Super Bowl XLVI

2012-02-06T20:52:00.000-08:00

When considering the New England Patriots and the New York Giants in Super Bowl XLVI, one is inclined to begin with “the last two teams…” But they weren’t the last two teams, really. The St. Louis Rams and the Cleveland Browns would have been, nay, are, the last two teams that one would expect to see in the Super Bowl from the very outset of the 2011 season. And while the Patriots with a healthy Tom Brady and the Giants with a healthy Eli Manning cannot be discounted, neither seemed like the cream of a fairly rich crop of NFL talent in 2011.

As a conference, the AFC was on the weakish side this season. The Patriots, while always an offensive force, seemed merely a shadow of their former juggernaut selves, with a pallid, push-aroundable defensive corps. Not that they performed shabbily throughout the season. But they had their soft spots, and those soft spots were known. Nevertheless, as long as Bill Belichick sets the course and Tom Brady mans the helm, the Patriots are always going to get a few early season picks to make it to the show. Subtract Peyton Manning from the AFC equation, and one entire AFC division disappears; the Texans played well enough, but injuries and lack of experience severely impugned their ability to make the long voyage. In the immortal words of Dennis Green, the Jets “were who we thought they were,” despite improbable back-to-back AFC championship appearances. The AFC West is still a dog’s dinner steaming in the coastal sun. Someone had to win that division,however, and God, sense of humor fully intact, had to go with Denver for the obvious reasons. All power opposing the Patriot’s perennial run lay in the AFC North, where reckoning forces tend to collide with great vengeance and furious anger. These years, truth be told, is that no one in the AFC wants to play either the Steelers or the Ravens when the playoffs roll around, but a few unfortunate teams inevitably must. And every once in a while, those teams survive the experience.

This year, the Patriots survived it, to their credit. Seeing the Baltimore Ravens show up in Foxborough for the AFC championship game was about as welcome a sight as having the Steelers fly into town—miraculous upsets deposing both of those contenders would have been an answered prayer, but if God has it in Him to say no to Tim Tebow once in a while, He’s not going to hesitate with Gary Kubiak and the Texans. But the Patriots have a charmed history, of course, with the AFC North. They tend to have a bit of a kitten’s frolic with the otherwise rough, gritty, punishing Ravens and Steelers (a phenomenon that’s worth a fuller analysis). They don’t really care to play either of those teams, but they still tend to beat them (it’s just a little harder). It’s sort of a Brain versus Brawn thing, and while the Brawn (Steelers, Ravens) are more than capable of overwhelming the Brain, they still tend to think too much about it and disappointing things happen. This year’s AFC championship game was another riveting example (and when the "thinking too much" aspect of it is left to a placekicker, well, 'nuff said). For both the Ravens and the Steelers, the road to the Super Bowl goes through each other’s cities… unless the next stop is Foxborough.

Of the three top teams in the AFC this season (Steelers, Ravens, Patriots—in, believe me, that order), all were inconsistent or, perhaps more accurately, consistently flawed. Defensive-minded Belichick’s Patriots were at the bottom of the NFL in defense. The Ravens, almost pathologically, played to the level of their opponents, and lost to some truly weak teams. Similarly, the Steelers played horribly on the road, barely surviving games against, among others, the Colts, the Chiefs, and—the ultimate indignity—the Broncos. It seemed pretty clear that one of these three teams was going to make it to the Super Bowl, yet what chance could any of them have against NFC high-fliers like the Green Bay Packers, the New Orleans Saints, or, startlingly, the San Francisco 49ers?

Probably no chance. But in the end in didn’t matter. The NFC seemed like a version of The Tortoise and the Hare: slow and steady wins the race. It seemed inconceivable that the fast and furious Packers and the similarly high flying Saints would not, in the end, put up an NFC championship airshow to rival all high wire acts, on their way to a Super Bowl point-a-rama. But Tom Coughlin’s plodding, shell-clad Giants lumbered their way into another Super Bowl, grim and grass-stained. The great irony of this—or perhaps not an irony, but a fascinating bit of great justice—was that this was a team that the Patriots could compete against. New England’s woeful defense was butter for the hot knives of the Packers or the Saints. But the Giants… they had a chance.

At the same time, they didn’t… have a chance, that is. And they knew it. The Giants humbled them in their powerhouse year four seasons ago, and that occasion was not forgotten. Don’t mind what they said or didn’t say. This, the Giants, was the team that wrestled them down in all their unbeaten glory, after all their streaks and records and accolades. Don’t be fooled. When you win every game you’ve played in a season but the last one, it fucks with you. In 2004, the Steelers went 15-1 with their rookie quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, including a sound regular season drubbing of the Patriots, and then got their asses handed to them in the AFC championship game by the Patriots in Pittsburgh. They’ve never gotten over it. Maybe, someday, if they beat the Pats in a playoff game, they will have. But until that happens, the Patriots are Pittsburgh’s Professor Moriarity: brilliant, fiendish, deadly.

But that’s the thing in the NFL. Every team has its Professor Moriarity. The Patriots, unfortunately, had to play theirs. In hindsight, they’d have probably welcomed a Packers or a Saints matchup. The Giants, on the other hand, got exactly what and who they wanted.

2012-01-23T20:31:00.000-08:00

Randy Thoughts & Stuff, #1

Randy Thoughts is my paperboy. He’s the smartest person I know. You wouldn’t think that someone as smart as Randy Thoughts would be content delivering newspapers for a living. But you don’t know Randy.

Take the other day. Randy and I were just laying on our backs in the front yard, looking up at the stars. Randy was chewing on a blade of grass. Since it was January, I had hypothermia.

“Mr. Palmer,” said Randy. “How many of them old stars do you think are up there?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Randy. A couple thousand.”

“That’s sure a lot, Mr. Palmer.”

“It sure is, Randy,” I chuckled. “It sure is.”

Yesterday, I hurt my knuckle opening a can of nuts. Boy, I didn’t see that coming.

I’ve been monitoring the activity on the Internet for a very long time now, and I’ve noticed several trends. But I’m not going to say what they are.

Randy Thoughts brought my paper by the other morning, and I invited him to take his ease on the front porch stoop with me and pass a moment or two in conversation. Randy told me that he’d just gotten his first pet, a cat that he adopted from Animal Friends. He said that he named his new cat A Tremendous Snort.

“That’s unusual, Randy. More like a title than a name,” I said.

Randy considered this for a while. Then I went inside to make us both a cup of cocoa, and then the telephone rang, and then I had to use the bathroom, and then I thought to myself, I really like the word “durable.”

But that’s what it’s like, spending time with Randy Thoughts.

I was talking to my friend [name withheld because he has privacy issues] on the telephone the other day. [Name withheld because he has privacy issues] is one of the wackiest gents I know. We’ve been having telephone conversations for 20 years. They always start as rather normal, friendly conversations, but then they quickly deteriorate into vulgar, sophomoric nonsense. These are really the best kind of phone conversations to have, when you think about it. Nobody really wants to know what some other person “has been up to,” or “what’s new” with them, or “how’s work?” or any of that stuff. The only problem is, conversations of vulgar, sophomoric nonsense have no logical arc. Sometimes we end up laughing so hard at what we’re saying that we’re just two people laughing into our respective telephones. It’s fun, sure, but sometimes I’m afraid that the hooker is going to get bored and leave.

Theses & Parentheses

Super Bowl XLVI