The Kansas City Chiefs are heading to the Super Bowl for a third consecutive year.
The NFL’s reigning champs defeated the Buffalo Bills at home 32-29 in a close AFC Championship game that was hard fought until the final minutes.
The Chiefs are angling for a historic third consecutive Super Bowl win. The Bills were the last team to notch four consecutive Super Bowl appearances, from 1991 to 1994, but the team went home empty-handed each time.
The Chiefs will face off against the Philadelphia Eagles, the team that secured their Super Bowl berth earlier on Sunday by defeating the Washington Commanders 55-23 at home in the NFC championship game. Fox will carry Super Bowl LIX on Feb. 9 from the Superdome in New Orleans.
The contest between two popular teams in different parts of the country bodes well ratings-wise for Fox. Of course, the NFL’s big game is consistently the most-watched TV program of the year.
Popular on Variety
The game will be a rematch of the 2023 Super Bowl, in which the Chiefs defeated the Eagles 38-35. Last year, the Chiefs toppled the San Francisco 49ers 25-22.
The Chiefs and Bills traded the lead throughout most of the game in the closely watched contest between quarterbacks Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen. With six minutes to go in the fourth quarter, the Bills tied it up 29-29. But two key errors allowed the Chiefs to score with three minutes to go, and the Bills never regained momentum.
In the sky-box cheering section for the Chiefs was Taylor Swift, the pop superstar who is dating Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. Swift came down on the field at Arrowhead Stadium for the presentation of the AFC trophy, standing and cheering in tandem with Kelce’s mother, Donna Kelce. Donna Kelce has become a media personality in her own right as mother of two popular NFL stars. Jason Kelce, a center, retired in 2024 after 13 seasons with the Eagles.
Before Kansas City in 2023 and 2024, the last team to win back-to-back Super Bowls was the New England Patriots in the heyday of quarterback Tom Brady in 2004 and 2005. If the Chiefs can take it all the way down the field to a third Lombardi trophy next month, it will be a first in the 59 years that the NFL has held the Super Bowl.
The Philadelphia Eagles’ Saquon Barkley at Sunday’s NFC Championship game in Philadelphia (Photo by Emilee Chinn/Getty Images)
Getty Images
For Philadelphia, the victory caps a strong season with quarterback Jalen Hurts and the addition of running back Saquon Barkley, who was signed as a free agent to three-year deal with the team last March. By the middle of the fourth quarter, the Eagles were comfortably ahead of the Commanders to secure their Super Bowl berth.
With three minutes to go in the quarter, as the score reached 55-23, Eagles’ players and coaches started celebrating, high-fiving and dumping big tubs of Gatorade on one another on the sidelines. The double-nickels score racked up by the Eagles marks the highest score ever recorded for an AFC or NFC championship game, per Fox Sports.
The Eagles’ most recent appearance in the NFL’s big game came in 2023 when they were defeated 38-35 by the Kansas City Chief. The Eagles’ most recent Super Bowl win came in 2018 when they bested the New England Patriots with a 41-33 victory.
(Pictured top: Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes at the AFC championship game)