And the Saints are a good story. That said, could we please stop freighting them with the weight of the region's recovery? It has become hackneyed to assert that the Saints are a feel-good story lifting an entire people with their plucky play on the field. I love football. New Orleans fans love football. If the Saints win, those fans will be happy. But I'd really appreciate it if everyone involved in looking at this game would stop maintaining that the Saints are a redemptive force in any meaningful way.
Back in 2001 writers and commentators and baseball people tried the same nonsense with the World Series, arguing that the Yankees and Mets facing off provided some sort of catharsis for a region and that thus those fans "deserved" that confrontation. (Not quite as blatantly, but equally as stupidly, people tried to claim that it was apt that a team called the "Patriots" won the first post-9/11 Super Bowl, as if the nickname of one billion dollar organization really conferred some sort of patriotic legitimacy over other billion dollar organizations).
Again, the Saints story is a nice one, even if I think we might be right to question the sort of priorities that allowed taxpayer monies to rehabilitate the playground of a gazillionaire when hundreds of thousands still remain without the basics and when by almost any standard the city is still in tatters. Furthermore, football is not the United Way. Sports are not a charity organization meting out wins like a sort of karmic Santa Claus, weighing which teams fans are most worthy of the largesse of a Super Bowl win. I am especially pleased for this reality because while I may hate to admit as much, I'm pretty sure that the rest of the country would find New England fans the least worthy of those remaining of winning the ultimate NFL prize.
But have I been buggin' you? I don't mean to bug ya. Because if the weather Gods cooperate, this weekend will represent for me the opposite of somber reflection or weighing of civic priorities. For all of the travelling I have done across the country and the world, tomorrow at 10:40 I will step onto a plane bound for the City of Sin, Las Vegas. Other than a brief layover on the way to California a few months back I have never set foot in Vegas. The Thunderstick has found that to represent a disgusting lacuna in my biography and sought to rectify it. Using the pending nuptials as an excuse he has organized a Vegas bachelor weekend for nine of us who will be congregating from all over the country tomorrow. (Yes, there are a number of my friends with whom I am not happy right now -- bums!) We wanted to organize the event around a major sporting weekend and narrowed it down to March Madness or else the AFC-NFC Championship weekend. With hopes that the Patriots would make it this far we settled on this January weekend and the roll of the dice, as it were, appears to have paid off.
I'll avoid the usual cliches. Maybe what happens in Vegas is supposed to stay in Vegas, but my guess is that more likely we will create a lot of great stories in the next three days that demand retelling and augmenting. And since we will be in Vegas the picks that follow might even provide my own guidelines for gambling. Otherwise, I'm just going to say it: We're dealing with professional sports here. No one "deserves" to win other than if they take victory on the field. New Orleans is experiencing a great football story, which pales against what is otherwise a bleak and grim backdrop. For whatever reason some people have come to hate the Patriots. None of this will matter on Sunday either when four very good teams will play to get to the Super Bowl.
As for my merry little band of nine? Wish us good fortune in getting there, in staying in lady luck's graces, and in surviving dcat's initial Vegas foray. "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert . . ."
Saints at Bears: (Bears favored by 2.5) Vegas thinks the Bears hardly even warrant the benefit of home field advantage, apparently. And I can see why in a sense -- this is a tough game to call. The Bears have been underwhelming for several weeks now. They managed to get it done in theis first postseason game last week by slipping past a Seahawks team that scared no one. Seattle was the weakest team in the postseason this year and yet with a few bounces of the football they would be facing their second consecutive NFC Championship game. We know that Rex Grossman is sketchy at best. The Chicago defense has fallen from rarefied air -- back in midseason people spoke of this Chicago defense not in terms of the rest of the NFL, but in terms of the great defenses in history. For awhile some folks were foolish enough to utter comparisons with the 1985-1986 Bears defense, which is just insane.
Meanwhile we have everybody's darlings, the Saints of Drew Brees and Deuce McAllister and everyone's favorite rookie sensation, Reggie Bush. People tend to overlook the weaknesses of New Orleans even while they poke at every pockmark on the other three teams. Reggie Bush almost gave that game away. New Orleans played a Philly team that made a lot of mistakes and still let them be in it until the very last stages of the game. And as importantly, New Orleans is the least experienced team in the playoffs. Usually, that is the sort of thing that catches up with a football team. It almost always takes a team several shots to get through the playoff schedule. The Saints have won two playoff games in their star-crossed history. One of them came last weekend when they won to get to their first conference championship game. I'm not certain that the bright lights will shine too brightly for them. I'm not necessarily worried that the Saints will not be able to handle Chicago weather -- Brees played his college ball at Purdue, after all, while Grossman played at Florida. And I imagine that the Saints will not succumb to the intimidation factor of the Chicago fans -- fan intimidation is usually one of the most overrated factors in all of sports. Most of the time professional football players enjoy being hated in opposing arenas. Guys who get mashed by unfathomable amounts of force on the field are rarely cowed by fat guys from the suburbs dressed like dogs or wearing hog masks or garbed in Star Wars gear with spiked shoulder pads or wearing cheese on their heads.
But a confluence of factors will pile up in this game. The Saints looked somewhat tentative at times last week. Destiny almost always gives way to ability at this time of the season. New Orleans has been a great story. Whether the Saints win or lose will make little difference, however, in the city's recovery, and we all should be rooting for the people of the Gulf region irrespective of whether or not their NFL entry manages to overcome the Bears this weekend.
Like everyone else, I suppose my heart is with New Orleans. But on the field, the Bears are going to bring too much. Rex Grossman is going to manage the game rather than try to win it. The Bears defense will be a step too quick, the New Orleans stars a bit too callow. Chicago, which for almost all of this season has been the best team in the NFC by a long way, will be the best team on Sunday. It may not even be that close of a game. Bears 31-Saints 24
Patriots at Colts: (Colts by 3) I'm not even going to pretend that I am going to do anything but pick the Pats in this one. The Colts are scary talented on the offensive side of the ball. As the week has progressed, I, like lots of fans, have looked at the options the Colts have at their disposal -- it all starts with Manning and then goes to Harrison and Rhodes, Waynes and Addai and Clark -- and wonder how the Patriots can possibly stop them. I look at their reinvigorated D and am convinced that they have improved so much that maybe they will be able to shut down the Patriots. And of course the Colts now have the advantage of Adam Vinatieri. And that is a huge advantage.
But for all of the clear attributes the Colts bring onto the field, they still are not the Patriots. The Pats have won three of the last five Super Bowls for a reason. They have an opportunistic defense whose sustained body of work ranks as well as any in the history of the league. They know how to close out close games. They beat a better team than the Colts did last weekend. And as always, the Patriots have Tom Brady and Bill Belichick.
The rest of the league's fans hate that last assertion especially and call it smugness, but I've reconciled how the rest of the world looks at Patriots fans because that is how the rest of us always looked at Bears and Cowboys fans in the 90s, Niners fans in the 80s, and basically any team that has had a sustained level of excellence. All fans of winning teams become a bit obnoxious and hard to handle. All winning teams become dislikable over timne because their story line grows tiresome.
In any case, what it comes down to for me, and what it will continue to come down to, is that I am going to take a tautological view of Pats-Colts playoff games just as I'm sure, and it pains me to admit this, Yankees fans looked at the Sox before 2004: until they show that they can beat us, they cannot beat us. Peyton Manning may well win a Super Bowl. I cannot stand him because that's what fans do, but he is a tremendous quarterback who will more than likely lead a team to the promised land. If they can get past the Pats it will happen this year. But until they do it I won't believe that they can do it. The Patriots will find a way to win because at this stage of the season the Patriots have always found a way to win.
Plus I am going to be in Vegas this weekend, and that has to mean something. And no, it is not coming down to a Vinatieri kick. Patriots 34-Colts 30
And yes, I promised to avoid cliches, but what the hell -- Vegas baby! We are so money, and we don't even know it! "I feel like a monster incarnation of Horatio Alger . . . a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident."
3 comments:
did you see this?
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/070119
COLTS WIN! COLTS WIN!
As I imply above in my latest post, "Ouch." I guess it's a real rivalry now. Pitchers and catchers report in a month.
dcat
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