The fundamental dichotomy between the NFL as a monocultural juggernaut and the NFL as it is actually experienced by its most dedicated customers can perhaps be best summed up by the lunatics that are Philadelphia Eagles fans. You might have enjoyed a casual night out eating nachos at your Super Bowl party. Meanwhile, these guys were painting their faces green, screaming into a mirror, clawing out their eyeballs and gnawing off their own hands. You merely adopted the dark. They are born in it.
What are Eagles fans like? Well. The last time they won the Super Bowl, during the championship parade, an Eagles fan, egged on by his fellow green-clad crazies, literally picked up a piece of horse manure, put it in his mouth, and started chewing. The crowd exploded in joy. I doubt the man regrets it one bit. I wonder what he’ll chow down on this time.
Super Bowl LIX began with Lady Gaga, flanked by Tom Brady and Roger Goodell, singing a song of national healing on tragedy-scarred Bourbon Street. It included billions of dollars of surreally dismal commercials starring the glossiest names in entertainment, and, of course, it welcomed the president of the United States, laundering all his chaos and madness with some sideline glad-handing and a crisp national-anthem salute. But to be at the Superdome in New Orleans on Sunday night was to be engulfed by the stark-raving mad, almost psychosexual connection Eagles fans have to their beloved Birds. While we were all looking for Taylor Swift and hissing at AI ads, Eagles fans were frothing at the mouth. That they were doing so out of pure ecstasy didn’t make it any less terrifying.
The Eagles absolutely demolished the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday, in a 40-22 shellacking that was not as close as the score indicated. Patrick Mahomes, attempting to make the Chiefs the first team ever to win three consecutive Super Bowls, was running for his life on every snap. And while he threw two interceptions, including one that was returned by Eagles rookie folk hero Cooper DeJean for a touchdown, it’s honestly impressive that he didn’t throw more. The Chiefs gained a total of only 14 yards in the first half, and Mahomes looked simultaneously afraid and befuddled every time he dropped back in the pocket. For all you people who were wondering what Drake, ensconced in Australia, must have looked like during Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show, you need not dwell in mystery: Look at any clip of Patrick Mahomes in this game, and that’s totally what Drake looked like.
Speaking of the halftime show: For all its greatness, nothing Kendrick could have done, no matter how innovative or electrifying, was going to stir the crowd into a frenzy more than a song written in 1955 and performed, many decades ago, by the Philadelphia Eagles Sound of Brass band. “The Eagles’ Victory Song,” more commonly known as “Fly, Eagles, Fly,” played in the stadium after every Eagles score on Sunday, which means it got enough Spotify streams tonight alone to keep the Sound of Brass band’s grandchildren wealthy and for the rest of their natural lives.
Every single thing the Eagles did on Sunday went right, like they were playing Madden on a cartoonishly easy setting. And Eagles fans handled it with the trademark aplomb. At one point, while waiting on line for a urinal, I stood behind two of them standing next to each other. The whole bathroom erupted in an infinite scroll of “E-A-G-L-E-S!” chants, and after the final “S,” the two men turned and, I swear to God, headbutted one another and screamed. Then they went back to finishing their business. Took them another 30 seconds, too.
There was such a large Philly contingent here that the crowd began vigorously booing every Chiefs fan who showed up on the Jumbotron and cheering any Eagles fan. At one point, nearly 65,000 people roared upon seeing Bradley Cooper. Later, Swift was greeted with a booming chorus of boos, to which she reacted with a perfect deadpan faux-bewildered side-eye. One particularly nice touch: As the clock ran down on the Eagles victory, their fans started collectively doing the Chiefs’ tired Native American chant, in a final bit of delicious mockery.
The Eagles’ dominance instantly evaporated every other possible subplot of the game, from Trump’s appearance to what one suspects will be the last high-profile Travis Kelce moment for a while, to the event itself, which ran much more smoothly than the last time it took place in New Orleans. All the pomp and circumstance for sports’ signature event was washed away by 60,000-plus psychotic, deranged, so-happy-they-were-collectively-levitating Eagles fans, throwing their own private party in front of the entire world. The Super Bowl can be massive and hypercapitalist and everything that is great and terrible about the United States, but at the end of the day, it is just a football game. And that game is most cherished not by people looking for funny commercials, but by the diehards. It’s always the diehards. It’s the people who feel so euphoric about their team winning that they will pick horse poop off the ground, eat it, and smile. Eagles fans don’t care about your moment of silence, Eagles fans don’t care about pleas for national unity, Eagles fans don’t care about your celebrity romance or your bid for history. They just want to sing their old song and headbutt at urinals and scream into a mirror and eat all the shit they can stomach. And they do it all together, one big-ass glorious green hoagie, and they have the time of their goddamned lives.
