The Best and Worst Moments of the 2022 Super Bowl

The Rams beat the Bengals, Meadow and A. J. Soprano were reunited, and the N.F.L. hoped that everyone would forget the league’s problems for one night.
Cooper Kupp of the Los Angeles Rams makes a touchdown catch over Eli Apple of the Cincinnati Bengals during Super Bowl LVI.
The Rams’ Cooper Kupp caught two touchdown passes and was named the game’s most valuable player. Photograph by Ronald Martinez / Getty

During the past few weeks, pro football, one of the country’s remaining shared media spectacles, was its vibrant, awful, all-consuming self. First, there was a string of captivating playoff games, full of wild stuff: mind-boggling lead changes, impossible-to-tackle quarterbacks, offenses whipping up and down the field and scoring freely until the final seconds, overtimes, smaller men carried off on the shoulders of bigger men in triumph.

But the competition on the field is only part of what accounts for football’s hold on the national psyche. The two-week interregnum between the conference championships and the Super Bowl brought the rest of the drama. Tom Brady, a quarterback long victorious against time, announced his retirement—though he never uttered the “R” word, and made it sound more like a dating-show breakup, writing, “I am not going to make that competitive commitment anymore.” (There was also the awkwardness of not mentioning his ex, Bill Belichick.) Brian Flores, the successful yet recently fired head coach of the Miami Dolphins, filed a civil suit against the N.F.L., alleging that it discriminates against Black applicants for head-coaching and executive jobs. In the complaint, Flores also claimed that the Dolphins’ owner, Stephen Ross, had offered him a hundred thousand dollars for each game that the team lost in 2019, in order to tank the Dolphins’ record and qualify for a better draft pick. (Ross has denied this.) The Washington Football Team, formerly the Redskins, before that slur finally became untenable, announced its new name: the Commanders. The next day, a former team employee alleged that she had been sexually harassed by Washington’s owner, Daniel Snyder. (A year ago, after an investigation of other harassment allegations brought against the team, the N.F.L. declared that Washington ran a “highly unprofessional” workplace; Snyder described the most recent claim against him as “outright lies.”) A few days later, Aaron Rodgers, the self-described “critical thinker” who was fined earlier this season for violating the league’s COVID protocols, was named the league’s Most Valuable Player.

The lawsuit and the workplace allegations would amount to a crisis for another sports league or major corporation. Not so, though, for the N.F.L., which continues to profit despite scandal and outrage and controversy. Still, there was surely some relief at league HQ with the arrival of the Super Bowl, a game that fans—and, more important, gamblers—could be reasonably certain that neither the Los Angeles Rams nor the Cincinnati Bengals would be trying to lose on purpose.

The Rams won it on Sunday, inside the multibillion-dollar SoFi Stadium, in Inglewood, California, where the weather both outside and in looked warm, dry, and generally enviable from back East. The game followed football’s special recipe—even a plodding game often turns turbocharged at the end, with defenses playing soft and on their heels, and offenses seemingly invigorated by the time constraints. After the Rams marched down the field for the go-ahead touchdown, with a minute and twenty-five seconds left in the fourth quarter, the Bengals’ offense quickly drove the other way, and looked poised to at least get within range of a game-tying field goal. Instead, the drive stalled out, and ended on a fourth and one at midfield, when the Bengals’ quarterback Joe Burrow (the second coming of Joe Namath, we were told last week) was forced to flip the ball meekly forward as he was hit by the Rams defensive tackle Aaron Donald. It was a fitting way to win: Donald has played all eight of his pro seasons with the Rams, has barely missed a game, and is the team’s all-time sacks leader. The Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford, who spent years putting up big numbers for mostly losing teams in Detroit before being traded to L.A., in the off-season, was a veteran redeemed. As he took a knee to run out the clock, the crowd went—well, not exactly wild.

Until last season, when the Tampa Bay Buccaneers did it, no team had ever played in a Super Bowl at home. This year, thanks to another stroke of scheduling good fortune, the Rams were hosts. Yet since moving back to Southern California, from St. Louis, in 2016, Rams home games tend to feel less than homey, with much of the crowd often decked out in the opposing team’s colors. It was that way in the N.F.C. championship game, against the San Francisco 49ers, and so it was again on Sunday, with a wash of Bengals orange in the stands. Big plays by both teams were met with what could best be described as the same vague noise, joy and sadness blended together. The only time that the crowd sounded uniformly happy was during the terrific halftime show. Meanwhile, like some divorced billionaire, the Rams, winners now by all the popular definitions, looked a little lonely in their gleaming new palace.

Speaking of lonely rich people, this year’s television commercials featured the customary parade of stars. But some brand pairings sparked more questions about celebrity motivation than they did consumer interest. Scarlett Johansson and Colin Jost appeared to be fulfilling a contractual bit of cute coupledom for Amazon. Neither Paul Rudd nor Seth Rogen, who were hawking Lay’s, look like they eat potato chips anymore. And does Larry David, king of the syndication checks, really need crypto money? Chevy’s Meadow and A.J. reunion, which extended the universe of “The Sopranos” by another fifteen years, found a receptive audience on Twitter, if only because it brought new facts to bear on the great debate about the show’s finale. Budweiser used a cute dog and a wounded Clydesdale to try to say something about the various messes of the moment—“In the home of the brave, down never means out”—although, at this point, every part of that line would mean very different things to different people. Or nothing to anyone. The flashiest ad of the night also offered the most alluring escapism: a cinematic Michelob Ultra spot set at a bowling alley, with a vibe that mixed “The Big Lebowski,” “Dazed and Confused,” and “Jackie Brown.” It starred a handful of famous athletes, and ended with Serena Williams in Turturro purple doing her best Pam Grier strut. It’s safe to say we’d rather be there than wherever here currently is.

The Rams’ wide receiver Cooper Kupp, who caught the game-winning touchdown, was named the game’s most valuable player. During the postgame ceremony, he said, “I don’t feel deserving of this.” Humility and graciousness—as admirable as his immense talent, but a bit dissonant for the N.F.L. Not quite the right note. The more fitting face of this Super Bowl may have been the player who was arguably the least valuable. Near the end of the first half, the Bengals’ cornerback Vernon Hargreaves, who was inactive for the game, was flagged for an unsportsmanlike-conduct penalty after he ran onto the field, wearing sandals and a hoodie, to celebrate an interception with his teammates and mug for the camera. The broadcast later showed him back on the bench, with a sheepish look. He had been the star of a perfectly apt football moment—out of some combination of exuberance, shamelessness, and obliviousness, there he was, rules and good taste be damned, right in the center of things. The American way.