Kevin Posival: Super Bowl caps season of letdowns
Posted On: Sunday, Jan. 27 2008 03:15 AM
We've seen the Patriots win Super Bowls and we've seen Tom Brady win Super Bowl MVP's. We've never seen a 19-0 team and we never imagined Eli Manning in the Super Bowl, much less winning one.
In the end, I'll be disappointed that the Patriots didn't make history or that the Giants didn't prove to be giant-killers. It is a season of disappointment, after all.
We've seen baseball's 'holy grail' branded with an asterisk. We've seen Marion Jones' five Olympic medals and Floyd Landis' Tour de France yellow jersey stripped far quicker than they were 'earned.' A Washington senator questions Roger Clemens' seven Cy Young Awards and Michael Vick shows up three weeks early for a 23-month sentence hoping to get leniency for his association with a dogfighting ring.
As sports fans, we need a 19-0 NFL season like a leg-less man needs a pair of Vince Young's new Reebok football cleats and we need the giant underdogs to win like another David Carr-like franchise quarterback.
The Giants are led by an until-now Giant disappointment in Eli Manning. Is he coming of age, embracing his Manning lineage or is his turnaround the reincarnation of an '80s one-hit-wonder? Whoever Eli becomes in the coming seasons, he and his New York teammates have earned this shot at the 'greatest team ever.'
The Giants had to beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers just to get back to Texas and stand across the field from the top-seeded Cowboys. Then, having bested their NFC East rivals for the first time all year, they took to the road and took on the ever-lasting Duracell battery himself: Brett Favre and his Green Bay Packers.
The Giants went from fifth-seeded, longshots to dark-horse hopefuls (and hopefully proving something of their Cinderella case to the BCS board along the way).
The Patriots are fan-favorites; either for the way they're burning history with every scorched opponent or how they've become increasingly beatable down the stretch.
After embarrassing the Redskins 52-7, they proved mortal in four of their last eight regular season games.
Coupled with double-digit wins over Buffalo (7-9), Pittsburgh (10-7) and Miami (1-15), the Patriots won by a two-touchdown advantage in their last eight regular season games and by less than eight points against teams that finished at or above .500; three of those
last eight teams made the playoffs and shouted 'we are not Zeus, we will humbly go undefeated' from the top of Mount Olympus.
The Pats had their script: play close enough to seem fallible, but always win.
Roger Goodell must have struck a side-pot deal with the Hollywood writers after their strike on Nov. 5 – coincidentally the day after the Pats-Colts game that drew the largest regular-season television audience since 1986 that the Pats topped again when they played the Giants in the final week.
"If you build it, they will come."
And, the Giants – not the Cowboys, not the Packers – have come.
Two teams from the Northeast play for the Lombardi Trophy in the Glendale, Ariz., desert on Feb. 3 in front of a worldwide audience.
Tom Brady and the New England Patriots vs. Eli and the Manning monkey on his back.
It's been a season of pumped up allegations and heroes falling from grace and someday, somewhere, a screenwriter for Disney will reduce it all to a PG-movie titled, "The Needle in the Haystack."
Contact Kevin Posival at
kposival@kdhnews.com or (254) 501-7562.