The Los Angeles Rams defeated Cincinnati 23:20

When analogies are used on American football, they are usually about chess or the gladiatorial spectacle of ancient Rome. Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow prepared for the Super Bowl with virtual chess games on Sunday. He only lost four out of ten games. But he couldn’t win the Super Bowl, that gigantic, kitschy, exaggerated spectacle.

The Los Angeles Rams won, 11:20, and after the confetti rained down on Inglewood’s $5 billion SoFi Stadium, their coach Sean McVay didn’t talk about gladiators or chess. But of poetry.

“We always talk about being the best when it counts. That offense found a way and Aaron Donald could make the difference on defense, that’s poetry, man.” Now it’s hard to imagine Rilke writing a homage to American football. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And for the Rams, Sunday’s events had an allure of beguiling grace.

After no one in the history of the Super Bowl had been granted the privilege of crowning themselves in their own stadium until the triumph of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers around Tom Brady in 2021, a team succeeded on Sunday with the Rams for the second year in a row. It was a logical victory – not only because Los Angeles was the clear favorite.

Strong top dogs from the NBA and MLB

The Rams returned to Los Angeles in 2016 after more than two decades in exile from St. Louis. It was an expensive move, costing $550 million in relocation fees to the NFL and $790 million to settle a lawsuit filed by the city of St. Louis out of court. And he was not without risk: Certainly, there was no NFL team in Los Angeles at the time, which was interesting from a market point of view.

But powerful top dogs still existed: the basketball players of the Los Angeles Lakers, one of the proudest and most traditional sports organizations in North America, who are currently trying to preserve Kobe Bryant’s legacy with megastar LeBron James. And the Dodgers baseball team, a team inextricably linked to pop culture. They are iconic brands, franchises with global appeal.

It will be a while before worship for the Rams penetrates even a comparable aura. Super Bowl triumph or not: The affection of entire generations has to develop first. That was also evident on Sunday: half of the stadium was filled with Bengals fans, and the scenery had little in common with a classic home game for the hosts.

Sean McVay and the reputation as an offensive mastermind

In the short time since returning to Southern California, the Rams have done a lot right. After a disappointing comeback season, they traded hapless coach Jeff Fisher in 2017. And hired the youngest coach in the league, Sean McVay, who was 30 at the time. McVay has earned a reputation as an offensive mastermind – his assistant coaches are regularly poached, and Super Bowl adversary Cincinnati is also headed by a former McVay assistant, Zac Taylor. The Los Angeles Chargers, the Green Bay Packers and the Minnesota Vikings also rely on previous McVay copains.

But in the most important game of his career for a long time, the 2019 Super Bowl, McVay was coached by the old master Bill Belichick according to all the rules of the art. The Rams lost 3:13 to the New England Patriots, their offense was a fiasco, nothing worked. McVay has often emphasized recently that he learned a lot from the shame of that time. On Sunday he impressively completed his rehabilitation process and became the youngest coach in history to win the Super Bowl.

The coach has also benefited from the Rams positioning themselves in the player market as the most aggressive team in the NFL during his era. The Rams have completed 21 barter transactions in McVay’s five years, a league high, and they are pursuing a decidedly different strategy than most of the competition. This guards draft rights as a rule like the treasure in the silver lake. The Rams, on the other hand, have no qualms trading those picks for established players.

General manager Les Snead has put together an impressive star ensemble for McVay, and since the end of last season alone the Rams have added three really big names to their collective with quarterback Matthew Stafford, Odell Beckham Jr. and Von Miller. It’s a strategy that’s not without risk – at some point the Rams will have to pay for it because their roster will be too old and too expensive. But Sunday’s triumph makes up for all of tomorrow’s worries – the plan worked out spectacularly.

Satisfaction for quarterback Stafford

What is only the second Super Bowl triumph in the team’s history — the first dated back in 1999 and was accomplished while the rebranded team was in St. Louis — is also a huge source of satisfaction for 34-year-old playmaker Matthew Stafford. Almost a year ago, the Rams got him for a number of valuable draft rights from Detroit, where he produced excellent statistics but didn’t win a single playoff game in more than ten years. The question of whether this was due to Stafford or the Lions had sparked a kind of scholarly dispute. The “Detroit Free Press” said goodbye to him in 2021 with the unforgiving words that he was “part of the problem”.

Now, in his 13th season in the league, the quarterback has clinched the title on the first try with the Rams. There can’t be a clearer statement. Stafford scored the crucial points for the Rams with just under a minute and a half to go when he found his favorite pass receiver, Cooper Kupp, in the end zone. The touchdown put the Rams in the lead in extremis, shortly afterwards the again disruptive, for the Bengals hardly to be contained Aaron Donald and his fellow defenders ensured the victory.

The defeat had something bitter for the adversary Cincinnati, the Bengals were equal to the favorites. Phenomenon Joe Burrow, this young quarterback, exciting and so confident, can take comfort in the fact that the future is his.

The future the Rams have been selling so consistently for a while.