Well that weekend…existed.

Let’s start with the bad. Eagles/49ers was a terrible football game, but it at least had the courtesy to give us some stupid nonsense like a ball hitting the wire and the chains breaking again. The 49ers season ended on the third offensive play they had, with Brock Purdy getting his elbow jammed, forcing the 49ers to start Josh Johnson…until Josh Johnson got concussed and the 49ers sent Brock Purdy back in to hand the ball off a few times until it was over.

So the Eagles are in the super bowl after about the least convincing 31-7 win you might ever see. The 49ers defense held up for a little while and frankly, Hurts played pretty off, missing throws and looking unhealthy. But it doesn’t matter when the opposing side is forced to start Josh Johnson and doesn’t have a prayer. CMC did one cool run and that was it. The Eagles could just run the ball and the 49ers slowly got ground into dust. I think it’s impossible to deny the Eagles are a great team, but you can still, even now, make the argument they have yet to be truly tested. They had one of the easiest schedules all year and two losses came with Minshew at QB. The 49ers were going to be the second good defense they faced all year (Dallas was the other) and then the offense got hit with bad voodoo and it was over. So now we have what feels like an excellent team that should win it all next week that still has the potential of just ending up outmatched somehow. I hate it.

At the very least, Chiefs/Bengals was competitive. Not great, but competitive, and unfortunately ended with a wet thud. Chris Jones ripped the Bengals patchwork offensive line, and the Chiefs stumbled around looking questionable. Eventually, the Chiefs got the ball with 40 seconds and then a scramble + sad penalty put them in easy field goal range. Game over. The game continuously threatened to be interesting but never crossed the threshold.

CHAOS OF THE WEEK goes to the officials. Pretty much every single game now is badly officiated. #NFLRIGGED trends at least once per game. The refs and the rulebook have become so incompetent that it has convinced almost every fan the league is rigged to some degree. The Eagles had their second scoring drive kept alive by 3 ticky-tack defense calls on SF. The Chiefs got gifted an extra unfair down because they messed up. The final penalty on Ossai was indeed a penalty and unnecessary, but I’ve always been a bit leery of those out-of-bounds push calls. It’s another case of not being able to stop physics. Ossai wasn’t going to be able to stop himself at that angle, at that speed. I think if Mahomes didn’t fall over it might not have been called. By the letter of the law, it’s a penalty, so it was called fairly. That will not stop Bengals fans from whining about it.

I go on about chaos but there is good chaos and bad chaos. Good chaos, to me, is stuff that makes the game more interesting. Wild fumbles, silly picks, bonkers plays, weird playcalling. Choking away leads. Miracle kicks. Doinks. Storylines that heighten the narratives within the game and outside the game. Bad chaos is what you’d expect: things that make the game less interesting, confusing, or bullshit. Ref chaos is bad chaos, most of the time. A stalled drive kept alive by ticky-tack calls that nobody would have been bothered by if they were left uncalled. Refs wasting our time for 10 minutes to reset the clock after they fucked up. All of this hurts the viewing experience and in the worst cases leads to a certain type of fan screaming RIGGED all the damn time. Incompetent players are good chaos. Incompetent officials are bad chaos. We don’t expect refs to ever be perfect, but some more competence would be fucking nice.

GIANTS CORNER: Well, the Eagles are in the super bowl and so is Kadarius Toney, so that kinda sucks

MOST UNWATCHABLE GAME OF THE WEEK: It feels silly to do these things for playoff weeks with 2 games but I think we can all agree 49ers/Eagles was an unwatchable waste of time after Purdy got hurt.

DISAPPOINTMENT DUCK: The Empire State Building for being a traitorous piece of shit

I like drawing Hurts as Sam the Eagle and I think I’m gonna continue to do so. Definitely gonna do a muppet week theme next season sometime.

Well, here we are. An Andy Reid super bowl. His current team versus his old team. I kinda wish it was still Doug Pederson coaching so we could make student and master jokes. We’ve got two weeks to ruminate on it, and those two weeks will be vital for Patrick Mahomes to heal up. Right now, who do I think wins? Eagles. I did not get “This team is clearly better than the Eagles” vibes watching the Chiefs stumble around against the Bengals. The Eagles have a much, much better line than the Bengals, so Chris Jones is going to have a harder time eating them alive. The Chiefs do have a more competent QB capable of crazy shit, which is a point in the Chiefs favor. The Chiefs can win this game, but I just get the vibes this is the Eagles year. When they came out against the Giants last week, fresh off a lot of late-season questions, and then just obliterated them, it felt like this is the team that’s going all the way. The Chiefs struggled against both the Jaguars and the Bengals, while even the lamer Eagles, facing a broken 49ers offense, still did what good teams do and ground them into dust over time in a blowout.

I do not have any immediate ideas for the final drawings and I’m in no rush. I think they should both involve Andy Reid. I will be happy to take suggestions in the comments.