February 7, 2025
Hello from New Orleans! 👋
It’s great to be back in the Crescent City. This place brings up a lot of feelings for me. There’s something about broadcasting my first Super Bowl in the same building where I played my first Super Bowl that is hard to ignore. When you turn the page on a major chapter in your life and you start writing a whole new one, I think there’s a natural inclination to look for little, familiar signs along the way that you’re on the right path, or that you’ve made the right choice.
Does the new thing give you the same kind of butterflies that the old thing did? Are you being similarly challenged? Are you growing? Are you getting better? Are you excited to get up in the morning?
Each of the last twenty-one weeks of the NFL season, I’ve seen the signs that say YES to all of those questions, and this week has been no exception. The storybook symmetry of returning to New Orleans is like a wink from the universe letting me know that I’m right where I need to be.
But the QB in me will always die hard, so when I think about where I need to be this week my mind instinctively turns to game preparation and to mindset management. Obviously, a lot goes into Super Bowl game prep during the week immediately after the conference championship game (I talked about this at length in response to a question from this week’s Verizon Fan Mailbag), but the irony is, more than any other week of the season, you want this week of prep to be as normal as possible, because once you get down to the Super Bowl site early in the second week, that’s when the chaos truly begins (especially in New Orleans) and the demands on your attention increase by a factor of ten.
None of this will catch either of the teams facing off in Super Bowl LIX by surprise. The Chiefs and Eagles have been to the Super Bowl multiple times in the last decade, with many of the same players, coaches, and staff. They know the drill. They will drill it into the young guys and the new guys. And then all of them will have it drilled into them again by the staff before they get on the plane, because coaches are naturally skeptical of players’ ability to remember anything they’re told.
Still, the one thing you can’t account for in all of this, the one thing that preparation cannot mitigate, is that Sunday is going to be the biggest day in the lives of numerous people on both sidelines. It’s a huge moment! This is the first Super Bowl for Saquon Barkley, Jalen Carter, Cooper Dejean, and Mekhi Becton–all impact players for the Eagles. It’s their offensive coordinator Kellen Moore’s first Super Bowl. It’s the first for Xavier Worthy, Kareem Hunt, and Marquise Brown–the source of nearly all of the Chiefs’ speed on offense. It could be Travis Kelce’s last Super Bowl. It could be DeAndre Hopkins’ only Super Bowl.
This isn’t to say that football, or the Super Bowl, are more important than other parts of life. Many of these guys are fathers and husbands, sons and uncles, entrepreneurs and men of faith. And they take these roles and responsibilities seriously. The difference is, they’ve only been dreaming about and working toward one of these things since they were eight years old.
That thing is football.
To paraphrase the great Ron Burgundy, it’s kind of a big deal. And until you’re in it, there’s no way of knowing just how big a deal it is. It’s impossible to predict whether all the guys playing on Sunday will make the most of this moment or if the moment might be too big for some of them. I don’t think it will be, but I don’t know for certain and neither do they. What we do know—every single one of us who’s strapped on shoulder pads and buckled a chinstrap—is that at some point in our playing careers we will each encounter a moment that feels too big for us. We hope it’s not the Super Bowl. (I certainly hope for each one of these guys that it’s not this Super Bowl.) But if it is, how we deal with that will be what matters most.
Our response to adversity and overwhelm is what determines our success or failure in difficult moments—whether it’s playing in a big game, interviewing for a dream job, pitching investors for a new business, or a thousand other things. In my experience, how we respond also predicts our potential for growth from those moments and the likelihood that we will find similar success (or failure) in the other areas of life that maybe we haven’t been dreaming about since we were kids.
For me, that moment was my first AFC Championship game against Pittsburgh in 2002. The first half of that game was a rock fight. Neither team could get anything going. I was getting balls batted down. We didn’t have a run longer than four yards until late in the second quarter. Even when guys were getting open, safeties were smothering them, forcing incompletions. Then, coming out of the two-minute timeout, up 7-3 and driving, I hit Troy Brown over the middle for a big first down right as Lee Flowers got home on a safety blitz and rolled up my ankle. The hit knocked me out for the rest of the game and forced Drew Bledsoe to come in cold off the bench. Like a consummate, unflappable veteran, he finished off the drive with a touchdown and then led us to a 24-17 win that punched our ticket for Super Bowl XXXVI…in New Orleans. My first, Drew’s last.
What I remember most about that game was not the injury or even the final score, but the way my jangly nerves affected my play. My adrenaline was so jacked up, just as one example, that when I reached the top of my drop on pass plays and I stuck my back foot in the ground it was like pulling the trigger on an RPG. There was very little finesse. Every throw beyond the line of scrimmage was an absolute missile. Go back and watch the first half of that game: there are Roman roads with more bend in them than some of my throws. Even on the Flowers hit, it was my nervous energy that did me the greatest disservice, because I resisted going down. As a result, my body ended up twisting and contorting like Apollo Creed in the Drago fight at the beginning of Rocky IV. . You want to scream at him: Go down! Just go down! Any other time, the same kind of hit, I would have done just that: flopped forward, face-planted into the turf, and lived to fight another down. But I was deaf to that inner voice. Nothing was getting through.
I don’t know exactly what it was about this game that was so overwhelming. Maybe it was the terrible towels and all those loud, maniac Steelers fans. Maybe it was the physical environment: the cold air, the hard ground, the bright winter sun, the swirling wind in the south endzone. Maybe it was just the stakes of the whole thing—I told Mr. Kraft when he drafted me that I wouldn’t let him down, and this was my first real shot to live up to my word.
Whatever the reason, I’m incredibly grateful it happened when it did because two weeks later, I found that I was more prepared than I’d ever been to manage what was both the biggest moment of my life to that point—the kickoff of Super Bowl XXXVI—and the craziest experience I’d ever had on a football field.
That’s the thing about the Super Bowl: as a player you may have already experienced a moment that was too big for you; you may have overcome it and learned valuable lessons from it, but there is nothing that can prepare you for the spectacle and the magnitude of the physical environment when that ball gets kicked off at 6:30pm EST. You could keep a human heart alive for a month with the adrenaline pumping through that building as the ball sails through the air for the first time. You will feel the nervous energy all around you, like static electricity waiting for something to ground it. You almost can’t wait to get hit. You need it to jar you out of the waking dream you’re in and remind you that you’re not living inside a movie, you’re playing in a football game…and the clock is ticking.
That’s one of the things that makes this Super Bowl so interesting. Both teams have been here recently. They’re familiar with all the distractions. They know that the first team to get their collective heart rate back under control has the advantage. And they know all the little things they need to do in order to get there, to get in their bag, and to execute. The question is: who gets there first and who does it best?
