7 reasons Super Bowl 53 was one of the most boring Super Bowls ever

The New England Patriots are Super Bowl champions for the sixth time. While the other eight Super Bowls they’d played in since the 2001 season were all pretty thrilling in one way or another, their 13-3 win against the Rams in Super Bowl 53 was horrific television.

What made it so bad? Several things. Let’s take a drab journey together.

1. The Rams offense was painful to watch. Painful.

• Jared Goff threw a pass off C.J. Anderson’s butt at one point. Like, it appeared Goff was trying to throw the ball away under pressure, but he just threw it off Anderson’s ass.
• Goff missed an extremely open Brandin Cooks for what would’ve been a 29-yard touchdown to put the Rams on the board in the third quarter.
• The Rams punted on their first eight drives. The best play of the game for them was arguably Johnny Hekker’s 65-yard punt on the eighth of those. It was the longest punt in Super Bowl history, which is great, but not if it’s the most exciting your team does in three quarters in the biggest game of the year.

• The Rams were averaging 3.2 yards per play when Greg Zuerlein hit a 53-yard field goal to tie the game at three near the end of the third quarter.
• Goff, in particular, just looked lost the whole game. He looked like a QB who absolutely should not have been in the Super Bowl. (No, this isn’t a point about a missed pass interference call in the NFC Championship. It’s a point about him playing badly.)
• Goff threw what amounted to a punt with his arm on second-and-10 at the Patriots’ 27 with four and a half minutes left. He didn’t get hit. He just threw the ball too high in the air, and Stephon Gilmore made one of the easiest picks of his life to preserve a 10-3 lead.

The Rams being so bad with the ball was the chief reason the game was awful.

2. It wasn’t just the Rams, though. The Patriots offense was also bad, though it’s numbers weren’t as spectacularly dry.

Tom Brady didn’t play well. The Patriots didn’t get into the red zone (nor did the Rams) until a 29-yard Rob Gronkowski catch with seven and a half minutes left.

3. Even the winning touchdown was deeply boring.

A 2-yard power run behind a fullback. Can you feel the excitement? And there were seven minutes left, so it’s not like this was some exciting walk-off that prompted a big celebration.

4. The halftime show was really bad.

There were literally hundreds — if not thousands — of better choices than Maroon 5 to headline this massive event in Atlanta, one of the world’s great musical cities. It was never a natural fit. And Maroon 5 was boring, submitting a low-energy performance that didn’t have a single memorable moment other than Big Boi briefly appearing.

It was truly terrible. Maybe the worst halftime show of the modern era. To borrow Maroon 5’s own phrasing, it’s not at all clear that this halftime show will ever be loved.

5. The biggest drama of the whole night was probably figuring out how long the national anthem was, for prop betting purposes.

Atlanta’s own Gladys Knight did the anthem before kickoff. Most sportsbooks had the over/under for bettors at 1 minute 50 seconds, and specified that they’d click their stopwatches at the end of the word “brave,” whenever Knight said it for the first time. She did that after about 1:49, then launched into a second “brave” that took around 10 more seconds. People scrambled to learn whether the anthem would grade as an over or an under. In the end, at least one sportsbook decided to pay out both sides.

To put this into context: I’m arguing that the national anthem was the most exciting part of the Super Bowl. This is a commentary on the Super Bowl as much as the anthem.

6. The Patriots won, which is the most boring thing that can happen in any Super Bowl this century.

That’s the sixth time.

This one was as boring as any other time, and probably even more so. Despite the Patriots doing a weird thing this year where they acted like underdogs, everyone expected this exact result. Media “experts” did. Fans did. Bettors certainly did, with every sportsbook reporting the overwhelming majority of the money was on New England to win. It was Tom Brady against Jared Goff, for crying out as loudly as humanly possible.

And then the Patriots won by 7 in a game with no defining play. There wasn’t even an exciting Brady drive to finish it off. The Gilmore interception had a feeling of finality to it, but more than anything, that was because the Rams’ offense was that putrid. The thing that really sealed the game was a 41-yard field goal to make it 13-3 with 72 seconds left.

7. The Rams missed a meaningless field goal with 8 seconds left, and it was somehow the saddest thing of the whole night.

Like, they kicked a 48-yarder to get back within 7 with seconds left. It was effectively useless, because they didn’t have time to recover an onside kick and then score again. And Zuerlein missed it, just to make things even uglier. It was a fitting capper.