Greetings fellow Brandeisians! With not having a football team at our school, I know some of us are hyper fixated on both National Football League (NFL) and College Football to make up for the gaping hole in our athletics. To make up for it I present you with my brutally honest opinions on where we currently stand. 

First, please allow me to preface this article by stating that I am often highly-opinionated when it comes to sports. Bias certainly comes into play for me, being born and raised in Massachusetts. For the love of Pete, my younger brother’s name is Brady (not entirely because of Tom Brady, but there was definitely some influence by his talent on the field). I love the Patriots organization with my whole heart and know I will be a fan until the day I die. Though we may have had a horrible season and finished fourth to last in the league this year, we are on the up and up, okay?

Now that my lengthy disclaimer is out of the way, let’s get to the meat of the article! We are entering the Conference Championship weekend. The NFL is divided up into two conferences, the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National Football Conference (NFC). This weekend, the champion of each conference will be crowned. The winner of each conference will represent their conference in the Super Bowl, the final game of the season. The winner of the Super Bowl is the champion of the NFL for that given season. For the whole three people that read this article, I hope that this information has already been in your brain for many years. 

This upcoming weekend, the AFC championship game will be the Buffalo Bills against the Kansas City Chiefs. The NFC Championship game will be the Washington Commanders against the Philadelphia Eagles. 

If it were up to me, I would love for the Bills and the Commanders to make it to the Super Bowl. The Bills have not been to a Super Bowl since the early 1990s when they appeared in four consecutive championship games. They have never won a Super Bowl since the AFL and NFL merged. As for the Commanders, they have appeared in five Super Bowls, three of which they won. Their last Super Bowl win was 32 years ago. I am all for the underdogs and spreading the love around the league. 

I do not want the Chiefs or Eagles to be in the Super Bowl as each team has recently won. They also have some polarizing players who I am not a fan of. Though Taylor Swift plays for the Chiefs, oh wait, no, she just gets more screen time than the actual Chiefs players do, I do not want it. No thank you. Also, I swear the owner of the Chiefs pays the refs to help them out. Each game proves more and more that the refs play for the Chiefs, I swear. 

The Eagles are fine, but now that Jason Kelce (not to be confused with his brother Travis who plays for the Chiefs) is no longer their center, I am far less interested in their success. 

I am well aware that all of this is hypocritical coming from a New England Patriots fan. The entire country hated us for winning six Super Bowls, I get it. But I don’t think we were ever as heinous as the Chiefs. At least we were playing high-quality football. The plays we used to run were like some sort of beautiful poetry capable of telling a story, or wrecking Julian Edelman’s hand even more. Hopefully that skillfully beautiful form of play will make its return as former Patriots Head Coach, Bill Belichick, has now been hired to coach football for the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. A silver lining as some may say? Or maybe this is just me coping with our dynasty coming to a close …

For those of you who are interested in watching the conference championship games this weekend, the NFC game will be on at 3 PM, and the AFC game is on at 6:30 PM, both on Sun., Jan. 26. 

I will also write an article following the conclusion of the season. I hope that the odds work out in my favor, but that is the fun of the sport; you can never predict what may happen next … any given Sunday, as they say! I was rooting for the Detroit Lions and you can see how far that got me (they were eliminated last week). 

This article is dedicated to my Hoot father, Justin Leung ‘23, our former sports editor who set the stage for me. I hope that the Commanders, his home team, make it to the Super Bowl to make his medical school studying just a bit more tolerable. 

With that, thank you if you made it this far! I would honestly be impressed if many people do. For the love of the game! GO COMMANDERS!