Updated Jan. 25, 2026, 6:52 p.m. ET

I’m not going to pretend that I don’t love seeing snow at a football game. Even as a viewer at home, there’s something so special about watching grown men and elite athletes try to play a game made for children while navigating some chaotic wintry flurries. It’s very aesthetically pleasing and often makes a big game, like Sunday’s AFC title game between the New England Patriots and Denver Broncos, feel even bigger.

But there’s one obvious drawback to watching a full-on, gusty winter storm dump a mountain of snow and unpredictable winds on a stadium that seats over 76,000 people. (Shoutout to CBS’s Evan Washburn for rolling with the punches, by the way.)

It makes the quality of the game on the field terrible, a complete mockery of supposedly serious football. In the end, the team that most often wins in these sorts of impossible conditions is likely and simply the one that got luckier to have more points before Mother Nature decided to basically say “[expletive] your football.” It’s not the egalitarianism that the NFL likes to sell its postseason as. Lo and behold, the Patriots did, in fact, have the 10-7 lead (which ended up being the final score after a second half that saw eight total completions between both Drake Maye and Jarrett Stidham) before the brunt of the winter storm hit Denver.

As such, the Patriots are moving on to Super Bowl 60, and the Broncos are not. Womp, womp.

I understand that blaming the snow for an awful game makes it sound like I’m making excuses for the Broncos. I’m not. There’s a decent chance they probably still lose this AFC title game with Stidham and an offense that really wasn’t in rhythm during a harmless first half of weather. Please note that I also thought they were the worse team going in. I am purely castigating the snow for turning the second half for both teams into a mushy pile of indiscernible (and kind of invisible) gray slop. Some of the most exciting athletes in the world were nonfactors through no control of their own.

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Who wants that on a stage like this? Certainly no one reasonable.

The snow didn’t make the AFC title game better. It turned it into an anticlimactic, giant waste of time. There was no real point in watching snow and wind efffectively play lockdown defense on inconsistent offenses who might have struggled without its presence. This, in all actuality, was the best argument for domes in the NFL eveywhere. Speaking of, the Broncos are building a new stadium in Denver that will have a retractable roof. It will likely open sometime in the early 2030s.

After Sunday’s wintry disaster, I’m sure Broncos fans think their team’s new home digs can’t arrive soon enough.