Twenty weeks ago, Joe Burrow sat down in front of a live mic on the and offered up a little more candor than most football players exhibit when they discuss the game many of them have dreamed about since they were children.
The Super Bowl, which his Bengals played in last season, felt like a dinner party. He said the event, in Los Angeles’s SoFi Stadium, didn’t feel like a playoff football game after what he had experienced the weeks before in Tennessee and Kansas City. Somehow, the conversation about neutral-site NFL playoff games has only been ratcheted up since then.
The Eagles and Chiefs qualified to face each other in Super Bowl LVII, and two of the lasting scenes from conference championship Sunday took place on podiums in the middle of packed stadiums. First, Jalen Hurts belted out “Fly, Eagles, Fly” to a stadium full of fans celebrating a second Super Bowl appearance in six seasons. Four hours later and 1,000 miles west, Travis Kelce went full WWE on the mayor of Cincinnati, who had chimed in on social media with other Bengals fans who had taken to calling Arrowhead Stadium “Burrowhead” in honor of their QB.
If the NFL gets its way, those scenes may be numbered.
