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Teams of destiny, underdogs, Davids slaying Goliaths … championship games are ideally contests where neutrals and the uninitiated can find something to invest in.
But Monday morning's (AEDT) Super Bowl showdown between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers will be a tough pill to swallow for anyone except ardent fans of those franchises.
Here's why.
Towing a Traylor into a political scuffle
Take a look at the comments section of any social media post featuring Taylor Swift by the NFL, ESPN, SportsCenter etc, and you'll see a slew of fans bemoaning the focus on the pop superstar instead of the football. (She's dating Kansas City tight end Travis Kelce, in case you hadn't heard.)
Those commenters are sick and tired of the constant focus on Swift during games despite the fact that, according to recent studies, the ball is in play for only 11 minutes of an ostensibly hour-long game.
It's a three-hour broadcast. TV crews need to film something. So when one of the most famous humans in the Western world is sitting there, of course cameras are going to find them in one of the countless periods of nothing happening on the field.
And never mind that Swift, according to the New York Times, is actually on screen for less than 30 seconds — on average — during any given Kansas City NFL game.
In a three-hour broadcast (the Super Bowl will be longer) that's about 0.2 per cent of the screen time.
Alas, those social media posts have created an inflated sense of how much of a focus is on Swift, leading to this bizarre moment when US sports take-merchant Colin Cowherd tapped into a rich vein of Swifties who will go to war for him.
But, like all things nowadays, this gets more insidious when you take a second glance at the political angle.
Swift copped grief from many on the left for staying pretty quiet during the 2016 US election, when the contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton divided the nation.
Swift was one of eight people to receive a 50th Anniversary Milestone Award at the Academy of Country Music Awards (CMAs), and it was believed that anti-Trump statements from someone like her, with a connection to a large chunk of people in the mid-west and south, could have swayed things.
Of course, Trump fans loved that she'd stayed quiet where other celebrities had pretty roundly come out as pro-Clinton, viewing it as a tacit endorsement of their guy.
In the 2020 documentary Miss Americana, Swift said she regretted her silence and dragged Republican Tennessee senator Marsh Blackburn as "Trump in a wig" and regressive.
She also endorsed Joe Biden, and as her fame has only increased in the past four years, Republicans fear she could bring her army of Swifties to bear and genuinely affect election results.
It's gotten so insane, that there are wild conspiracy theories about how the Swift-Kelce relationship is an orchestrated campaign to get Biden re-elected.
"So is Taylor Swift a front for a covert political agenda?" said Fox News star Jesse Watters, whose mother once begged him on his own show to not "tumble into any conspiracy rabbit holes".
"[Watters's show] Primetime obviously has no evidence … but we're curious."
Kelce was also a spokesperson for pharmaceutical giant Pfizer urging Americans to get a second vaccine shot during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Oh, and 49ers defensive end Nick Bosa has declared he's a "big fan" of Trump and that Beyoncé is too political and her music is "complete trash", although he has become less vocal on his stances since being drafted second in the 2019 NFL draft.
So, yeah. Good and normal stuff all around.
Shall we talk about football now?
A real Purdy quarterback
NFL fans are obsessed with who is "elite", particularly when it comes to quarterbacks.
Some teams are carried by their QBs, sometimes a QB is carried by their defence or their coach or their offensive line or their running backs.
The latter are (often derisively) called "system quarterbacks"; players who are succeeding more because of the squad around them, rather than elevating their teammates with pin-point passing or clutch decision making.
And, like everything in sports media, there's often a rush to label players one or another with perceived authority.
San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy has been a nightmare for that particular brand of punditry.
Purdy, the 262nd and last pick in the 2022 draft, was at the heart of the team tied for the second best in the league in this, his sophomore season.
But he's got elite talent around him in the form of tight end George Kittle, running back Christian McCaffrey and Nick Bosa on the defensive end, and there are plenty of suggestions they've done more for the team this season than the man throwing the football.
Here's a pretty good encapsulation of the narrative around Purdy this season:
Then, a week later…
Shout-out to ESPN analyst Ryan Clark, who's been on a real journey with Purdy this year.
The 24-year-old doesn't have the tightest spiral or the biggest arm or the fastest legs, but neither did almost universal GOAT and seven-time Super Bowl champion Tom Brady (who was picked in the sixth round of his draft, by the way).
In a culture where individual players are often judged by their team's success, having someone like Purdy, who might be just pretty good right now, winning a championship at just 24 years of age messes with the perceived narrative that only all-time greats can orchestrate championship runs.
If he wins on Monday, he has more Super Bowl wins than legend Dan Marino. And if, god forbid, he gets another at any point in the intervening 10 or so years that make up an NFL quarterback's career, well suddenly he has one more than four-time MVP Aaron Rodgers.
If Purdy just has a decent career but ekes out a couple of Super Bowl wins he'll be equal fifth among quarterbacks all-time, alongside names like Peyton Manning, Ben Roethlisberger and John Elway, creating an asterisk and caveats that people have to factor in when discussing the greats of the game.
Everyone hates a winner
Seeing the same teams win time and time again is like watching a billionaire's risky investment coming off. Just the rich getting richer.
Monday's game is the NFL equivalent of that, with the Chiefs playing in their fourth Super Bowl from the past five years, while the 49ers are one of the most storied franchises in NFL history.
In saying that, San Francisco hasn't won since 1995.
In fact, of the 15 teams with multiple Super Bowl titles, all but two have won more recently than the Niners, but the team still boasts five Vince Lombardi trophies (third all time) and two Super Bowl appearances in the 2010s. There are lifelong fans of teams who've never seen their side even reach the Super Bowl, much less win one, much less five.
To make matters worse, in the NFC Championship game they sent home the Detroit Lions — a team from an industrial American city that hasn't won anything in the NFL in 57 years, since before the Super Bowl was even a thing.
Meanwhile, the Chiefs in their playoff run sent home the Miami Dolphins, who haven't won since 1974; the Buffalo Bills, who've never won a Super Bowl; and the Baltimore Ravens, who had the best record in the league and whose presence in the season finale would've given us our first look at MVP quarterback Lamar Jackson in the biggest game of the year.
Basically, there were more novel and intriguing storylines available to the NFL script-writers than the Chiefs and Niners returning to the big game.
But hey, this has given us the opportunity to speculate wildly about Taylor Swift's flight patterns and forced right-wingers to potentially root for the liberal stronghold of San Francisco.
So there's still fun to be had if you know where to look.
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