I stopped at a Starbucks to get a latte on my walk between the BART station and the National Football League media headquarters at Moscone Center in San Francisco. About a block from the NFL festivities on 4th street I saw a couple lining up for a photograph in front of a Super Bowl sign.

The lady, who I assumed was the man’s wife, was positioning her husband under a Super Bowl sign and raised her phone to snap the shot. “Would you both like to be in the picture,” I offered and she thanked me and I requested she hold my drink, so I didn’t drop her phone while snapping the photo. I made sure the Super Bowl sign was in the shot with them and took the picture twice. Isn’t that what we always do just to make sure we got a good picture.

As the lady handed me back my drink while I surrendered her phone her husband said, “Thanks Dennis.”

It caught me by surprise. How did he know who I was? I asked him, and he laughed and said, “Your name is on your Starbucks cup.”

Okay, the name on the Starbucks cup I was carrying was a pretty good indicator of what my name was. But it didn’t have to be. The Starbucks employee could have misunderstood what I said and put the wrong name on the cup and I let it go. I could have been with a friend who ordered two lattes and used his name on both of them. I could have picked up the wrong cup on the way out of the coffee shop.

But none of those longshots happened. It was my name on the cup I had handed over and the appreciative gentleman thanked me by name.

A football game is like that.

There are clues on who is going to win. And while before the game it may not be as obvious as a name on a cup, after the game it will seem as obvious as that. It is most often like that, before a game there are two choices, reasons in most games for either team to win, particularly when factoring in the point spread. But after the game the winner will seem so obvious that one questions how anyone could have been on the wrong side.

Last year, we had one of those games. The talk was of the Kansas City Chiefs going for a third straight Super Bowl win and the point spread favored them slightly over the Philadelphia Eagles. I saw the game as one of the easier Super Bowls to predict, the better team getting points and geared for a revenge win after losing to the Chiefs two years earlier in Super Bowl LVII.

It was that easy. The underdog Eagles won the game by even a wider margin than the 40-22 final score would indicate.

One factor the Eagles had going for them last year is that they had a stat that always pointed to a winner in the Super Bowl. That is, a team that scored at least 23 points and allowed 23 or fewer points in as many as seven games in a row. The Eagles did it seven weeks in a row, then just missed in their next game while winning by a 22-16 margin and followed that victory with another win that qualified on the 23/23 rule, 27-13.

The Eagles were the fifth team to score and allow at least 23 points more or less and, like the Eagles, the prior four teams to accomplish that stat in pro football history all won their league championships. The 1949 Philadelphia Eagles, 1961 Houston Oilers, 1999 St. Louis Rams and 1984 San Francisco 49ers were the first four teams to win after accomplishing that feat. The Eagles were the first team to be underdogs on the point spread in the Super Bowl with that factor weighing in their favor.

The New England Patriots are the second.

Mike Vrabel’s team scored at least 23 points and allowed fewer than 23 points in a record 10 straight games this season. And now, they are underdogs to the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl LX. Is this an indicator as clear as the name on the cup … or is this the rare time when the person holding the cup doesn’t match the name scribbled on it?

It will be very obvious after the game … from this side it is a more compelling question.