For the past three years, we all had to watch the Kansas City Chiefs play in the final game of the season. A core value of being a hater is that you hate on those who are successful. Ever heard of a Cleveland Browns hater? Neither have I.
But winning was just part of it with the Chiefs. They somehow ended up with an elite coach, the best quarterback in the game and one of the best tight ends in NFL history. And then that tight end started dating Taylor Swift!
Cue the Jim Carrey scene from “Liar Liar”: “Oh COME ON!”
Why is this relevant? For one, it’s in the NFL bylaws that you can’t write a Hater’s Guide about the league without mentioning the Chiefs. But secondly, the football gods listened to our cries. They ensured us a Chiefs-less Super Bowl by not allowing Kansas City to even make the playoffs!
Amazing. All right, so the AFC is wide open then, right? Let’s see who we have representing that conference in the final game.
Again, cue the Jim Carrey scene: “Oh COME ON!”
That’s right. The New England Patriots, who appeared in four of five Super Bowls, including three straight, right before the Chiefs appeared in five of six Super Bowls, including three straight, are back in the Super Bowl. Also, Cris Collinsworth and the NBC crew have the broadcast of the game, so if you thought you were going to get a Super Bowl without any mention of Patrick Mahomes, better luck next time.
As we mentioned in the bandwagon guide before the playoffs began, think about those precious 6-year-old kids born into Patriots fandom who have never witnessed a championship parade. The Patriots were the second-to-last team in that bandwagon guide, so you know there’s plenty of hater material for them. The Seattle Seahawks were actually the No. 3 team to root for.
Grab a cup of Haterade and gather around.
Patriots vs. Seahawks, Part 1
We’ll get to the current Patriots team in a bit, but unless you’ve been living under a rock these past couple of weeks, you know this isn’t the first time the Patriots and Seahawks have faced off in the Super Bowl. We’ve been reminded repeatedly about Malcolm Butler’s goal-line interception in 2015 that launched the Patriots’ second dynasty. As if the two logos against each other weren’t enough to invoke that game, Bill Belichick missed the cut for the Hall of Fame and one of the viral clips circulating to showcase his brilliance came from how he didn’t call a timeout in that situation nine years ago.
Russell Wilson’s fourth-quarter interception at the goal line haunted the Seahawks for years. (Rob Carr / Getty Images)
If all of that makes your blood boil, it’s understandable. Those Patriots were at the heights of their hate-ability. Nothing will top when they were busted for Spygate in 2007 and then went on to author a 16-0 season by running up the score every week, but at least that season ended in epic heartbreak. In 2014, the Patriots had become the sad puppy with their “Monday Night Football” blowout loss in Kansas City in September. They ended up going 12-2 after that game on their way to the Super Bowl, but the weeks leading up to that game were dominated by another scandal, Deflategate.
The Patriots hadn’t won a Super Bowl in 10 years and fell behind by 10 points in the fourth quarter against the Seahawks. After a maddening rule — the Tuck Rule — launched their first dynasty in 2001, a maddening decision by the opposing coach launched their second dynasty. And thanks to this matchup happening so close to the first one, you have to be constantly reminded of how close it all was to falling apart, until it didn’t.
Finding quarterbacks
One of the hardest things to get right in the NFL is the quarterback position. The Browns may be an outlier in how extreme their quarterback luck has been but you can look at the Chicago Bears before Caleb Williams, the Detroit Lions before Matthew Stafford, among several other teams throughout the league.
The Seahawks came off a 2011 season with Tavaris Jackson as the starter and selected Russell Wilson in the third round in 2012, who instantly became a starter and delivered a decade of stability, including two Super Bowl appearances and a title. Seattle nailed the timing in dumping Wilson and got a few good years from Geno Smith, which was certainly a risk with where Smith was at in his career. They again nailed the timing of dumping Smith and turning to Sam Darnold. This season, Darnold is the 20th-ranked quarterback in terms of cap number.
Meanwhile, Wilson’s career went into a tailspin after the Seahawks cut bait and Smith quarterbacked the Las Vegas Raiders to the No. 1 pick the year after Seattle shipped him away. Seattle essentially took three significant gambles for their last three starting quarterbacks and nailed it each time.
The Patriots, of course, had the gamble of all gambles when they turned things over to a sixth-round pick in 2001. This time around, they took a more conventional route, drafting Drake Maye with the No. 3 pick in 2024, just behind Williams and Jayden Daniels. But how did they get in position to draft Maye? Well, they can thank Belichick, who had clearly lost his touch in his final season in New England and led the Patriots to a 3-14 season.
New England’s transition at the position wasn’t as seamless as Seattle’s — who can forget the Cam Newton, Mac Jones and Bailey Zappe starts? — but they landed a guy who was an MVP candidate in his second NFL season.
A bad final season by Bill Belichick helped the Patriots land quarterback Drake Maye. (Thearon W. Henderson / Getty Images)
The Patriots’ path
Throughout the regular season, you’ve probably seen some people reluctant to buy into the Patriots because they had played such an easy schedule. That is not an exaggeration. The Patriots’ strength of schedule win percentage in the regular season was .390, easily the softest schedule in the league. Over half the league played a schedule at .490 or higher and nobody other than New England dipped below .400. The Patriots’ strength of victory in their 14-3 season was .370, which was the lowest among all playoff teams.
Surely the playoffs would expose the Patriots, right? Well, they began their postseason by playing against a Los Angeles Chargers team that had an injured Justin Herbert and only allegedly had an offensive line. Then, they played the Houston Texans, in which C.J. Stroud played one of the worst games by a quarterback in recent memory. And then they got a Jarrett Stidham-led Denver Broncos team in the AFC Championship game.
What really sucks about this is that you can’t even blame the Patriots; they just play whoever is on the schedule, so this is a case of not even knowing where to direct the hatred.
What helps in this Super Bowl matchup is that, by this metric, it’s easy to pick a side. If the Patriots had the easiest route to the Super Bowl, the Seahawks had one of the toughest. They competed in what was the toughest division in football this season. Their .471 strength of victory was the second highest among playoff teams, only behind .485 for the Los Angeles Rams, whom the Seahawks had to beat in the NFC title game to get to the Super Bowl.
If you’re into hate-watching the Super Bowl when your team is not in it, this year presents an interesting conundrum. It’s not like last year, where you had the Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles, two of the easiest teams to hate in the NFL.
This year, both brands are annoying. The Patriots still have that Belichick-Brady stench, with the scandals and success. Somehow, the Pro Football Hall of Fame even helped turn Belichick, of all people, into a sort of sympathetic figure in the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl. The Seahawks had that brash arrogance, headlined by Richard Sherman and the Legion of Boom.
But if you separate the history from the current iteration of these teams, they’re both sort of tame on the hater scale. Somehow the Patriots managed to go from the evil hoodie man at head coach to one of his players, who is more endearing than anything. Maye gives off the “aw shucks” vibe you used to get from Brady way back in the early 2000s.
On the other side, it’s hard to imagine any neutral fans, including those of the New York Jets and Minnesota Vikings, not rooting for Darnold. Jaxon Smith-Njigba is one of the rare non-diva dominant wide receivers in the league. His aura gives off a little bit of Larry Fitzgerald vibes. Outside of cornerback Riq Woolen, it’s pretty hard to even pick a player off the Seahawks roster that would annoy you, let alone inspire hate. Although the Seahawks will be favored, there also isn’t a heavy underdog, as it wasn’t terribly unlikely by the end of the regular season that this could be the Super Bowl matchup.
That’s why the pick is clear for the 2026 Super Bowl Hater’s Guide: Go Seahawks.