Did Super Bowl LI make up for a boring 2016 season?
With 8:30 left in the third quarter of Super Bowl LI, Tevin Coleman took a swing pass into the end zone, giving fans an uncomfortably familiar feeling as the Atlanta Falcons built a 28-3 lead.
Throughout the 2016 season and playoffs, fans became accustomed to the NFL not living up to its own hype, and while the 51st Super Bowl initially felt like more of the same, it eventually gave them something different.
Love them or hate them, the New England Patriots' 25-point comeback to force the first overtime in Super Bowl history saved the game, and let millions of fans forget the three rounds of uneventful playoff football they had watched.
Still just days removed from seeing Tom Brady win his fifth Lombardi Trophy, the buzz has yet to wear off. We're still talking about the whereabouts of a certain jersey, who will and won't attend the Patriots' White House trip, why the Falcons went with their late-game play-calling, and where that game ranks on the list of all-time greats. The NFL will hope these conversations don't end anytime soon.
Heading into Super Bowl LI, fans had experienced the worst playoffs ever, as only two games were decided by one score, and winning teams outscored losing teams 323-166 through three rounds. The 2016 regular season was also the most uneventful in recent memory, and started to show unprecedented cracks in the league's shield.
Without any polarizing storylines to follow other than Brady's ongoing feud with Roger Goodell - which most people got tired of quickly after another offseason of Deflategate stories - the NFL started to fade out of the spotlight in 2016. For the first nine weeks of the season, ratings hit lows the league hadn't seen in a decade, though many pointed to the U.S. election's domination of the news cycle as the reason for a lack of interest. While ratings began to rise after the election was finished, now that Donald Trump has taken office, the NFL can no longer expect to be the top news story everyday.
Detest for the league and its ever-growing list of silly problems - like what color cleats players are allowed to wear, and how many pumps is too many when celebrating a big play - has become stronger than ever. Fans are looking for reasons not to watch football, while the people who run the game continue to ignore the problems. Goodell gave the same question-dodging answers when considering how to address the relationship with fans, and spent a considerable amount of time trying to push the absurd idea that Thursday Night Football is better than other games.
On the field, there wasn't a lot of interesting or compelling plot lines to follow as the season began, with a strange run of disappointing prime-time games. The Dallas Cowboys had surprise success with a pair of talented rookies, but they did a tremendous job dodging drama. The Patriots did fine in their time with Brady, and were just as dominant as usual. Even the MVP - Matt Ryan - didn't really have his play noticed until the end of the season, when the football world had time to examine how special his statistics were.
But a boring game with an exciting finish can be mistaken for a good game, and the same might be true of an entire season. If Super Bowl LI didn't have all the elements that has put it in the discussion for best Super Bowl ever, most fans would consider 2016 a disaster for the NFL, but Brady's record-setting comeback has flipped that feeling, for the time being.
Only time will tell if fans will be captivated enough by the Patriots' win to forget just how dismal the rest of the season was.