The Super Bowl, Memory, and What We Choose to Record

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — February 10, 2026, 12:30 p.m. PHST

I don’t follow sports. I never really have. That’s not a virtue or a confession — it’s just how my attention has always been allocated. There are only so many hours in a day, and I’ve spent most of mine paying attention to politics, systems, history, power, and the consequences that follow when those things break.

That said, there are exactly two Super Bowls that lodged themselves in my memory.

The first was the Chicago Bears in the mid-1980s. The 1985 team. Jim McMahon under center, Mike Ditka on the sideline, and a defense that felt less like a strategy and more like a declaration. They didn’t just win games; they imposed themselves. That Bears team wasn’t subtle, and it didn’t need to be. It arrived at exactly the right cultural moment — loud, confident, unapologetic — and then dismantled the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XX, 46–10. If you were alive then, even if you didn’t care about football, you remember it.

The second is much more recent: the Kansas City Chiefs in the Patrick Mahomes era. Mahomes represents something very different. Where the 1985 Bears were about collective force and identity, Mahomes is about individual brilliance inside a finely tuned system. Improvisation, speed, creativity under pressure. You don’t need to understand football to see what makes him different. He is one of those rare players who bends the game around himself, and eras like that always get remembered.

Everything else has mostly blurred together for me.

Which brings me to the present. Yesterday’s Super Bowl — Seattle beating New England 29–13 — was a solid, professional win. No mythology required. No cultural earthquake. Just execution. It deserves to be recorded as what it was: a good team doing its job well on the biggest stage.

And that’s the point.

Sports history is exhaustively documented. Every Super Bowl, every score, every stat line, every highlight reel will be preserved in multiple formats, on multiple platforms, for decades. Long after the political arguments of this moment have been distorted, sanitized, or conveniently forgotten, there will still be crystal-clear records of who won which championship and by how much.

There will be more complete, accessible records of the Super Bowls than of what is happening in the United States right now.

That isn’t an accident.

It’s one of the reasons this site exists at all. We write these things down not because they are more important than everything else, but because so much else is being allowed to slip away unrecorded, uncontextualized, or deliberately obscured. Sports don’t need defending. They’re already safe in the archive.

Everything else isn’t.

That’s why we cover it.