Culture
NFL coaches pick the Super Bowl winner: Why they think Kansas City has the edge
For the second consecutive season, the Kansas City Chiefs enter the Super Bowl as an underdog. They defeated the favored Philadelphia Eagles last season and will try to knock off the favored San Francisco 49ers on Sunday.
Will it feel like an upset if Kansas City makes it happen? The Chiefs possess the ultimate edge in quarterback Patrick Mahomes, who is healthier this season than last and has played brilliantly through most of the playoffs.
Each year at this time, I ask a collection of NFL coaches which team they are picking to win the Super Bowl and why. Our panel fared pretty well last season, with the first coach correctly picking the Chiefs to win by three.
Four coaches weighed in with predictions this year. We pick up the conversation with a defensive coach’s insights into what bothers 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy, and whether the Chiefs are well-equipped to exploit this specific vulnerability.
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Defensive coach
The Fighting Taylor Swifts are playing better defense than the Niners right now, and that could be the difference. San Francisco has to play better on defense to win. The 49ers are still dangerous and violent, but they are giving up more yards and plays. I think they will play pretty good, but if you ask in my gut, I’d still think Kansas City pulls it out.
Affecting Brock Purdy is one of the biggest keys to this game. The teams that give Purdy problems are the ones that are able to affect him in the pocket. Cleveland was able to do that. Detroit could not affect him that way, but the Chiefs can. They do a really good job of getting their hands up. That’s a big deal against Brock. They can do a really good job of affecting not only the longer throws but the quicker throws at all the different launch angles.
Purdy’s strength is how strong his lower body is. George Kittle’s quote was really funny when he said Purdy looks like one of those little water dragons running across the water. That is exactly what Purdy looks like. His legs are strong as hell. But when you can push the pocket to his front foot, he struggles. It is hard to get there because sometimes they throw it fast, but I think the Chiefs have an ability to do that.
When people get to Purdy’s front foot, the ball will tail and drag or drift. Like the one he threw into the Packer guy’s belly. He couldn’t get full twist out of his hips and it floated. It is easier said than done to affect Purdy in this way. The 49ers know what they are doing, and Purdy is really good, and Kyle is good at calling it, but I think the Chiefs with four (rushers) can do that some of the time.
(Chiefs defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo) is going to pressure and also play his two-high combination coverages. It is hard to play combination coverages when the 49ers get everybody out. They have positionless players. (Christian) McCaffrey is going to be a wideout, Deebo (Samuel) is going to be in the backfield and 44 (Kyle Juszczyk) is going to be everywhere. When you play them in split-safety defense and they can see it and get it out, the matchups can be really good.
The Chiefs do not always tackle well when you get them in space. Steve has done such a good job this year of not letting that happen. In other years, you could isolate their guys. All of Kyle’s guys are 6 feet or 6-1, 215 and can run after contact with great hands and anger. That would be their advantage if they can find ways to get around the D-line and then get those guys going.
I also think San Francisco will attack the edges in the run game, like Kyle did with Atlanta versus New England in the Super Bowl. If you can get around Kansas City’s interior and force guys other than (Justin) Reid to tackle, you can do some things. But you gotta get around their big guys. I think Kyle will find a way to do that, but I trust the Chiefs a little more.
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Inside 49ers-Chiefs Super Bowl matchup: What to watch when the Niners have the ball
Defensive coordinator No. 1
This is going to be a really interesting game because Spags has that defense rolling, and I think it’s going to create problems. They’ll be able to get after Brock Purdy. Spags will come with some good schemes to at least make Purdy think, throw his rhythm off.
The 49ers, that whole team is built off a front-running mentality. When they play with a lead, they just pounce and they’re better, they’re more athletic, their talent shines. When they play from behind, it is usually different. Against Detroit, they came back. I’ll give them credit there, but Detroit royally screwed that up. What happened was not repeatable.
What you have to do with the 49ers is match them early. I would take the ball and try to score. Green Bay did that. I know it is only 7-0 early and doesn’t matter, but if you score early, you are not in response to them.
Mahomes will make the right plays when they need to. He’s been protecting the ball, which he hadn’t been doing the first half of the season as much. People have to honor Rashee Rice now. He has developed. MVS (Marquez Valdes-Scantling) has become more consistent.
The 49ers’ defense has shown throughout the playoffs they’ll get the ball moved on them. They don’t have many answers. You hit their soft spots and don’t let their rushers get going and they don’t get takeaways, you are fine. The coverage system isn’t elaborate. They’ve got one good corner, one safety playing really well.
When you have a guy like Andy Reid over there with Patrick Mahomes, they’re going to find those soft spots. Andy is OK taking 5 (yards) from Travis Kelce on a catch-and-run. It’s just hard to go against Reid and Mahomes.
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Defensive coordinator No. 2
The better team is probably San Francisco, but the Eagles were probably a better team last year, and it came down to Patrick Mahomes.
For San Francisco, so much of it is game flow. It’s not to say that Brock Purdy can’t come from behind. I’m not trying to say that. But I think they are a team that has a much better chance of winning when they play their game, whereas the Chiefs might find a way to win in any type of game a little bit better.
That is what happened in 2019 when those teams played. Kansas City was down two scores, and then all of a sudden, they are up two scores in the fourth quarter. It was unbelievable.
San Francisco came back to beat Green Bay and Detroit, but they were drastically better than those teams, especially Detroit. Detroit is not a team, in my opinion, that can hang with San Francisco. Detroit not being able to put that game away shows how much better of a team San Francisco was.
I could see San Fran’s defense not being dominant against the Chiefs. I don’t know if they are a dominant defense like they were with DeMeco Ryans and Robert Saleh. It doesn’t feel like they are all that. Deep down, I’m saying Chiefs.
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Inside 49ers-Chiefs Super Bowl matchup: What to watch when KC has the ball
The 49ers’ offense is hard to defend because they have skill guys that can create yards after the catch and they have a quarterback who can read defenses very fast and put the ball in a spot accurately. Their dropback game is very timing-based, whereas Kansas City is not that.
Mahomes’ ability to play on or off schedule could be the difference. What makes Mahomes good is that he’s a great off-schedule quarterback who does not have to play off-schedule to be great. I always felt that was the thing with Russell Wilson. When everyone said he was great, I felt that to be a high-level quarterback, you still have to be able to throw it on time. Mahomes can do that.
Purdy’s not bad off-schedule because he’s got some slipperiness to him. He just doesn’t play as much off-time. Mahomes is elite off-time, and I think that’s Kansas City’s edge.
Offensive coach
Kansas City surprisingly with (Isiah) Pacheco runs the ball pretty well, and they’ve been more willing to run it, and I think that does take some pressure off Mahomes. It has served their defense well. That has probably made them a more complete team.
San Francisco gave up 280 yards against Detroit in the first half. Maybe they were surprised by Detroit, but they still haven’t figured out how to slow down the perimeter runs. Pacheco is a slasher, and if you got him on the edge, I think he would be good, despite being more of an inside runner.
Detroit just kept pinning the ends and tossing the ball, and the 49ers’ secondary was late in supporting. I’m sure San Francisco is going to make an adjustment for the crack toss plays. They just have to get someone up in faster support. That is not a major adjustment, but they probably will be reluctant to do it because of Mahomes.
I like Kansas City. I want to like San Francisco, but I think in these games, the quarterback matchup is pretty big, and this is a big separation between these guys.
Christian McCaffrey and Deebo Samuel, those two guys could be enough to overcome that, but I don’t think so in this game.
Final thoughts
If the 49ers win, surely someone associated with their team will claim no one gave them a chance. It won’t be a huge stretch, despite oddsmakers favoring the 49ers, because so many people in and around the game are picking the Chiefs. I took Kansas City by a 24-20 margin in our staff picks. It wasn’t a pick against the 49ers as much as it was a fear of picking against Mahomes. I’ve sided with him in every week of the playoffs. Why stop now?
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(Top photos of Patrick Mahomes and Brock Purdy: Patrick Smith, Kevin Sabitus / Getty Images)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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