Steve Brownlee

It’s that time of the year — again. Time for the Super Bowl.

This year, everyone is hating on the Kansas City Chiefs, apparently for a lot of reasons.

Some people don’t like any team hogging all the success year after year, after all, no team has ever won three Super Bowls in a row like KC is attempting to do.

Some don’t like having to see Chiefs personnel, “chiefly” (get it?) quarterback Patrick Mahomes, on seemingly every other commercial there is on TV.

And some don’t like this collision of “planets” between sports and pop music with the latest super couple being KC tight end Travis Kelce and pop superstar Taylor Swift.

Now I get the feeling there’d really be an avalanche of antipathy for KC if its opponent was someone like the Detroit Lions — or the Green Bay Packers.

Philadelphia, however, both the city and the Eagles team, aren’t exactly warm and fuzzy, not that that’s what you’d ever want your football championship-caliber team to be like.

Remember, Philly fans became famous for roundly booing and throwing snowballs at Santa Claus and having baseball star Mike Schmidt refuse to say anything to the media for something like two or three decades.

This Eagles’ team itself has a head coach, Nick Sirianni, who does some weird stuff like yelling in anger at fans in the stadium during games.

Or their passel of star receivers playing the passive-aggressive game of pouting about being overlooked, then in a subsequent game, reading a self-help book on the sidelines while a playoff game was going on.

Really, though, all these feelings shouldn’t have an effect on who everyone thinks is going to win this game. I doubt even Taylor Swift has enough gravitational pull to tilt the field so her boyfriend Travis is always running downhill.

But I get the feeling that people’s feelings about either of these teams — particularly the Chiefs — does affect some of these pundits and predictors of the NFL.

Now, though, let me put that on the backburner while I take a look at some of the Super Bowl “prop” bets, that word short for propositions, those bets that are about the game but not on things that truly contribute to the outcome of who will hoist the Lombardi Trophy.

I didn’t want to spend this entire column about that, with the way that sports betting has become so ubiquitous, if I’m using that word correctly — again, just about every other TV commercial now is about enticing you to bet with seemingly no risk.

So I want to look at the some of the more ridiculous wagers that can be made, one hopefully no one serious about their cash would have anything to do with.

These were ones mentioned on a Fox Sports website by writer Sam Panayotovich, who said he scoured a number of booking sites to find his favorites.

This first one isn’t that ridiculous on the face of it, but as I thought about it more, it really is. Which is great!

You can put an over-under bet on the number — that is, the uniform number — of the first player to score a touchdown on Sunday.

Apparently the dividing line is 15 1/2, so a lot of QBs fall in the under, while running backs and receivers — though not universally — end up in the over. Not surprising to me, the under is a higher-odds bet, since you can’t count a QB throwing a TD pass for this. Instead, it has to be the receiver of that pass, let alone if it’s a kick returner or a rusher scoring the TD.

Another one is will a 300-pound player score a touchdown? Some offensive or defensive lineman might recover a fumble or a tipped pass and run it in, or simply fall on a loose ball in the end zone. So the “no” on this one is considered way more likely, the “yes” paying about 25-to-1.

I’ve always liked the cross-sports bets, and one listed is “Who will have more on Super Bowl Sunday, Cade Cunningham points or Patrick Mahomes completions?”

Cunningham is the star of of the up-and-coming Detroit Pistons, who if he hadn’t gotten hurt at the end of Wednesday’s game, I would really be high on for this bet, though not enough to actually risk cash on it. I think he did come back into Wednesday’s game after stepping on an opponent’s foot and potentially twisting his ankle, but I’d be leery of that.

He has several 40-point games lately, though, so I can see him beating out Mahomes in this one.

So that takes care of it for me on the Las Vegas-style betting.

Let’s look at the game:

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Super Bowl LIV (or as Rob Gronkowski says, “Super Bowl Liv”) — Kansas City (17-2) vs. Philadelphia Eagles (17-3), 6:30 p.m. Sunday; TV: Fox — There’s been a lot of compelling arguments for both teams, which makes me confident that this will be a competitive, and quite likely, ultracompetitive game, right till the end.

“Ultracompetitive” means where the lead could change several times in the fourth quarter and a play in the closing seconds — or overtime — could determine the champion.

If that happens, then I’d consider just about all of us winners if we’re Packers or Lions fans without a rooting stake.

I’m just not hearing enough that tells me the Eagles can put their stamp on this game, and if it comes down to the final few plays, I most definitely like the Chiefs as better able to pull it out at the very end.

A lot of pundits are resting their case for Philly on them having the better talent. But how did that work out for Ohio State in The Big Game back in November?

There are so many cases of favorites underachieving, or for that matter, underdogs overachieving, when there’s so much on the line.

So I have to go with the better end-of-game team, the Chiefs, 27-24.

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Last time out — 2-0, 100 percent. Playoff total — 8-4, 67 percent.

Steve Brownlee can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 552. His email address is sbrownlee@miningjournal.net.