption if teams only judged him by his regular-season play. The Vikings would have kept him if the only thing that really mattered in assessing a player’s ability was the regular season.
The player who steps up when the need is greatest is lauded because that’s the hardest thing to do in sports. Without bouncing around too many more globally-watched sporting events from the last seven days, the Olympics are decided by those who handle the pressure when it is at its most intense. It’s not about continuous assessment.
The GAA doesn’t have a regular season of eight or 10 games against similar-strength opposition upon which you can benchmark individual performance in a team sport . . . or at least, not one which is genuinely respected by fans, players or coaches. If you describe a GAA player as a solid league player, everyone will know what you mean and everyone will know it’s not much of a compliment.
So it’s about doing it when it matters. Picking an All Star team and not including what happened in the final two or three rounds of the championship, when the fat is truly in the fire, would be self-defeating to an unacceptable degree. If you only played two storming games, but both of them were in front of full houses in Croke Park, in an All-Ireland semi-final and final, then you have done it when it mattered.
If the main takeaway from Maye’s thrilling season is that he’s a big man for the small occasion, he’ll have the rest of his career to prove them wrong. He’ll also know the only way he can change that perception is in the playoffs, long after the MVP voting has closed. That’s hardly fair, but it’s top-level sport.