The Kansas City Chiefs defeated the Buffalo Bills in the AFC Championship Game to advance to face the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl LIX.
The discourse surrounding their win remains tainted by bad-faith arguments regarding NFL officiating bias after two “controversial” calls in the AFC title game. One was a spot on a Buffalo fourth-down stop by Kansas City, and the other was a catch from Xavier Worthy, which was upheld upon replay review. The explanation for both calls is fairly simplistic and ultimately comes down to what replay can and can’t overturn. They need indisputable video evidence to overturn any ruling on the field. Alas, the damage was already done after the AFC divisional round, and national media outlets like ESPN are pushing a false narrative.
Speaking on the Rich Eisen Show, three-time Super Bowl champion and former New England Patriots wide receiver Julian Edelman addressed the narrative and defended the Chiefs. He heard the same malarkey about a “friendly whistle” regarding his quarterback, Tom Brady.
“It’s apparent when you’re on top, everyone wants to try to bring you down,” Edelman said. “It’s a bunch of baloney that the league is helping the Kansas City Chiefs. If you’ve got a problem with it, go beat them, OK? The refs aren’t involved when you throw interceptions, when you fumble the ball, when you jump offsides, when you don’t convert third down or fourth down, or third and fourth down for short, four times — they can’t control that. Like, if you want to beat them, go beat them. Don’t talk about it. Be about it. I’m so sick and tired of hearing people say that about the Chiefs.”
Edelman continued, explaining that teams are coached up on the officiating crews they get every week. They know where they can and can’t get away with certain things, depending on who is or isn’t calling the game. It’s a part of the mental aspect where Kansas City is simply better than everyone else.
“He’s the face of the league, OK? If it’s close, and you have to think about it, just stop,” he continued. “Okay, you got to do business as business is being done with the referees. We all have scouting reports on each ref crew on how they like to throw the game. You learn about it during that in the first part of that game. If they’re calling it tight, you tighten back. If they’re not, you just hope that they’re consistent throughout the whole thing, which they usually are. And yes, they miss calls, and they do these things, and there are bad calls here and there, but you know, there’s a handful of roughing the passers for guys that don’t even have a resume that you looked at this year that got the call. If it’s close, leave it alone. Yeah, they’ll probably have to address that sideline awareness stuff. But you know these whole graphics about, oh, they don’t get the call, and they don’t get the call. They don’t give the call to them because they’re coached better.”
Edelman heard his fair share of it when he was with the Patriots through a good portion of their success. People want to discredit what you’ve accomplished, but it comes down to being the better-coached football team than your opponent in the most crucial moments.
“They’re situationally tight,” Edelman said of the Chiefs. “You watch them on third down. You can watch them in the red area. You know, a lot of these games, when you get to this time of the year, they’re not won by the team that makes the most plays. Yeah, that’s part of it. It’s usually the team. Well, it’s always the team that makes the least amount of mistakes, and that’s what they do. They play mistake-free, they play situationally tight, and they lull you to sleep, and then they beat you when they need to. And that’s stuff that we used to do. So you know, it’s been fun to watch them because that’s how football is supposed to look. A lot of these teams are sloppy penalties, turnovers, abandoning their run game, when things get tough, trying to go for two-point conversions in the second quarter — that has you beat. That’s you. That ain’t them. That’s you.”
Julian Edelman predicts Eagles will need to play the perfect game against the Chiefs in Super Bowl LIX
So, how exactly does this all come together when the Chiefs and Eagles face off in the Super Bowl? What will Philly need to do to be able to unseat the reigning back-to-back Super Bowl champions? According to Edelman, they’ll need nothing short of a perfect game. He pointed specifically to Jalen Hurts’ big mistake against Kansas City in Super Bowl LVII as proof of it.
“I think they got to do what got them to this point in the season,” Edelman said of the Eagles. “They’re going to have to establish a run. It’s very apparent that when that run game goes, it opens up everything else. It’s also apparent that their dropback pass game for Philadelphia isn’t where it should be for a Super Bowl-winning team, but when you have a guy like, say, Saquon Barkley, who’s got nine touchdowns in this playoff run. Like, that’s an X-factor. They’re going to have to play penalty-free. They can’t turn the ball over. You know, when we talk about the last time these two teams played in the Super Bowl, ‘Jalen Hurts had such a great game.’ I mean, he fumbled the ball, and they scored on that. You can’t go in and think you’re gonna beat the champs, who are a historically mistake-free team right now, thinking you can go out and turn the ball over and squint up when things get tough. Because they’re not going to they’re used to being uncomfortable.
“I think that the Eagles are gonna have to play a perfect game.”
