It's here, the biggest game of the year comes this Sunday afternoon between two of the best football teams in the league.
On Sunday, the Los Angeles Rams and Cincinnati Bengals will face off for the grandest prize in football, Super Bowl 56.
The So-Fi stadium in Los Angeles will either see the Rams make history by becoming the second team in the NFL to win a Super Bowl at its home stadium, or it will see the possible birth of the successor to the recent-retiree, Tom Brady.
There are different reasons to side with one team or the other. However, given the fact that the NFL's greatest quarterback of all time has gone off into the sunset, the league is now in the hunt for its next poster-boy.
For over two decades, Tom Brady was the face of the league, appearing in numerous conference championship games, let alone the Super Bowl throughout his trajectory. It was a career that turned him into either a hero or a villain for football fans, which also made every football season that much interesting in wondering how far he'll lead his team by the end of the post-season.
And now he has left us after 22 seasons heading into this weekend's Super Bowl.
Let's take a peak on what we'll be getting this weekend.
We will make our projection based on the better story with the best possible conclusion.
On one end, if the Los Angeles Rams win, Matthew Stafford gives his career a turn-around no one saw coming. Coming into the Rams organization, Stafford was widely-recognized as a highly talented quarterback who has put up really good numbers throughout this career in Detroit, but hadn't quite become the quarterback to lead a franchise to a Super Bowl appearance.
The veteran quarterback is now on the verge of adding a Super Bowl championship to his resume that consists of nearly 50,000, which is ranked 12th all time among the best quarterbacks in history.
If he can add that luxurious piece of hardware to one of his fingers, it's hard to believe that the 13-year veteran doesn't enter the Hall of Fame at some point in the future, considering that there's only been eight quarterbacks that have a Super Bowl title along with 50,000 passing yards in their career.
And on the other side of the football field will be Joe Burrow, who has put up an incredible season for the Cincinnati Bengals. The 25-year-old has already made history by becoming the first quarterback to be drafted first overall, followed by a Super Bowl appearance within his first two seasons as a professional.
Burrow has already gained constant praise from all-time great quarterbacks, including the greatest to ever play the sport of football.
Tom Brady recently mentioned that Joe already sustains certain tools at quarterback that even Tom himself didn't have at the age of 25.
“I think Joe’s got some tools that I didn’t quite have when I was his age, so super impressed by how he’s kind of come into the league and went to Cincinnati, which has been a tough place to play over the years. And, you know, two years into his career, after a really tough injury last year, showed a lot of mental and physical toughness coming back and having an incredible season.”
If Burrow wins this Sunday in Los Angeles, he already closes one small chapter to a most likely Hall of Fame career in the making.
Joe would do something historic that no one has done in American team sports since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. If he wins Sunday, Joe would have won the national championship title in his last season in college, win the highest individual prize known as the Heisman Trophy, and also a Super Bowl ring within the first two seasons in the NFL, all within a span of 3 years.
After analyzing both scenarios, the more intriguing, feel-good story points toward a Cincinnati victory.
A handful of NFL careers will be sealed with a championship on either side of the spectrum, including Joe Burrow, Odell Beckham Jr., Aaron Donald, possibly Stafford, and others. But with the recent retirement of Tom Brady, a victory for Cincinnati would make for a much better story, considering that the league could use Burrow's "young champion" image to build itself back up from a marketing point of view in the years to come.
ChulaVistaToday Super Bowl prediction: Bengals defeat Rams, 35-28.
SB MVP award: Joe Burrow.
