Super Bowl Pick

I went 50/50 for the conference championship round -- I had the 49ers picked to beat the Eagles and they took a drubbing instead, but the Chiefs did finally beat the Bengals (after losing three in a row, including last season's AFC championship, to them).

More on all that below, but first my Super Bowl pick:

Kansas City Chiefs beat Philadelphia Eagles -- 100%

While I picked half the games correctly this weekend, I lost 100 points in the FiveThirtyEight NFL Forecasting Game because I gave each of my picks 100% chance of winning. So I gained 50 points on the Chiefs win but lost 150 points on the Eagles win. That leaves me with a season total of 327.2 points, in the top 23% of players.

Why did the Eagles beat the 49ers? Well, let's be honest: It was kind of a coin toss anyway. Both teams are great teams.

But third-string 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy -- who won his first five NFL games and took the 49ers two games deep into the playoffs -- got his elbow injured early in the game.

Then their fourth-string quarterback, Josh Johnson, took a nasty hit that immediately put him off the field and into concussion protocol. After briefly flirting with using running back Christian McCaffrey as their fifth-string quarterback, they put Purdy back in (for one thing, McCaffrey is their principal non-quarterback weapon), but damn ... with those handicaps, it's a miracle that the final score was "only" 31-7. And it really should have been 24-7. The Eagles were given the ball by terrible officiating and a complete bullshit roughing the kicker call on San Francisco.

Speaking of bad officiating, referees took a touchdown away from the Chiefs on a bad call that got challenged and affirmed despite being obviously and indisputably incorrect, then decided to treat an incomplete Patrick Mahomes pass as a fumble, giving the ball to the Bengals. That put the Chiefs in the position of having to win with a last-minute field goal (which is how the Chiefs/Bengals games generally seem to go regardless of who wins).

If they hadn't been robbed of that touchdown and settled for a field goal, they'd have ceteris paribus been up by four points before that field goal, and who knows what might have happened if the refs hadn't faked a fumble as well? And that field goal would have been an iffy thing if not for an unnecessary roughness foul by the Bengals on the last Chiefs drive, which got them 15 yards closer.

Which is not to say that the Bengals played poorly. They played an excellent game. It may have been the venue -- Arrowhead stadium, where crowd noise accounted for at least one delay of game penalty when the Bengals couldn't hear the play call -- that made the difference.

I don't know if I will bother playing this forecasting game, or following NFL football, next year. I'm undecided. One major factor in my football enthusiasm has been that my brother, Mike, was all about football, and following it closely gave me many opportunities to get on the phone and shoot the shit with him. As I've mentioned here, he died a week ago last Wednesday. I've continued watching because he was a king-hell Chiefs fan and I'd like to see a new set of Chiefs Super Bowl rings as part of, in my mind, his memorial. I guess we'll see.