XLII

This is officially the most depressing week in sports. The Super Bowl is over, and pitchers and catchers don’t report to training camp for 4 days, 17 hours, 32 minutes 18 seconds (as of writing this according to the countdown clock on http://www.mlb.com/). I don’t care for what the NBA has become and Hockey sucks. The only “sporting event” on television this weekend is the NFL’s Pro-Bowl. I am convinced that Fox is required to air the Pro-Bowl as part of its contract to air the Super Bowl. The Red Sox were required to take Mike Lowell from the Marlins as part of the Josh Beckett trade… somehow I don’t think Fox will be as happy about the Pro Bowl as Theo Epstein is about Lowell. But I digress.

The common axiom is that the Super Bowl generally stinks and the conference championship games are the real gems. Certainly the last two Super Bowls barely kept me awake. In fact, the only Super Bowls this decade to have any kind of excitement were the four in which the New England Patriots played. All four games were three point contests and all four were great. But Super Bowl XLII set the bar for exciting Super Bowls. You have to go back to 1989 or 1991 to find games that were as exciting as this one, and even then you don’t get games as rife with subplots.

Lets start with the elephant in the room. The Patriots were poised to become the first 19-0* team in NFL history. After running roughshod over every team to get in their way, the Patriots entered Sunday’s contest 12 point favorites over the lowly Giants. With 589 points, a 50 TD tossing adonis of a Quarterback, and a rejuvinated all-pro, record setting wide receiver, the Giants were merely a formality on the way to historic perfection.

Meanwhile the Giants had started the season 0-2, They were a fifth seeded team that faced road games against the leagues best defense, and the league’s second and third best offenses in three brutal stadiums for visiting teams (culminating in a football purist’s wet dream of the NFC championship game at Lambeau field). The Giants had a coach who has been on the verge of being fired for several years after three straight 6-2 starts with second half records of 0-8, 5-3 and 2-6. Giants fans started off the season demanding Coughlin’s head after starting 0-2 and then settled in for the now-familiar second half collapse when they were 6-2. Again. They had a Quarterback who has been woefully inconsistent his entire career. The Giants were merely a formality.

Here’s a true story about the way Giants fans see Eli Manning. Fellow Official Scorer Josh and I decided that as long as the Giants were in Tampa while we were in Florida we would score tickets to the game. After the Giants took a 14-7 lead into halftime we prayed for a “kill the clock and please god don’t let Eli drop back to pass” strategy. Every time Eli dropped back, we covered our eyes in that fake still looking way. We were quite shocked when the Giants actually won, but it was a foregone conclusion that they were losing in the next round (a feeling we kept each step of the way).

Spygate II showed up mere days before the Super Bowl where it was revealed that the Patriots illegally videotaped the Rams’ final walkthrough before Super Bowl XXXVI.

Anklegate (as I’ve taken to calling it) had dominated the news-starved media for the two weeks leading up to the big game.

And my personal favorite <drumroll please> Tiki Barber getting it up the rear on national TV. Long considered the star of the Giants and the key behind their 2000 run to getting killed by the Ravens in Super Bowl XXXV (You didn’t really think it was Kerry Collins, did you??) Tiki retired following the 2006 season. Then he went on national television and told the world that Tom Coughlin was a joke and Eli Manning wasn’t a leader and various other ways of saying the team was a joke. The VERY NEXT SEASON they go out and make it to the Super Bowl. The moment the game ended I turned to my friends (who had no friggin idea what I was talking about) and said “Well, the Ewing theory has been oficially replaced by the Tiki theory“.

Some thoughts on the game itself:

• The Giants, and particularly Eli looked incredible on that 9 minute 54 second, clock killing, record setting opening drive.
• The Patriots had apparently decided that their opening play was going to be a double reverse fake gadget play designed to be a 56 yard bomb to Moss weeks, perhaps months before the game started. The Giants’ front four got to Brady with an intensity that reminded me of Alvin Mack in the Program (You’re the guy who shot my mother aren’t you?). They kept up that intensity until the fourth quarter when they just looked exhausted from being on the field for so long.
• Coughlin only made one real coaching mistake in the game: punting on 4th and 1 from their own 38 with 8:02 left in the game. Some people might say that he should have punted there, especially with how well their defense had been playing all game, but I still say you’re facing the NFL’s highest scoring offense in history, you have a highly improbable 10-7 lead, and if you can punch it in for 7, the game is over. TMQ (Greg Easterbrook of ESPN.com) believes that when you punt on 4th and short from anywhere near midfield you are guaranteeing 6 for the other team. Sure enough Brady led a 12 play, 80 yard, 5:12 drive downfield to put the Pats 2:42 from 19-0.
• When the Pats went ahead 14-10 I gave up on the game. I said out loud that there is no way in hell that Eli Manning is leading a Super Bowl winning two minute drive against the Pats.
• The play. I still don’t know what to call it or what to think of it. It has to be the single greatest play in Super Bowl history. I counted 4 seperate “holy shits!” When Eli wasn’t actually sacked, when he got the pass off, when Tyree caught it, and when Tyree didn’t drop it despite being maulled by Rodney Harrison. Harrison did everything short of stabbing Tyree. I have dubbed the play the Holy Shit! but somehow I don’t think that it will catch on. There’s simply no catchy way to name it that encompasses both Eli’s escape and Tyree’s one-handed-pin-it-against-his-helmet-while-getting-mugged catch in one.
• Joe Buck completely dropped the ball on the call. Buck called the greatest play in Super Bowl history like he was waiting for Jerry Jones to toss him a PepsiMAX. Can you imagine if Buck had called Bobby Thompson’s homer in ‘51? Instead of “The Giants win the pennant!” We’d have “Thompson swings, its a long fly ball, and whaddya know? The Giants won the game.”
• When the Pats took over with 35 seconds left and all three timeouts, I was convinced that we were about to see a legendary drive that would seal 19-0 and break the hearts of Giants fans and Pats haters everywhere. It wasn’t until Brady’s fourth down heave fell incomplete that I realized that the history was on the last drive.
• Eli had a great game, but he wasn’t the MVP. The Giant’s defensive line deserved to be co-MVP’s of the game.
• This was the greatest super bowl I have ever seen.