There are a lot of pieces here, actually, not all of which are directly made clear by my comment, so I'll try to make them clearer. By doing that, I'm going to draw out the explanation and highlight a bunch of assumptions - making the warrants for what I have to say explicit, as it were - so I apologize about the wall of text.
One team, the LA Rams, is in the Super Bowl because they won a game against my favorite team, the New Orleans Saints, that turned largely on the most egregious uncalled penalty in the history of the NFL playoffs. This is not a particularly large amount of hyperbole; most NFL writers and fans seem to also agree and the primary narrative arising from the game is that the refs screwed up and it threw the game. So I was already a salt mine in time for the second game of the night.
That game pitted the New England Patriots, a team that has been at the top of the sport for 18 years, against the Kansas City Chiefs, a team that has not been at the top of the sport for 18 years and which in fact has won zero titles in the Super Bowl era. The Chiefs are fun to watch and they have an outstanding rookie quarterback with a cannon arm and a ton of personality. It's been fun to see Chiefs fans happy lately, which is not a thing you get to see very often. On the other side of the ledger, the Patriots are, obviously, a good team, but their fanbase is arguably the worst and most obnoxious in American sports, and they gained notoriety over the last few years because some of their players, staff, and owners have close relationships with Donald Trump (who, as usual, ruins everything) and, bizarrely, Vladimir Putin. The Pats have been connected to cheating and spying scandals to varying degrees of culpability. They're simply the most hateable team in the country. If you're not a New England fan, you're really not a New England fan.
They have also appeared in two straight Super Bowls (now three) and four of the last seven. So a big chunk of that comment was about Patriots fatigue.
Anyway, the Pats led for most of the game before the Chiefs' rookie quarterback led them storming back for the tie at the end of regulation by racking up 24 fourth-quarter points. Then, the NFL's overtime rules, which have sucked for a long time and probably will continue to suck even if changed, allowed the Patriots, once they won the coin toss, to march down the field and score to win the game without once putting the ball in the Chiefs offense's hands. This was a predictable and legal outcome; nobody got jobbed like in the Saints-Rams game. But it was a frustrating and lame outcome all the same.
Another big chunk of it was just sportscaster fatigue. It is very easy to make fun of the stupid memes that color commentators bring up during games. They love to talk about football players who played basketball in college, because it gives them a "reason" to be good at jumping and catching balls thrown extremely high. They love to cite absurd statistics in hyperspecific situations that are not predictive in any way, imply that they are predictive, but fail to give any logical reason why they would be.
Most obviously, in this situation, they love to bring up the history of the game. I guarantee you that the shadow of the 2002 Super Bowl will be long over this game. It won't be because of the players. Pretty much the only two people on the 2018-19 Patriots who also went to the 2002 Super Bowl are the head coach and the quarterback; none of the Rams are in that situation. The similarity is the fans - and oh they will stroke Pats fans' egos by rerunning footage and doing interviews and exhausting all possible avenues of comparison. I was trained as a historian. I love contextualizing things and making this past meaningful. But this isn't meaningful. It's just a bukkake-like spray of semi-relevant information, none of which will actually affect or condition the outcome on the field. Besides, those are bad memories for me, and I don't want to relive them.
I don't necessarily think that the outcome of the game will be the same. I hope the Rams win and will be pleased if that happens. Watching the game, though, will be uncomfortable. My friends and I have better ways to enjoy ourselves with alcohol and snacks than any of this.
Normally, again, I could accomplish this by saying to a fellow American, "the Saints got jobbed and the Pats are the worst, I'm not watching this year". But not all of the assumptions make sense if you're not a fan, so here's the explanation.
