The NFL season was concluded last night with the Seattle Seahawks defeating the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LX in a relative beatdown, as Seattle’s defense throttled Drake Maye’s offensive line
and put him on the ground multiple times forcing some ugly turnovers late in the game. A couple of garbage-time drives made the score a little more respectable, but the Seahawks were in control pretty much the whole way through.
In the old format of Today on PSA, we often included a secondary question on NFL events during the long offseason, checking in after each round of the playoffs to see who were the favorites and what you all thought of particularly flashy games. But with football officially giving way to the start of baseball season, I figured it was a good time for a more lighthearted opener to the day and give a nod to the NFL one last time until the World Series passes the baton back to them and discuss the league through a Yankees-centric lens. So, with that in mind, what NFL team would this current Yankees team appear most similar to?
If we were talking long-term, there’s an argument to be made about those Patriots that just struck out in the title game. New England is seen as the Evil Empire of the NFL, the bad guys that lorded over an entire generation of the game, one of the winningest franchises in the sport, all things that lead to a similar background as the Yankees. On top of that, they underwent a changing of the guard with Tom Brady leaving the team and missed out on the playoffs for a few years, before finding their new captain in Maye and making a surprising charge to the Bowl. It wouldn’t be a far stretch to compare that to what the Yankees did in passing the torch from the Core Four days to the Aaron Judge-led Baby Bombers with the 2013-16 teams trudging through the valley before their 2017 team nearly upset the favored Astros.
If we’re keeping that mindset, the San Francisco 49ers may fit the bill even better. The 49ers boast a legacy of winning from decades past with Joe Montana and Steve Young, and their modern era of teams have been highly competitive but not good enough to win it all. Jimmy Garoppolo and Brock Purdy aren’t quite as flashy a name as Judge is, but their rosters have been star-studded and picked to go deep often, just to come up short to those pesky Chiefs much like the Dodgers stood in the way of the Yankees in 2024. A rival in their division overtook them in the most recent season — for the 49ers, the Seahawks, for the Yankees the Blue Jays — and went to the title game right after demolishing them in the playoffs. That’s pretty uncanny.
If you wanted to look purely at the short-term though, perhaps a team like the Bengals fits their mold best. They have a dynamic superstar in Joe Burrow who led Cincinnati to one Super Bowl appearance, just to lose and then lose out on future opportunities due to injury. Injuries have cost these Yankees significantly over the years, with staff ace Gerrit Cole sitting out last year when he could have tilted the scales back against the Jays, and the 2023 season ended up being lost in no small part to the Yankees missing Judge for the summer thanks to one unpadded section of Dodger Stadium’s walls. On top of that, the Bengals’ head coach Zac Taylor faces an enormous amount of scrutiny for his decision-making, and there’s no denying that Aaron Boone has had his head-scratchers over the years. It’s an element that’s missing in our previous two contenders at the very least, as both Mike Vrabel and Kyle Shanahan respectively are considered two of the best coaches in the league.
Would you say these Yankees mirror the post-dynasty Pats, the legacy-haunted 49ers, or the injury-plagued Bengals? Perhaps a different team completely?
Today on the site, we start off with Estevão considering the fit Anthony Banda could have in the bullpen after he was put on waivers by the Dodgers. Andrew then gives Clete Boyer some shine on his birthday praising his elite defense at the hot corner for the early 1960s Yankees, Andrés previews Jazz Chisholm Jr. ahead of his walk year, and Matt goes back to the signing of fan favorite Masahiro Tanaka as our free agent series’ next feature.
