SAN FRANCISCO – The National Football League is known for its grandness and being impossible to ignore.
That’s usually never more obvious than during the seven-day celebration each February that culminates with the Super Bowl.
But that’s not the feeling here in the Bay Area, where San Francisco, Santa Clara and San Jose are all hosting different aspects of Super Bowl week.
No doubt geography has zapped some of the fun, with the distance between San Jose and San Francisco being two hours or more at the wrong times of day.
The usual gangs of fans in team jerseys roaming the streets have been hard to find, if they exist at all. There just isn’t a lot of Super Bowl buzz.
That’s sure to change as the game draws closer, but Thursday afternoon you could walk down a busy street in either city and not know the big game was happening.
Similarly, the media contingent at this Super Bowl week feels markedly smaller than in past years. That’s no doubt due in part to the Winter Olympics, but the overall feeling this week is that things that are scaled back and less grand.
Northern California being just about the most expensive area in the country probably has slowed the flow of early-arriving fans to Super Bowl week as well.
Presumably there will be more Seahawks blue than Patriots red in the crowd when kickoff hits, based on geographical proximity alone.
These teams met in Arizona 11 years ago in a Super Bowl remembered for Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch not getting the ball on the goal line with the game hanging in the balance. Instead, an interception by Malcolm Butler miraculously preserved a Patriots win.
This is a new generation of success for both teams after missing the playoffs a year ago.
The Seahawks were picked by many to be a playoff team this season but played distant second fiddle to the division-rival L.A. Rams much of the season. A dramatic December overtime win over L.A. and another one in the NFC Championship game is the short version of why they’re here.
The New England story is more dramatic and much more hotly debated.
The Patriots played the softest regular-season schedule of this century, then faced three playoff opponents who’d been declawed by key injuries on offence, including the Broncos without starting quarterback Bo Nix in the AFC Championship Game.
Sunday’s performance will either validate or expose the Patriots and all that they’ve done this season.
There’s an expression in football that, “You can only play the teams on your schedule,” but strength of schedule is not an imaginary phenomenon, and the Super Bowl may largely rest on how much it reveals about the Patriots.
There is reason to be doubtful, starting with an offence that’s been performing at an historically low rate for a team that’s in the Super Bowl. In fact, the Patriots’ 54 points scored through the wild-card, divisional and conference championship game is the lowest total of any Super Bowl participant ever.
That’s been countered by historically strong playoff defence performances, with New England surrendering just 26 points, the fewest since the Baltimore Ravens at the end of the 2000 season.
But here’s the difference.
The Patriots playoff opponents were far more impacted by injuries on the offensive side of the ball than on defence.
Seattle is the highest-scoring team in the playoffs and scored the third-most points during the regular season. They are balanced and feature one of the league’s rising superstars in receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba, who was named 2025 AP NFL Offensive Player of the Year on Thursday night.
The Seahawks are going to test the Patriots defence in ways the Chargers, Texans and Broncos simply couldn’t.
Meanwhile, Patriots quarterback Drake Maye will be facing the league’s No. 1 scoring defence after modest performances against other top-10 defences the past three games.
It all points in the Seahawks direction, but the Patriots have made an art of winning this season, suffering just one loss since Sept. 21 in a game they led 24-7 at halftime.
This game still has a chance to be super, even if not much else about this Super Bowl week has been.
