Super Bowl 58, this country’s largest unofficial holiday, is Sunday.

Based only on football Packers fans might be torn about this game. On the one hand, Kansas City, whom the Packers beat during the regular season, is coached by former Packers assistant Andy Reid, one of the most likable NFL coaches. On the other hand, San Francisco, who ended the Packers season in the playoffs, has as its quarterback Brock Purdy, who has gone from the final NFL draft pick his rookie year to a Super Bowl quarterback.

Unlike most Super Bowls, this one has unfortunate political portents because of the presence of Taylor Swift, girlfriend of one of the Kansas City Chiefs players who besides being an entertainment bazillionaire endorsed Joe Biden for president and before that a Democratic U.S. Senate candidate who lost. That is anathema to those who believe celebrities should stay out of politics and, for that matter, accept no other political views besides their own:

About Swift, Ben Domenech:

I was standing in the beer line with a group of Pittsburgh Steelers fans midway through their home game against the Green Bay Packers when a cadre of women with Glamsquad hair walked by. They wore decidedly bespoke yellow and black outfits, emblazoned with player names you typically won’t see worn on fan jerseys. “There go the WAGs, they’re like the Real Housewives of Pittsburgh,” a female fan dressed in more temperature-appropriate attire informed me. “I get my hair done at the same place as her,” pointing to a blonde wearing the last name of Pittsburgh’s placekicker. In a crowd of camo jackets, wool beanies and winter coats, the shiny-heeled boots and excess of tanned skin stood out — but no one said fashion was easy, especially in the National Football League.

A new piece by the Ringer’s Nora Princiotti has managed to do something perhaps thought impossible at this stage — write something interesting about the NFL’s Taylor Swift year, and what it means for both the culture and the business of sports.

Her comparison to the Victoria Beckham era of the mid-2000s is apt, yet there’s just one part of Princiotti’s theses to which I take exception: her suggestion that the NFL has poorly served female fans in the past and that the descent of the WAGs on the sport is an opportunity-filled break from that. She writes:

In a commercial sense, Swift and her fellow WAGs’ prominence this season has been a coup for football, more evidence of the power of female audiences, who remain underserved as fans of basically anything, including sports. The NFL is the ratings juggernaut in entertainment, but its biggest long-term concern is that the average fan is a fifty-year-old man. The league knows this and desperately wants to appeal to a younger and more diverse audience, but it doesn’t know how. Overtures to female fans via pink jerseys and plunging V-neck logo tees have been condescending, not to mention downright ugly. But in 2023, a group of influential female tastemakers who demonstrated in real time how they want to present themselves as fans fell organically into the league’s lap, modeling game days as an aesthetic — not mob wife, but football girlfriend. Swift’s outfits are well documented and have led to plenty of sold-out merchandise, and after she, Mahomes, Biles and Culpo all wore Kristin Juszczyk’s custom team gear, the NFL gave Juszczyk a licensing deal.

I have heard this hypothesis expressed occasionally by media types who don’t typically pay attention to sports — and it’s important to keep some perspective on all this. While women are underrepresented as a portion of pro football viewership during the regular season, the total number of NFL viewers is so huge and dwarfs all competition to the point that women still watch the NFL way more than any other sport, by far.

To understand the level of difference we’re talking about: the lowest-watched Super Bowl of the past decade was in 2021, when about 92 million people watched (a far cry from the famed New England-Atlanta comeback, watched by more than 170 million). But roughly half of those were women. By comparison, the 2023 Stanley Cup finals averaged 2.6 million viewers, the 2023 World Series averaged 9.1 million viewers, and the 2023 NBA Finals averaged 11.6 million viewers. The 2022 World Cup final had 25.8 million viewers. Even if literally every viewer for all those professional championship games was female, it still wouldn’t total the number watching even a down-year’s Super Bowl.

The point is, more women are fans of the NFL than literally any other sport and more of them watch it than any other sport — which is why advertising has already shifted in their direction. What Taylor Swift has done is dramatically increase the attention paid to the sport by women who aren’t already sports fans — something that you see in the expanded coverage from media outlets who don’t have any idea what a Shanahan offense looks like.

And this has obviously created a spike in WAG efforts, lived out in competitive “gameday couture” and intentional attempts to go viral to boost makeup artists or designers. The fact that one of the most viral non-Swift moments from the box level was Cincinnati Bengals backup Jake Browning’s girlfriend in her all-white jumpsuit just indicates that we’re only going to see things escalate from here.

The NFL still provides the most drama on television, and now it’s reaching a new demo. Just wait until they start having opinions about Tony Romo’s announcing — that’s when it’s going to get real.

This is less a new trend than Domenech may realize given the numbr of female Packers fans, including the biggest Packers fan I know, my aunt.

Now for some actual football, from John Hirschauer:

Football is a cyclical game. Teams are always trying new things—plays, formations, coverages—to get an edge. Some innovations work for a few weeks, some for a season. Others, like creative pre-snap motion, become part of every team’s playbook. In time, every innovation is either foiled or copied.

The NFL is in the midst of another schematic revolution. In the past two decades, innovations percolated from the college level up to the pros. This time, though, teams around the league are embracing an old brand of football with a modern face.

At the fore of this revolution are the San Francisco 49ers, representing the NFC in this weekend’s Super Bowl. San Francisco led the league in every major offensive category this season, including rushing and passing efficiency. Their coach, Kyle Shanahan, is a wunderkind who has befuddled opposing defensive coordinators and elevated his quarterback, Brock Purdy, from the final man selected in the 2022 NFL draft to the heights of the football world. Shanahan’s assistants have filled coaching vacancies around the league as teams strive to imitate San Francisco’s success.

Shanahan succeeds by zigging as the football world zags. Where high school and college teams across the country have traded neck-roll-wearing fullbacks and plodding tight ends for speedier wide receivers, Shanahan’s 49ers use a fullback more than any other team. Colleges have all but ditched traditional under-center formations for the shotgun, while Shanahan’s pro-style, under-center formations call to mind your father’s 49ers. And as the football world seeks to stretch defenses with wide, spread sets, Shanahan uses condensed formations—with the wide receivers aligned close to the tight ends and offensive linemen.

Shanahan’s offense is predicated on the “outside zone,” which his father, Mike, used to win consecutive Super Bowls with the Denver Broncos in 1998 and 1999. The premise is simple. At the snap, all five offensive linemen take steps in concert to the “play side” of the formation. Their goal: to “outflank,” or beat to the sideline, the defender in their “zone.” If they succeed in sealing off their assigned defender, the running back is left with a huge gap to the play side.

If they don’t—or if the defense anticipates the play and “outflanks” the offense—the running back is often left with a giant “cut back” lane on the opposite side of the play …

As The Ringer’s Ben Solak notes, because this play requires the defense to move laterally, Shanahan can set up passing plays that mirror his running plays, leading to easy throws for the quarterback:

Each of these plays, you’ll notice, uses a fullback—the bulky blocker who lines up in front of the running back. At the start of the 2024 season, only 14 NFL teams listed a fullback on their roster; at the college level, the fullback position is all but extinct. Not in San Francisco. Shanahan signed fullback Kyle Juszczyk to a $21 million contract in 2017, the largest for a fullback in league history. “When you have a fullback out there, that’s the only time an offense can fully dictate what’s going on,” Shanahan said. “If you don’t have a fullback in there, there are certain things a defense can do where you have to throw the ball.”

Making this choice in an era that puts a premium on speed, Shanahan has cracked the code. By using “heavier” personnel, he forces defensive coordinators to make a decision: play a beefier linebacker to match the offense’s power in the running game, at the risk of having a slower defender on the field for a pass, or stick with a quicker, scrawnier defensive back who is better able to cover the pass but could get exposed by San Francisco’s brawling fullback and tight end on a running play. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

This is characteristic of how Shanahan’s offense succeeds: he gets defenses to anticipate one thing, only to deliver something else. He breaks the huddle with an All-Pro running back and fullback, only to line up with an empty backfield. He plays the running back, Christian McCaffrey, as a wide receiver, and the wide receiver, Deebo Samuel, as a running back. He motions a tight end and pulls an offensive lineman right, then throws a screen pass left. For Shanahan, what started as a spin-off of his father’s wide-zone scheme has become an exercise in deception. As Solak put it, “The keystone of the 49ers offense is that you think it’s one thing, and it turns out it’s something else.”

The Shanahan system is not without critics, and it bucks the prevailing philosophy at the high school and college levels. The antithesis to his approach is that popularized by the late Mike Leach, the eccentric Texas Tech and Mississippi State head coach who midwifed the “Air Raid” offense into the football mainstream. The Air Raid is an up-tempo, no-huddle offense predicated on passing and snapping the ball as many times as possible. It is a relatively simple system, with short, often five-to-seven-word play calls, which communicate to the quarterback, receivers, and linemen one of a handful of staple route combinations (where the receivers run after the snap) and protection schemes (how the line blocks defensive pass rushers).

Where Shanahan uses long huddles and short running plays to keep opposing offenses on the sideline, Leach believed that “the greatest time of possession in the world is a touchdown.” Leach disdained the strategic precision of Shanahan-style offenses, with their 17-word play calls and elaborate pre-snap motions, for the chaos of a pass-first, on-the-move offense that never gave defenses a chance to adjust.

Whether Shanahan’s or Leach’s vision wins out in the long run remains to be seen. Coincidentally, though, one crucial player in this Sunday’s Super Bowl—Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes—played in an Air Raid offense at Texas Tech. Consider this year’s Super Bowl a referendum, perhaps, on the future of America’s game.

A referendum for now, perhaps. The line that NFL stands for “Not For Long” applies to all sorts of things.

The “Air Raid” is the offense Wisconsin played this fall under new coach Luke Fickell, to mixed results. Shanahan is part of the same coaching tree as Packers coach Matt LaFleur (both worked for Mike Shanahan at Washington), and there are similarities between the 49ers’ and Packers’ offenses.