Is Saquon Barkley football’s Novak Djokovic—and can his Philadelphia Eagles knock off the Kansas City Chiefs?

Super Bowl Sunday is upon us, and the world will be watching. That includes the tennis world—expect your social media timelines to be scattered with reactions to the game, the halftime show and the commercials from many of your favorite players. And your favorite writers.

While Steve Tignor, TENNIS.com’s resident Philadelphia Eagles fan, will be watching the Super Bowl with vested interest, Ed McGrogan, proud member of (Buffalo) Bills Mafia, will be watching and wondering what could have been—again. But they found plenty of common ground in this special, football-tennis edition of The Rally.

Hey Steve,

Back in the somehow-old days of Tennis Magazine, you and I often wondered if a player would “defend the cover”—our way of trying to ward off the dreaded Cover Jinx. I couldn’t help but think about that as we discussed the possibility of a tennis-adjacent back-and-forth about our favorite NFL teams.

Alas, while your Philadelphia Eagles “defended The Rally” on conference championship weekend, my Buffalo Bills did not. They did not defend much of anything, for that matter. But with more than a week for Bills Mafia to lick its wounds after its team’s latest loss to the Kansas City Chiefs, I’ve decided this Rally must go on. I’ve been eager to chat about two of my, and your, favorite sports.

Tennis and football intersect from time to time. This week’s ATP Dallas Open is being held at the Cowboys’ billion-dollar facility in Frisco, Texas. The US Open ends on the NFL’s opening Sunday—something I wish would change, both as a football fan and for the betterment of the sport. Allie Kiick’s father played for the undefeated Miami Dolphins in 1972; Jessica Pegula’s parents own the Buffalo Bills. The Australian Open, which until a few years ago concluded on Super Bowl Sunday, wraps up on conference championship weekend.

Which brings me back to last Sunday, and a talking point common among all sports: The greatest players never to have won a title. In tennis, where players vie for many titles each year, we reserve that distinction for the Grand Slams. Only one title is contested each NFL season, and it’s a team effort. In the case of Josh Allen, the Bills’ electric quarterback and newly minted MVP, he doesn’t even play half the snaps. Maybe that’s why Buffalo’s defense was lacking against KC.

Allen, as most know, has yet to reach the Super Bowl, but it’s not for lack of effort. He’s pretty much the last reason the Bills have come up short over the past five seasons. So it’s been all the more painful to see him go down swinging the last four times his Bills have played the Chiefs in the playoffs—despite having beaten the Chiefs in each of the past four regular seasons.

But for all of Allen’s talents, he keeps running into Patrick Mahomes, who inevitably saves his very best for when the stakes are highest. Kind of like what happens to Alexander Zverev in Grand Slam finals. There have been many Allens and Mahomeses in tennis history.

What’s your best Allen comparison, past or present? And not to put Josh on the level of Federer, Nadal or Djokovic, but the connection between Western New Yorkers and this charismatic gunslinger reminds me of the Big Three’s fan armies and their bonds.

And don’t worry, we’ll get to your Eagles soon.—Ed

Hi Ed,

Fans of the Bills know all about being four times unlucky. There are probably debates all over the city’s bars these days about which is more painful, the Josh Allen years, or the Jim Kelly years of the ’90s, when the team lost four straight Super Bowls. My favorite team, the Eagles, has been there, too. In the early 2000s, when Andy Reid was our coach, we lost three straight conference championships, and then the Super Bowl. Each year I woke up on the day of those games filled with dread, and each year my fear of defeat came true.

The tennis player that Allen reminds me of isn’t someone who failed to win a Slam, but someone who failed at a specific Slam: Bjorn Borg at the US Open. He made the final in New York four times, and lost each of those matches to one of his two American rivals, Jimmy Connors (1976, 1978), and John McEnroe (1980, 1981). After the last defeat, Borg skipped the trophy ceremony, got in his car, drove out of the grounds with reporters and photographers running after him, and retired at 25. The Ice Man had cracked.

Maybe I think of Borg because his losses were devastating to me—at 10, 11, 12 years old—in a way that season-ending losses by football teams are to their fans. I’m amazed every January by how emotional NFL playoff games can be, even when my favorite team isn’t playing. The wild home-field energy—which doesn’t exist in the neutral-site Super Bowl; the violence of the sport; the mass outrage on social media over every close call: all of it combines to ratchet the tension up to an unbearable level. It feels like you’re in a stadium with the rest of the country.

I can still remember how wrecked and haunted I was when the Green Bay Packers blew a seemingly insurmountable lead to the Seattle Seahawks in the AFC Championship Game in 2015. I’m not even a Packers fan, but I detested the Seahawks of that era—the Legion of Boom—and didn’t want them to go back to the Super Bowl. Through the rest of the day and probably the rest of that week, I kept playing out scenarios in my head that would have led to a Packers win. That’s how much the NFL in general, and not just your own team, can mean to a fan of the sport. That’s how much you can get swept up in the primal, tribal, social emotion that football calls up.

I’m guessing my fellow tennis fans know all about reliving matches for days, and making up scenarios in your mind where your favorite player wins instead of loses. I’ve done it myself for years. Our sport has its moments of maximum tension, too—most obviously the Grand Slam finals. But that emotion is expressed differently. Tennis is part sport, part theater; you’re supposed to be quiet and let the players perform, the way we let actors and dancers perform in silence. In football, it’s perfectly normal for a crowd to try to make so much noise that the opposing offense can’t hear what its quarterback is screaming at them at the line of scrimmage.

Ed, I was rooting for your Bills against the Chiefs last Sunday. Like a lot of people, I’m over the Chiefs and their reign, the same way I once was with the New England Patriots’. But as an Eagles fan, there was a tiny part of me that wasn’t upset that the Chiefs won. It might sound perverse, but I like the fact that the Eagles will be slight underdogs in the Super Bowl, which might not have been the case if they’d played the Bills. It will be easier to take a loss to the Chiefs than it would have been to take a loss to the Bills.

Only a true fan, or a fan of a tough-luck team like the Bills or Eagles, can understand that type of self-protective “logic.”

How do you compare your experiences as a tennis fan and a football fan, Ed?—Steve

Hi Steve,

Guarding against a loss—the “logic” you so aptly noted—is a hedge hardcore fans of any sport, tennis included, can relate to. I had a bit of that during my heavy Roger Federer era. I didn’t, though, for another favorite player of mine, Richard Gasquet. I just knew the Frenchman would melt like comté once the lights got too bright.

On a more positive Gasquet note: when I watched him last year at Roland Garros, amongst a throng of French supporters in a charged Court Suzanne-Lenglen, it reminded me of the unbridled, overly partisan fandom I associate with football. It may be impossible for tennis to replicate the fan experience of American football or European football, but the sport is always trying. From fans coming and going into arenas with less restrictions, to an event like the Laver Cup (a big success story, in my opinion) to technology used to further the fan-player connection, tennis is opening itself up in new ways. Of course, nothing can match the organic intensity of a thrilling contest, and on any given day—not just on Sundays—tennis can provide that.

One more point about the Bills, and then let’s get to the Eagles’ big game. Adding to my frustration was a critical decision by the referees to deny Buffalo a first down after Allen sneaked the ball on fourth-and-inches. It might shock you to hear this, but I believe he got the yardage. Still, it wasn’t conclusive on replay for the call to be overturned. Tennis, of all things, became part of the subsequent discussion, and how the sport’s universally lauded and accepted line-calling technology should be adopted by the NFL. This tweet about that has 7.8 million views and over 3,000 responses:

Hopefully at some point, Allen and Buffalo get what they deserve, in another example of The Delights of Delayed Gratification. That was the title our friend Chris Clarey chose for his piece on Madison Keys’ long-awaited Grand Slam final win, and I’d recommend it.

OK, Philly time. Here are my questions for you:

• How surprising is this year’s Super Bowl run? The Eagles came into this season with a highly talented roster, but infighting (between quarterback Jalen Hurts and wide receiver/book reader A.J. Brown, and perhaps with head coach Nick Sirianni) seemed to doom them…until it didn’t.
• What’s your best tennis comp to the 15-2 Detroit Lions losing in the Divisional Round, which perhaps paved the Eagles’ way to the title game? There have no shortage of seismic upsets in our sport’s past.
• Saquon Barkley: What a story, and what a player. The term “one of one” is overused, but he’s a running back like no other, at least in this era. Plus there’s the fact that he was traded to Philadelphia just last off-season from a major rival. Does he remind you of anyone on the court?

Go Bills, and Birds.—Ed

Ed,

The Eagles’ Super Bowl run is a surprise, and not a surprise, in roughly equal measures.

It’s a surprise because they finished last season on an extended run of total incompetence, with none of the coaches or players seemingly on the same page. But it’s also not a surprise, because the year before that, they went all the way to the Super Bowl and almost beat the Chiefs. The skill players from that team are still around, with the major addition of Saquon, and some key changes to the defense.

Eagles fans must now swallow the same bitter pill that we’re forced to swallow every couple of years: We have to admit that our general manager, Howie Roseman, has done a good job. “Fire Howie!” chants have been standard practice in Philly for years—they even break out at Phillies games. My dad has written letters to the team’s owner demanding that Howie go. But there’s no denying it: He put this team together in 2022, and then put them back together in 2024.

You’re right that football playoffs function like tennis draws: You can get a lucky one, you can get crucial help along the way, and they’re both single-elimination, with no second chances. Winning a Grand Slam title Is a life-changing achievement, but in reality you’ve only proven yourself to be better than seven other players of the 128 in the field.

The most famous case of an earlier upset leading to a surprise Slam title happened at Roland Garros in 2009—was it really that long ago?—when Robin Soderling beat Nadal, paving the way for Federer’s only French win. I wonder what the past 15 years would have been like if Soderling hadn’t beaten Rafa. Would Federer ever have won in Paris? Would his quest have consumed the sport every spring until he retired? Would he and Djokovic have played a final in which each was trying for their first RG title?

But I like to think of another historic moment when fate seemed to intervene. It was the first US Open, in 1968, and Arthur Ashe was slated to play Rod Laver in the quarterfinals. Laver was the top seed and had never lost to Ashe. In fact, he would go undefeated against Ashe until 1974, winning their first 18 meetings.

That year’s Open was happening at the height of a tumultuous year in politics and racial relations in the States, and around the same time as the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, where U.S. sprinters flashed Black Power salutes. An Ashe title, which would make him the first African-American man to win at Forest Hills, made historical sense, but a loss to Laver made logical sense. The sporting gods must have had history on their minds, because they had Cliff Drysdale shock Laver in the fourth round, opening the door for Ashe’s only US Open victory, and still the only one by a male Black player.

But back to the present day, and two other African-American athletes going for glory on Sunday: Saquon Barkley and Patrick Mahomes. The Super Bowl could be something close to a one-on-one duel between them.

You asked who Barkley reminds me of in tennis, and the first person that comes to mind is Djokovic. I guess it’s the mix of speed and efficiency, the lack of extra frills—unless he’s showing of his flexibility by leaping over someone backwards, or sliding for a get on a hard court—and how he wears down a defense over four quarters.

But the question is still: Can the Eagles, or Barkley, or anyone, beat Mahomes? Football is a team game, with a separate offense and defense, but I’d say Mahomes has come closer than anyone to making it into an individual sport. Whatever the other 43 players on the field do over the course of the game, he always—ALWAYS—finds a way to win it, especially in the playoffs. If he needs to pass, he passes. If he needs to run, he runs. In tennis terms, he has the legs of a speedy retriever, and the arm of a servebot.

And, of course, when he needs a call to go his way, he seems to be able to make that happen, too.

Mahomes has turned himself into a one-man wall who won’t let the Bills into the Super Bowl. We’ll see if he can become a similar nemesis to the Eagles on Sunday.—Steve