Whether you like it or not, the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks are going to Super Bowl LX. They are two entirely different teams who took two entirely different paths, but they both ended up in the same spot.
So will it be the best Super Bowl? Probably not, and that stinks… but that’s a problem for future us. Let’s focus on the football we just watched and celebrate the last full-ish day of football that we’ll have until September. These are the weekly awards from the NFC and AFC Championship games.
Puppy Bowl of the Week: Pats/Broncos
The Puppy Bowl is a few hours before the Super Bowl on some channel (Discovery, maybe?), and it’s just there to be aesthetically pleasing. No one cares about it, but turn off the volume and watch it because it looks nice.
That’s exactly what the Patriots and Broncos game was.
No one cared about it: If the Broncos won, that would’ve meant Sean Payton would go to a Super Bowl with a backup quarterback. If there’s one thing that could make Sean Payton more insufferable and cocky, it would be him making it to the Super Bowl with Jarrett Stidham… that’s not what happened.
Instead, the Patriots won, and now we have to deal with everything (and everyone) that comes with that for the next couple of weeks. It stinks.
You turn off the volume: This was a Jim Nance and Tony Romo game. Everyone loves Jim Nance… not a whole lot of people love Tony Romo. As a matter of fact, I’d venture to say the majority of people are pretty tired of his whole shtick.
Watch it because it looks nice: Snow football can be the best football. If the teams are respectable and can change their game plan to keep moving the ball despite the snow, games can become all-time classics (like the Eagles/Rams in the Divisional round last season).
The Patriots and the Broncos are not respectable teams. The game started slowly, kept going slowly, and then it started snowing… and the game somehow hit even more of a screeching halt.
However, it looked awesome. So, like the Puppy Bowl, it was worth watching.
Super Bowl of the Week: Seahawks/Rams
It’s really cool when the Super Bowl is the best game of the season. In 2023, the Super Bowl went to overtime. In 2022, it came down to the Chiefs' last drive. In 2021, the Bengals had a chance to tie it with less than a minute less in the game. That was a very solid three-year stretch of great Super Bowls.
Last year, the Super Bowl wasn’t exactly the best football game unless you were an Eagles fan (Go Birds).
You never want to go into a Super Bowl with one of the main story lines being ‘This game is going to be a reality check for ____ team.’ And wouldn’t you know it? This Super Bowl is looking like it’s going to be a reality check for the Patriots.
So, if you pair the lack of juice for the Super Bowl and the NFC Championship having a Puppy Bowl before it, the NFC Championship game was the Super Bowl, all but in name… which is really good because it was an awesome football game.
It seems fair to say that the NFC Championship game is going to be the last good game of the season. We had each team trading offensive punches for the first three quarters of the game (there were 28 points scored in the third quarter), which was a lot of fun to watch. And then when it came to ‘do-or-die’ time in the fourth quarter, both defenses buckled up.
That’s how I’m choosing to remember the end of the 2025 season. The Super Bowl will be purely ceremonial (unless it ends up being awesome, in which case I’ll deny that this was ever written).
Mono Survivor of the Week (Year, maybe Ever?): Sam Darnold
In 2019, Sam Darnold got mononucleosis and missed three games. If it wasn’t for ESPN’s graphic about it, we’d probably have forgotten by now.
Didn't get to watch last night's game so just now seeing how hilarious this graphic was pic.twitter.com/bIx3VsifbU
— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) September 17, 2019
But now Sam Darnold is going to the Super Bowl. That begs the question: If Sam Darnold wins the Super Bowl, is he the most prolific athlete to come back from the smoochin’ disease?
My baseline for this is very basic: I searched ‘Famous athletes who had mono.’ There were five results: Darnold, Roger Federer (tennis), Andy Roddick (tennis), Anna Shcherbakova (Olympic Figure Skater), Jack Quinn (NHL), and Mitch Marner (NHL).
Roddick was a really good tennis player, but after his bout with mono in 2020, he never won any championships.
Shcherbakova won a gold medal in the 2022 Olympics, so if she can come back this year and win another, she’ll take the crown.
Quinn and Marner aren’t really in the conversation because they didn’t win anything. However, Marner did play in the playoffs with mono, so he’s an honorable mention.
That leaves Federer. He got mono in 2008, and he won 10 championships afterward. That’s a pretty good post-mono performance.
If Darnold wins the Super Bowl and is the Super Bowl MVP, he’ll usurp the throne from Federer. That seems fair.
Predictable performance of the Week: Broncos
If you watched any of the pregame stuff about the Pats and Broncos game, you saw people yelling about how Jarrett Stidham had a chance to move the ball on the Patriots' defense. The crux of that argument was about how Sean Payton would be able to call plays to make his life easier. That was true for about five minutes.
Payton’s opening script is almost always good; that’s been a thing for him for a very long time. If there was a part of this game where Stidham was going to look good, it would’ve been in the Broncos' first couple of drives… which is exactly what happened.
On the first drive, the Broncos went run, run, pass, and the drive didn’t stand a chance. On the second drive, he hit Marvin Mims Jr. for a monster 52-yard pass and then Courtland Sutton for a six-yard touchdown pass. It looked really good, and that was just about it.
He finished the game 17-of-31 for 133 yards, a touchdown, and an interception. That means that 40 percent of his passing yards came on one play. Everything else was stinky. There wasn’t a lot of Payton letting him cut loose and sling it across the yard or easy completions that build confidence.
It was a good second drive, and then Stidham got overwhelmed. It’s exactly what we all expected when a backup quarterback, who has made four total starts in his six-year career, had to play in an AFC Championship game. Nothing more, and nothing less.
Snoop Huntley of the Week: Shedeur Sanders
With Drake Maye making it to the Super Bowl, that left an opening at quarterback on the AFC Pro Bowl team. Who would take that? Joe Burrow? Trevor Lawrence? Lamar Jackson? No, those guys would make too much sense.
Shedeur Sanders ended up being the Pro Bowl alternate. Sanders, the Browns’ quarterback who threw for 1,400 yards, seven touchdowns, and 11 interceptions… that guy is a Pro Bowler.
Sources: #Browns QB Shedeur Sanders has been added to the Pro Bowl roster as a replacement.
— Jordan Schultz (@Schultz_Report) January 26, 2026
Sanders is the first 5th-round rookie to make a Pro Bowl since Puka Nacua. pic.twitter.com/RTDy0J9l1f
Now, this isn’t as bad as the 2022 Pro Bowl when Snoop Huntley was an alternate, even though he only played in six games, where he threw a total of two touchdowns and three interceptions.
You could argue that Sanders was both better and worse than Huntley, and you’d be right.
Instead of complaining about how the Pro Bowl doesn’t mean anything anymore, just buy into it. Instead of getting frustrated that a bad quarterback gets a Pro Bowl nod on his Pro Football Reference page, just accept that it’s preposterous and laugh at it.