Hyde: Super Bowl questions tradition

Unlike the Dolphins, Chiefs and Buccaneers didn’t follow traditional team-building model

I’m backing the Bucs’ Tom Brady, picking the Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes and wondering if major pillars of building football teams like the Dolphins have will come under review after this Super Bowl.

One tenet: You build with the draft — especially first-round picks. This idea is as natural as drinking water and breathing oxygen. But … but … especially if Kansas City wins, look at their impeccable decisions. Sure, they got the generational piece of Mahomes by smartly trading up from the 27th pick to No. 10 in 2017 to take the quarterback. General Manager Brett Veach and coach Andy Reid saw what no one else did. That’s why they’re here.

Still, in the past five years Kansas City only had two first-round draft picks — that 10th pick and last year’s 32nd. What happened to the other three top picks? One went in the trade for Mahomes (along with a third-round pick).

Kansas City also traded first- and second-round picks in 2019 to Seattle for defensive end Frank Clark. That’s the kind of trade that, well, the Los Angeles Rams made in dumping draft picks for Jalen Ramsey and Matthew Stafford. Is a revolution underway? Is a re-thinking of draft picks at the minimum needed?

First-round picks hit half the time. They garner Pro Bowl players at roughly a 20 percent rate. So you could theoretically trade two, first-round picks for a proven star and come out ahead (ignoring the complicating age and salary-cap issues).

It still comes down to being smarter than everyone else, as the other No. 1 draft pick Kansas City didn’t use in the past five years shows. The Chiefs traded the 28th pick in 2016 to San Francisco for a few lower picks. With the second-round pick it chose defensive tackle Chris Jones, its best defensive player.

Again, it was bottom-line smarter than other teams. And they got the quarterback. But are first-round picks overrated — at least for lower first-round picks like Kansas City had?

The second tenet under review: You invest big in offensive lines.

“You win up front,” is a central philosophy to football since Lombardi. And the Dolphins invested last draft with first-round tackle Austin Jackson and second-round tackle Robert Hunt. Tampa Bay follows convention — a line built with one first-rounder and two second-round picks, in addition to a free agent and player picked off waivers.

Then there’s Kansas City. It lost both starting tackles to injury — right tackle Brandon Schwartz earlier in the year and left tackle Eric Fisher in the NFC Championship Game. So their starting line Sunday consists of: a tackle waived six times (Mike Remmers); a seventh-round guard (Nick Alleretti); a center waived three times (Austin Reiter); a 10-year guard on his fifth team (Stefen Wisniewski); and a tackle signed off the Los Angeles Chargers practice squad (Andrew Wylie).

That line says Tampa Bay’s defensive line can win this game. Defensive ends Shaq Barrett and Jason Pierre-Paul should have their day. Each had two sacks against Green Bay in the NFC Championship. Pierre-Paul, for example, took advantage of former Dolphin tackle Billy Turner, who moved to tackle that game due to injury.

Here’s the thing: Reid and Mahomes know their tackles are troublesome. Two weeks to prepare the play-calling and quarterback thinking will reflect that. Screens? Get ready for them. Short-passing game? That’s coming — meaning Tampa Bay should react by jamming tight end Travis Kelce and double-teaming receiver Tyreek Hill.

Reid, by extension, might put Hill running patterns out of the backfield to elude the double team.

The involved chess match will go a long way to seeing if Kansas City did what New England often did: Win with a makeshift offensive line.

In the big picture, this game is about Mahomes versus Tom Brady. It might be the deciding vote for who is the all-time greatest depending on if Mahomes’ start becomes his full career. But there’s other things to keep an eye on for building team like the Dolphins.

In order to reach this point, half of work for these teams was finding those two quarterbacks — having Brady drop to them in Tampa Bay’s case. You get that position right, you can coach around other issues. Dump first-round picks to fill holes. Strategize around offensive-line problems. Perhaps change how the game’s viewed? We’ll see.

My take: Kansas City 37, Tampa Bay 27.

JEFF ROBERSON/AP Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes celebrates after throwing a 5-yard touchdown pass to tight end Travis Kelce during the second half of the AFC championship NFL football game against the Buffalo Bills, Jan. 24 in Kansas City, Mo.