Eagles and Over is way to go

Richard Witt predicts the winner of Sunday’s Super Bowl between the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs:

Eagles -1.5 over Chiefs, Over 50.5

We find it hard to stray too much away from the fundamentals of the Chiefs-Eagles matchup. We’re more comfortable where we stand than we were just a few days ago, but our basic perspective has not radically changed.

Do we respect Patrick Mahomes and the monstrous, versatile Kansas City offense, even against a defense as good as Philadelphia’s? For sure, but to not respect the defensive proposition in a game this significant would be folly, unless multiple significant injuries come into play in short order.

We continue to suspect the offenses will maintain a meaningful edge versus the defenses they’ll be facing. The two worthies you’d expect to garner the bulk of the MVP attention (those top-drawer quarterbacks) continue to draw numerous hearts and eyeballs. It’s a challenge to tear your attention away from Mahomes and the Eagles’ Jalen Hurts.

The four most recent Supes have trended toward more moderate Over/Under ledgers, with the last quartet featuring 43, 40, 51 and 16 points. The last two scoring explosions came when the Eagles made the most of their opportunities and took out the Patriots, 41-33, in the Super Bowl LII overtime hard-knocker.

The Chiefs are blessed with a multiplicity of talented athletes on both sides of the ball. Even more impressively, they displayed an uncanny improvement advantage during the course of the season, though much of that could be attributed to their facing lesser quarterback talent during the final third of the campaign.

We’ll also readily agree that the Chiefs have proven themselves to be effective in varying defensive sets — not the least of which is their broad effectiveness when playing many varieties of zone defense, which has posed the Eagles’ offensive talent sustained difficulties. And when you’re talking about Hurts, you’re talking about a quarterback who has been less than bulletproof when attempting to make optimal throws to his right, causing him considerable discomfort on multiple occasions.

At first glance, I was considerably optimistic and bullish about the Eagles in this affair — especially if they came to the game relatively healthy, with most of the major players in reasonably good form and optimistic about the likely outcome from their sides’ perspective.

I currently believe that I was simply too optimistic about the level of stalwartness of the Eagles’ defense during my early research, especially when you consider the degree of schedule (not all that tough, boys and girls) the Eagles found themselves coming up against during the course of the long, hard season.

Bottom-lining this, I can’t deny that the Eagles could turn out to be excruciatingly vulnerable to the size, type and style of offense that the Chiefs are likely to pitch at them for well over three hours on national television.

I can still envision the Eagles winning, but they’re going to have to get off to that snappy start that many of the optimists expected they will generate. When they have wrested early command, they have been the devil to beat, but when many things don’t quite go precisely as they’d like, they’re not quite the locks to overcome all obstacles we originally envisioned.

Last week: 1-1
Season: 124-118-3.