The NFL playoffs redeemed a season and reminded us why we love this game

CBS ran a tease featuring the actor John Malkovich before the AFC Championship game on Sunday. It was one of those spots that’s designed to make you feel invincible. Like you could run through walls.

Malkovich spends the first half of the commercial making fun of the need for a tease at all. He rips apart the script for being too cliche, too involved. Jaguars vs. Patriots is really quite simple, he says. As he attempts to explain to producers why this hype video won’t work, he launches into impassioned narration as an orchestra plays behind him. He ends up giving one of the best pump-up speeches I’ve ever heard:

I felt a strong desire to go kick down a door as the video ended. I’m admittedly highly vulnerable to this sort of emotional manipulation: You could set footage of a rodent pushing an empty water bottle down the subway tracks to a soundtrack by Hans Zimmer, and I would probably follow Brandon the Rat into battle.

But the Malkovich spot is particularly effective because it’s so meta: The entire thing is based on the actor’s skepticism of the video itself. We watch as this skepticism is slowly consumed by the power of the narratives that carry the weight of these two teams’ histories. As Malkovich describes the game and the players, they become tales and characters. By the end of the video, it’s all morphed into myth. David vs. Goliath. By the end of his speech, almost despite himself, Malkovich is all in.

Football, as Malkovich says in the spot, is exhilarating to watch because anything can happen at any time. Last week, when the Vikings’ Stefon Diggs caught the football, stayed inbounds and ran for a game-winning, 61-yard touchdown against the Saints, he rewrote what seemed like a neatly wrapped-up story. Even his teammates couldn’t believe it.

“I’m still kind of lost for words about it,” Vikings fullback C.J. Ham told me last week. “It was unbelievable. I didn’t know how to feel as I saw him about to catch it. I expected him to catch it out of bounds. So I looked down after he caught it. Then everyone started screaming, and I looked up and saw him running. I was in shock.”

If last week’s shock was dream-like for the Vikings, the shock on Sunday night was more of the nightmare variety. Minnesota, whose defense has been formidable, let the Eagles score 38 points and answered with only seven of their own.

Like the end of the Vikings’ season, the narrative of the entire NFL during the regular season was sometimes tragic and often uninspiring. As I wrote last week, we saw endless handwringing about how ratings were down, how the president wouldn’t stop tweeting negative things about the league and players who were protesting social injustice; how star players kept getting injured. The games were often sloppy and lopsided. By the end, as I watched the Patriots play a totally inconsequential game against the pathetic Jets on a frozen field, I was simply bored.

The playoffs have done a lot to redeem that slugfest of a year. The games were mostly close (barring that Titans-Pats matchup or the NFC Championship) and thrilling, if you didn’t have a horse in the race. If you did, they were still entertaining but in that excruciating-and-very-bad-for-your-nerves type way. Sports fandom is not something I’d recommend, and it’s also not something I’d ever want to live without.

Aside from great actual football, the playoffs also gave us better stories. Heading into the AFC and NFC Championship games, three of the four teams were helmed by quarterbacks who no one in their right mind would’ve put money on at the beginning of the season. Journeymen Case Keenum and Nick Foles were pulled from the pile of Jeff Fisher’s heap of failed passers after their teams’ starters went down... even their numbers were a mirror of the coach’s consistently mediocre record, 7 and 9.

But Keenum and Foles ended up taking their teams to the second biggest dance in football. Blake Bortles went from a joke on a sitcom and fuel for memes to a quarterback who had some glorious moments and put up an impressive fight against Tom Brady in the AFC Championship.

Someone recently asked me if I thought having three teams that lack a lot of players the NFL markets heavily would hurt the Championship ratings or make the games less interesting. Perhaps it’s because I’m a sportswriter and I make a living off narratives, but to me, the Vikings’ miracle, or the Jaguars’ transformation from a 3-13 team to a playoff contender, or the Eagles’ underdog story, are all far more compelling than the multiple Big Name Quarterbacks could be. And even the One Big Name we did have got more interesting this month: Brady, whose story hasn’t changed much over the years aside from getting more and more impressive, has inspired more intrigue than usual. (He’s also gotten weirder.)

Most of the playoff stories have been new. Sure, the David-esque Jags couldn’t cobble a slingshot together to topple the Goliath-y Pats. But at least we didn’t get one of the common AFC matchups from the past few years. For fans who haven’t had teams in the playoffs since 1999 or seen a Super Bowl since 2005, it’s been a month of heightened emotions.

For the rest of us, it’s been fun to watch: How else were we ever going to get to see a gaggle of Vikings fans chanting “Skol” on the Rocky steps of Philadelphia? Or Eagles fans wearing dog masks to Lincoln Financial Field to pay homage to their underdog team?

“It’d be dope if we got to the game and everybody is wearing their dog masks,” wide receiver Marcus Johnson told me in the Eagles locker room on Wednesday. “That’d be awesome. Maybe they’d throw them on the field for us at the end.”

So where does the story go from here? The Eagles are probably going to be the neutral fan’s pick, as the Pats have been good for so long it’s annoying, and this Philly team has been fun, compelling, and damn impressive. But Vikings fans, who came so close to having the first-ever home-field advantage Super Bowl, are undoubtedly heartbroken. The rest of America probably isn’t thrilled, either, seeing as it’s a toss-up as to whether Philly or Boston die-hards rank higher in the Obnoxious Sports Fan Index.

Regardless of whether it’s the one most people wanted, the narrative is clear: The Eagles are fighting for a chance to prove themselves, and the Patriots are fighting to further cement their already set-in-stone reputation as The Most Insane Football Legacy of All Time. If New England doesn’t win, rumblings about the crumbling of a dynasty will gain more traction.

Brady said it himself as he held the AFC Championship trophy after the game and addressed Gillette stadium: “We had to write our own story tonight.”

At the end of CBS’s hype video, Malkovich puts his two fists together. “It’s simple. That’s what I would’ve said. Otherwise it’s too...complicated.”