What the Seahawks Did to Win the Super Bowl
The Super Bowl has become a game of such monumental excess that it poses a test within a test: Which NFL team can screen out the lavish absurdities, the gorging on celebrity and commerce, the insipid questions about favorite flavors and foods, and avoid becoming warped and overwearied before the ball is even kicked off? This year, that team was the Seattle Seahawks, a defensive-minded, unshowy bunch who had no use for indulgences as they defeated the New England Patriots, 29–13.
The Seattle quarterback Sam Darnold, who broke the game open in the fourth quarter with a 16-yard scoring pass to A. J. Barner to bring the lead to 19–0, is a onetime bust, playing on his fourth team in four years. Six of his fellow starters on the 53-man squad had been considered so untalented in high school that the national ranking service Rivals had not even bothered rating them. Twenty members of the team were undrafted free agents, eight of whom signed just this season. They were players accustomed to digging success “out of the mud,” as the receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba told me last week—an attitude that helped them ignore the spectacle around them.
The cheapest seat in Santa Clara, California’s, Levi Stadium was listed on StubHub for more than $4,000. VIPs in the luxury suites were offered a specially concocted $180 LX Hammer Burger, a grotesquerie of beef shank, mirepoix demi-glace, and blue-cheese fondue poured over brioche buns, with an enormous steak bone sticking out of the top. Was the bone a souvenir, to be taken home and dried on the mantel? Or was it to be fed to the hounds at the hearth? Or maybe it was meant to be tossed in the air like a boomerang at the military jets that did the pregame flyover, led by the enormous B-1 Lancer, a supersonic bomber aptly nicknamed “The Bone.” Lighter fare included $40 Dungeness-crab nachos layered over hand-cut potato chips. A can of domestic beer, to wash it down, cost $17.50.
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For the week leading up to the game, the San Francisco Bay Area was overlit, ear-splitting, and teeming with corporate pop-ups, including an Abercrombie & Fitch fashion show and a concert featuring Green Day and Counting Crows at Pier 29. A team had to have “stamina” to deal with it, find a way to play well amid the scale and spectacle, the Patriots’ coach, Mike Vrabel, said in a press conference after the game, watery-eyed with disappointment. Smith-Njigba estimated that the number of his family and friends who came to town and needed tickets was “in the teens.” At the Intercontinental Hotel in San Francisco, fleets of black Escalades lined the block to pick up “brand ambassadors” who’d come to town to hawk Bud Light, State Farm, UberEats. A promotional robot-dog was stationed by the front door, immobile yet menacing, stopping pedestrians in their tracks. Cardi B, said to be dating Stefon Diggs, a Patriots receiver, visited the Intercontinental on Saturday and encountered a different robot—this one a full humanoid—at the door. She gave it a lap dance in front of passersby, who captured the scene with cellphones as the robot accidentally toppled onto her.
Every day the press corps descended on both teams with pestering questions, some of which were obvious plants to promote products. “What’s your favorite color of Gatorade?” someone asked the Patriots’ 23-year-old quarterback, Drake Maye, a kid-faced North Carolinian who was finishing only his second year in the NFL. He replied that he liked “the purple one.” Somebody else asked him if he liked dorilocos, a Mexican street food. Maye asked, “What’s those? Is it spicy? I like Doritos.”
It must have all been a little overwhelming for an adored phenom such as Maye, who would have been the youngest man ever to win a Super Bowl, had he not given up two interceptions and been sacked six times by a tremendous Seahawks defense that nicknamed itself “The Dark Side.” Maye has attained folk-hero status in Boston for his combination of on-field flair and off-field charm, as has his wife and middle-school sweetheart, Ann Michael, nicknamed the “Queen of the North.” Her TikTok cooking videos have attracted hundreds of thousands of viewers and are high comedy for their contrast with the previous football couple to rule New England, the legendarily clean-eating, well-clad Tom Brady and his beauteous supermodel ex-wife, Gisele Bundchen. Ann Michael makes spaghetti with jarred sauce and appears on camera with a shiny forehead and damp hair. Her game-day bean-dip recipe with Bush’s Baked Beans includes half a cup of Coca-Cola; the video for it got 1.5 million views. When she baked jalapeño-and-cheddar sourdough bread, she said, “Okay. Okay. It’s a little dense.” One viewer wrote in response, “Gisele never believed in letting us eat any bread.”
Years before he joined the Seahawks, Darnold had been that popular—for a minute. Drafted out of the University of Southern California by the New York Jets, in 2018, he was considered the future of the franchise. Dealing with the hectoring racket of New York fans may well have prepared him to withstand the noise of the Super Bowl. He threw an interception on the first play of his career. As he struggled through predictable rookie unevenness and adjustments, the New York press and fans were merciless. One tabloid called Darnold “an anxiety-riddled, shell-shocked, panic-stricken mess.” The Jets’ management lost faith in him too quickly, and he was traded to the Carolina Panthers in 2021, then went to the Minnesota Vikings, then to the San Francisco 49ers, before landing in Seattle.
The son of a medical-gas plumber who worked night shifts, Darnold just kept laboring at his craft. “I learned,” he told reporters last week. “I learned a ton from the mistakes that I made early on in my career.” By the end of this season, he was so respected by the Seahawks for his pure doggedness, he was practically their mascot. “He’s a really cool case study,” the Seahawks’ offensive coordinator, Klint Kubiak, told me. In the team’s final press conference before the game, the receiver Cooper Kupp wore an I Love Sam Darnold T-shirt. “Find me another player, another quarterback specifically, who’s had the start of a career like he has,” Kupp said. “To be counted out like he’s had, and be able to come back and do what he has done.”
Darnold was emblematic of a team perspective that “when bad things happen, good things happen, you gotta use that to be a world champ,” Smith-Njigba said to reporters after the game. “You gotta believe you’re a world champ before you’re a world champ.” As the Seahawks hoisted the trophy on the field, amid the gigantism and confetti cannons and surfeit on display, a sense of perspective seemed to have been restored.