Super Bowl 42 Quick Hits

Why did the Pats lose? Tom Brady got his butt kicked.

"The quarterback must go down and he must go down hard."

Those words, spoken by Al Davis ring true to this day. The key to any defensive game plan is always not allowing the other team's quarterback to remain upright. And you have to do more than just get a few sacks. You need to hit him hard and knock him down early and often. I don't care who your quarterback is, if he's picking himself up off the ground after every pass attempt and has to run for his life immediately after he gets the snap from center he will not have a good day. You can disrupt any high powered offense out there simply by rattling their signal caller. Peyton Manning knows, Kurt Warner knows this, and now Tom Brady can testify. The Giants defensive line treated the Pats Pro Bowl-laden blockers the same way they handled the Cowboys Pro Bowl blockers two weeks earlier, with the same results. You can't get the ball to your big time receivers if you're constantly getting up off the ground every time you drop back to throw. It just doesn't happen. Brady was under siege all day, and the results were obvious. Even when he got passes off, they were all over the place. Some blame the ankle injury, I blame shellshock. When you're getting the crap knocked out of you, you want to do everything you can to make it stop, and for him that meant getting the ball out of there as quickly as possible. That, more than anything else, is why the Pats lost. Period. It wasn't because of a lack of focus, or because Bill Belichek had his cameras shut down, or because Gisele distracted Brady (just like Jessica did not cause the Cowboys to lose). Their offensive line got whipped, and their quarterback got hit. A lot. That is never a recipe for success. Great blocking in 1991-92 made Mark Rypien look like a world beater for a year, while bad blocking can make anyone look like a bum. The game is still won in the trenches, as it always has been.

P.S.: Why is that whenever a guy hooks up with a really hot girl (or just falls really hard for a girl, regardless of how she looks) everyone wants him to dump her, blaming her for anything bad that happens to the guy? Haters, I tell you! If you had a shot with Simpson or Gisele (or Beyonce or Rhianna or Jessica Alba or whoever), you'd take it and you wouldn't dump her just because some idiot behind a microphone or a keyboard told you to.

There's a reason I'm not a handicapper.

I believe it was me who shouted out in print for you to load up on the Patriots. Turns out that was a really bad idea. There's a reason that more casinos are getting built than are going out of business; it's because of schmucks like me who yell 'Lock & load!' because we like the way it sounds and not because it's sound advice. I figured the Giants had to do too many things that we couldn't count on them to do in order to win. I did not expect Eli to man up the way that he did, and did not expect the Giants pass rush to put the kind of heat they did on Brady. But they did all those things, and then some. I figured the Giant secondary would be good for surrendering at least one long touchdown, and that didn't happen. There's a bunch of other stuff I thought would happen that didn't. But hey, the Giants earned it, so congrats to them. No one can say that they got over, or that they lucked out and didn't have to face the toughest possible teams. They beat the three teams with the best records in the league, all on the road or in a neutral site. And they got no help from tuck rules, or crazy fumbles on the goal line, or guys stepping out of bounds and not getting caught. There were no flukes here, boys and girls, just one team taking it to the opposition and beating them all.

The guy you heard yelling at his television about good and bad receivers was Donovan McNabb.

The biggest offensive play in the game were made the quarterback and his receivers. The big escape and the big catch, which happened on the same play, were the most crucial moments of the entire game and are proof that you can't just have a bunch of guys playing at wideout and expect to win. Do you need Randy Moss, TO, etc.? No, but you need guys who are capable of making the kind of plays they can make, even if it's as a group and not individually. You need a guy who can make tough catches the way that David Tyree did, who can go up and fight for the ball when you absolutely need them to. I mention McNabb because if he had the Giants receivers the Eagles would have definitely played in more Super Bowls and might have even won one. During most of his career he has not had one receiver who could do the things that Tyree and Plaxico Buress are able to do on the field, or even a guy like Amani Toomer who is a good professional receiver who knows how to get open (legally and illegally), and can catch the ball whenever it's thrown to him. You think James Thrash or Todd Pinkston would have come down with that ball? No way! Neither would Greg Lewis, Reggie Brown, Kevin Curtis, Freddie Mitchell, Torrance Small, Charles Johnson, or any of the rest of the mediocre lot he's had to throw to for most of his career. Now he did have an great receiver for one year and they did make the Super Bowl, but of you're throwing to garbage, you end up with garbage.