Super Bowl conspiracy theorists found the latest 'evidence' the NFL rigged the 'script'

It sucks to have your favorite NFL team get bounced before the Super Bowl — but it's an unfortunate fact of life for 30 fanbases. (Editor's note: Go Bills.) But in the vacuum that inevitably follows defeat, certain sects of NFL fans love to gin up a conspiracy theory that proves, actually, their favorite team was wronged rather than fairly beaten.

Such fans this week have latched onto a new version of the "script" meme — the idea that the NFL is rigged and, for some reason, doling out clues about its conspiracy — via an illustration that was posted by the league before the season began. If you zoom in on the image, you can see QBs Sam Darnold and Drake Maye at the very front of a group of players staring down the NFL's Lombardi Trophy, given to the winner of the Super Bowl.

Darnold and Maye play for the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots, respectively, which are — you guessed it — the teams who'll face off in Super Bowl LX on Feb. 8. The odds of correctly guessing the teams that would appear in the Super Bowl are 0.39 percent, so it is quite the coincidence that those two players just happened to be placed together.

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The illustration has gone viral since the Super Bowl matchup was decided over the past weekend. To be clear, lots of folks are joking about the "script" — it has become a meme after all — while a smaller number appear to genuinely believe this is evidence that the league is fixed.

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So many people posted about the image that NFL VP of Communications Brian McCarthy responded, writing on X, "Re: the 'controversy' over this image - no."

Jokes and silly allegations of the NFL being rigged have been around for a while. The NFL itself has joked about fans claiming there's a "script," running an ad in 2023 where players do a table read of the next season. Despite the NFL itself making fun of the "script" theories, it's an idea that refuses to go away. Theorists, for instance, developed a whole hypothesis that the NFL was previewing the Super Bowl teams via the colors in each year's logo for the big game.

In 2024, meanwhile, people were convinced the NFL was rigging results for the Kansas City Chiefs because, of all things, Taylor Swift was dating Travis Kelce. As I wrote at the time, the NFL is not capable of pulling that off and, even if it were, would never risk its billions of dollars in profits for something so trivial. (Editor's note: Again, go Bills.)

So, no, that image from September is not evidence that the NFL is rigged. Hell, if you look at the image closely, Tampa Bay's Baker Mayfield and New York's Malik Nabers both appear to be closer or just as close to the trophy. Neither of those teams even made the playoffs.

Saquon Barkley of the Philadelphia Eagles — my favorite team — is the furthest away from the trophy, however, which is definitive proof that the NFL was rigging the season against Philly so they couldn't repeat as champions.