Kurtenbach: In the land of disruption, the NFL offers a fittingly chaotic Super Bowl

Innovation: It’s the lifeblood of our region. From the digital creations that power our modern world to the bridges that span these waters, the Bay Area has always been the American cradle of invention.

And, in turn, reinvention.

This is a place where the status quo is not merely challenged; it is dismantled and rebuilt into something faster, smarter, and more enduring.

And how fitting it is that on this stage — amid the ghosts of the Gold Rush and the titans of technology — we find two franchises that have arrived here not by standing still, but by embracing the spirit of change.

Welcome to Super Bowl 60.

Sunday night, the air will be thick with the weight of history yet charged with the electricity of the unexpected. We have seen this Big Game 59 times now, a diamond jubilee for the National Football League, a singular cultural phenomenon in this rapidly changing world. And yet for this game, the story feels as fresh as a Pacific breeze.

Welcome back to the big stage, the New England Patriots. For two decades, they were the monolith, the inevitable force of winter.

But empires fall, and dynasties crumble.

At least they are supposed to.

Enter Drake Maye, football’s baby-faced assassin, arriving in the region Steph Curry made his. A young gun with an arm like a cannon and the poise of a veteran, he’s looking to reach the summit in only his second season.

He steps onto this field seeking to reaffirm the terrifying excellence of a franchise that has become the standard bearer of the modern era.

In this new millennium, the Patriots have appeared in 40 percent of all Super Bowls played. It’s a statistic that defies logic, a dominance that runs counter to the salary cap and the league’s supposed mandate of parity.

They’re back in this game so soon after the Tom Brady era ended, it’s as if they never really left.

Or, as the Grateful Dead once warned us: “See here how everything. Lead up to this day. And it’s just like any other day that’s ever been.”

Guiding Maye is coach Mike Vrabel, the master motivator who returned to the Northeast not just as a former Patriots player, but as a savior. In a single season, he has pulled this team from the wilderness, channeling the dark, disciplined lessons of the master, Bill Belichick, while infusing the locker room with his own fiery brand of accountability. He is the bridge between the glory of the past and the promise of the future that is one win away from starting with a championship.

But across the field, a different kind of reinvention has taken hold. One with a decidedly more West Coast flair.

The Seattle Seahawks have returned to the Super Bowl after 11 years, not with the boisterous noise of their prior iteration, but with a quiet, suffocating intensity that leaves the rest of football both intensely curious and stubbornly skeptical.

They are led by quarterback Sam Darnold — a man whose career has been a winding road of rejection and resilience. New Jersey, Carolina, Minnesota, and yes, a gap year of reinvention in San Francisco.
But all of those teams saw a ceiling.

He, however, saw a horizon.

Now on his fifth team, Darnold stands on the verge of a redemption that no pundit, no scout and certainly no critic thought possible. He is the journeyman who refused to stop walking, looking to win the ultimate prize and the universal, indelible respect that comes with it.

And he is backed by the mastermind of chaos, Seahawks head coach Mike Macdonald.

Soft-spoken, unassuming, yet tactically ruthless, Macdonald has not merely rebuilt the famed “Legion of Boom” defense in America’s upper left — he has evolved it. In constructing a defense predicated on positional versatility and brute strength, he enters Sunday’s game with a unit that shifts and morphs like the fog rolling over the Marin Headlands. And it’s equally as difficult to navigate through.

It is a rarely acknowledged truth in the lead-up to this final game of the 2025 NFL season, but if the Seahawks triumph Sunday, this defense will be cemented in NFL history as one of the greatest ever assembled.

And so here we are. The Prodigy versus The Journeyman. The Heir to the Hood versus The Architect of Chaos. And those are just the headliners.

In a region defined by those who dare to buck convention, two teams will try to prove that their vision of the future is the correct one.

The present is 60 minutes of fury on the grass in Santa Clara.

The prize? It’s not a trophy. It’s football immortality.