When we published this test of allegiances in 2023, the Eagles and Chiefs were about to play in the Super Bowl. Which is right where we find ourselves in 2025. So the considerations below are newly relevant—and newly updated, including with a major New Haven connection we missed last time. Enjoy—
As the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs prepare to battle for Super Bowl rings this Sunday, you might think New Haven doesn’t have a team to root for.
Let’s game it out.
The Case for Philadelphia
With a hooked beak, scruffy white dome and brow furrowed by American-style grit, the bird on Philadelphia’s helmets is clearly a bald eagle, our national emblem, which happens to be Connecticut’s indigenous eagle. The Connecticut Audubon Society suggests New Haven’s West River and Milford’s Silver Sands as plausible places to spot one.
In his trusty Birds of Connecticut field guide, Stan Tekiela tells us the birds sport seven-foot wingspans and build “massive” nests weighing up to 1,000 pounds—more than three times the weight of the league’s average offensive lineman. To fill those nests, they mate in midair, where “one bird flips upside down, locking talons with another,” which sounds more athletically impressive than even the most spectacular hookups between quarterbacks and receivers.
The bald eagle isn’t the state’s only bird flying for Philadelphia. One Eagle, Jack Driscoll, grew up in Madison and played for Daniel Hand High School, where he was reportedly team MVP his senior year. (He’s also, as far as I can find, one of only two players in the Super Bowl who played college ball in New England, having begun his career at UMass, where teammate Isaiah Rodgers graduated.) 6’5” and 312 pounds at the still-fledgling age of 26 years, he’s listed on Philadelphia’s website as a tackle and guard and saw action in 13 games this season before injuring an ankle, which will have him on the sideline for the Super Bowl.
A closer local connection will be on the sideline with him: run game coordinator and offensive line coach Jeff Stoutland. Stoutland, described on the Eagles’ website as the team’s “longest-tenured coach” and “one of the most respected offensive line coaches in the country,” was “a three-year starter at inside linebacker” at New Haven’s own Southern Connecticut State University, where he “earned All-America honors as a senior and was a team captain.” Stoutland graduated with a bachelor’s in physical education in 1984 and a master’s in exercise physiology two years later, which he earned in part while working as the Owls’ inside linebacker coach. He then returned to the school from 1988 to 1992, where he took the reins as offensive coordinator.
Still, the strongest local connection to Philadelphia may be the fact that Philadelphia was New Haven, at least by a certain accounting. New Haven colony leaders in 1640 had formed the Delaware Company, a venture aiming to purchase, settle and profit from lands along the Delaware River. Promising to respect preexisting Dutch and Swedish claims in the area, Nathaniel Turner, the leader of the company’s initial expedition, instead “paid little heed to boundaries,” according to Charles H. Levermore’s The Republic of New Haven (1886), and “bought of the Indians nearly the whole southwestern coast of New Jersey, and also a tract of land at Passayunk, on the present site of Philadelphia, and opposite the Dutch fort Nassau.”
In 1642, a party of 50 New Haven families began to settle the purchased land, including by building a “fortified trading-house” at Passayunk. This wasn’t the first provocation in the eyes of the better-established Dutch and Swedes, and, banding together, they waged war on the upstarts. By the end of 1643, the New Haveners’ “trade was destroyed, their block-houses burned with their arms and stores, their vessels hindered from sailing,” Levermore writes. Ravished also by disease, some of the New Haven colonists were imprisoned, among them their leader, George Lamberton, whose subsequent trial rather conveniently concluded that a Swedish representative had completed a purchase of the very same territory from the very same chief just three days before Turner did, thus invalidating New Haven’s claims to any of the land.
You know what? That last part might be an argument against supporting Philadelphia.
The Case for Kansas City
When it comes to the Chiefs, history brings to mind the people who preceded New Haven.
Kansas City’s name, of course, is an homage to Native American power. But not directly. The team’s namesake is H. Roe Bartle, the mayor of Kansas City, who in 1963 lured the team then known as the Dallas Texans into the heartland—and who went by the nickname “The Chief.” In New Haven, it was an American congressman, not a city mayor—though his local impact was similarly enormous—with such a nickname: James Hillhouse, a.k.a. “The Sachem.”
An Algonquian word meaning “chief” or “great chief,” “sachem” is the title Momauguin and Montowese held when, in 1638, they and other Quinnipiac leaders traded to English settlers the land that would become New Haven, partly in exchange for protection from other regional tribes. And aside from that foundational contribution, the subsequent goods, services and skills the Quinnipiac people imparted to the English help explain why the colony survived at all. “During the early years of New Haven,” writes John Menta—who also wrote a book on this topic—for the Society of Colonial Wars in the State of Connecticut, “the Quinnipiacs traded deer meat to the colonists, who were unskilled in hunting. In imitation of the Indians, the English built weirs (dams) to catch fish. The Quinnipiacs served as guides, messengers, traded canoes, killed wolves that preyed on livestock, and taught the whites how to fish and clam.”
They also taught the settlers how to cultivate certain crops and what wild roots, fruits, nuts and berries to forage. Additionally, according to educational material prepared in 2011 under the auspices of the New Haven Museum, the Quinnipiacs “deliver[ed] goods and messages for the English, construct[ed] buildings, act[ed] as guides, and even [caught] runaways and criminals for them,” while also producing wampum, a currency that facilitated useful trade for English and Quinnipiac alike.
So New Haven clearly owes a lot to local chiefs of yore. How about local Chiefs today? The closest candidate, to the considerable extent I’ve looked, is Lucas Niang, an offensive tackle who played for New Canaan High School, which makes him the only recent Chiefs player with a confirmed Connecticut connection. Unfortunately, he was relegated to the practice squad this season, and then, in November, he was cut from the organization.
The Chiefs do employ at least one coach with a Connecticut connection: defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo, a Massachusetts native who assistant-coached at UConn from 1987 to 1991 and now has more Super Bowl wins than any defensive coordinator ever. As for connections to New Haven—either the city or the county—I haven’t found any.
In other words, neither the Chiefs roster nor the coaching staff offers much of a hook to hang our helmets on.
The Verdict
In the end, it just feels harder to directly connect New Haven to either Kansas City or its team. From a localist standpoint, then, I have to conclude the Eagles are the better choice.
Unless, of course, you’re a Giants fan.
Written and photographed by Dan Mims. Image 1 features detail of an eagle sculpture atop the Cornelius Scranton Bushnell Memorial in Monitor Square. Image 2 features the Quinnipiac Indian Memorial Monument in Fort Wooster Park. This updated story was originally published on February 8, 2023.
