MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
To sports now and the fact that never in the history of the NFL has a team won three Super Bowls in a row. Well, tonight the Kansas City Chiefs are setting out with the hopes of becoming the first to do so as the NFL regular season gets underway. Our sports correspondent Becky Sullivan is here to give us a preview. Hi, Becky.
BECKY SULLIVAN, BYLINE: Hello, Mary Louise.
KELLY: Hi. OK, so I'm going into this, I need to acknowledge you're not a neutral party on this. But I will ask, can the Chiefs do it?
SULLIVAN: Well, I am from Kansas City, but as the NPR sports correspondent, I like to think of myself as a neutral party here. But in this case, you know, in any given year, I should say that even, like, the Super Bowl favorite probably only has, maybe statistically speaking, like a 10-15% chance of actually winning it all, and Kansas City definitely has their eyes on this. You know, I think in sports, athletes can sometimes be a little coy about their goals. They'll just say stuff like, oh, you know, we're just focusing on the day by day, just focusing on what's in front of us.
KELLY: Yeah.
SULLIVAN: But just this morning on Twitter, Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes posted this hype video.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED SPORTSCASTER #1: The Chiefs are back-to-back Super Bowl champions. It is a dynasty.
SULLIVAN: And it had these highlights cut in, with a commentator talking about how hard it is to win even one Super Bowl and that no one's ever won three straight.
KELLY: OK, so it sounds like, at least for Mahomes...
SULLIVAN: It's on his mind.
KELLY: ...He's focused on the next game.
SULLIVAN: Yeah.
KELLY: But he's also looking ahead to the big one.
SULLIVAN: A hundred percent. And that's because honestly, if it's going to happen for the Chiefs, Patrick Mahomes is why. There have been some debates over the years about whether he is really the best player in football these days, but I think the Chiefs' past two Super Bowls in the past two years in a row have put that conversation to rest. There just is nobody else like him. And, of course, for the Chiefs, the support of Taylor Swift can't hurt - her boyfriend, the star tight end Travis Kelce, also on the Chiefs - a lot of excitement around Kansas City.
KELLY: Yeah. Just go back to the point about just how hard it would be, statistically or otherwise, to win three in a row in football.
SULLIVAN: Yeah. You know, it is harder in the NFL than it is in the other major American professional sports. So in the NBA and in baseball, it's been done about 25 years ago in both of those sports. In hockey, it was done in the '80s most recently. But in the Super Bowl era of the NFL, which began nearly 60 years ago, nobody's been able to do it. And even as there have been a bunch of teams that we think of as dynasties, like the 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers, like the Tom Brady Patriots for much of the 2000s and the 2010s, none of them could do it.
And that is partly because in football, the teams are just so much bigger than they are in these other sports. Players' careers are shorter, so personnel changes are inevitable. So, like, in basketball, when you only have five guys on the court at the time, you can have stars like Michael Jordan and Scotty Pippen and Dennis Rodman all come back year after year after year.
KELLY: Yeah.
SULLIVAN: Football, of course, is also just physically difficult. And so, you know, to even win one Super Bowl, teams have to be pretty lucky with injury, player health. And so, you know, to do that three times in a row is pretty unlikely.
KELLY: Well, there are plenty of teams out there, of course, who would love to stop Kansas City from making it three in a row. Who are the biggest challengers?
SULLIVAN: Yeah. You know, on the AFC side of the ball, I would say I'm going to be watching the Houston Texans, who went all in during the off-season after their rookie quarterback last year turned out to be just terrific, CJ Stroud. On the other side of the bracket in the NFC, you have the Detroit Lions, who fell just one game short last season of making their first-ever appearance in the Super Bowl. And then the Green Bay Packers - I'll shout them out, too - seem to have found yet another excellent franchise quarterback in Jordan Love and looked quite good at the end of the year last year.
KELLY: And what else should we be watching for as the season kicks off?
SULLIVAN: Well, really quickly, I'll just say I'm excited to see some rookie quarterbacks. So the draft had a bunch of quarterbacks taken, six in the top 12 picks. And three of those guys are gonna start this weekend. A lot of attention is going to be on Chicago, where I cannot overstate how much excitement this quarterback, Caleb Williams, has generated. He was a very exciting player in college, won the Heisman. The hype around the Bears is massive. He only played just a few dozen snaps in the preseason, so we'll all be watching to see if he's really as magical as everybody in Chicago is hoping.
KELLY: NPR's Becky Sullivan, not at all a Kansas City Chiefs fan. No, sir. You heard it here. Thank you, Becky.
SULLIVAN: Thank you so much.
(SOUNDBITE OF PINAR TOPRAK'S "PRIME VIDEO SPORTS THEME") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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