Peyton’s Adventures in Wonderland: A Super Bowl Preview
For the second straight year, the Big Brass at Punting Ace rejected an all expenses paid trip to Super Bowl City for your venerable author. Last year was Detroit and any sane professional can accept, on some realistic plane, that a junket to the Motor City can be missed and not too much is lost. Unless your downing cocktails at The Bosco in the early hours of a Sunday morning, surrounded by a bevy of attractive waitresses and listening to Martha and the Vandellas at high volume, Detroit is pretty much a bore and a cold one at that.
But this year is Miami and when word passed down the line from some Punting Ace lackey named Jan or Tiffany or Ian or something that The Miami Excursion was a no go, at least on the card of Punting Ace, I was sent into a violent fury of expletives and broken lamps. Jesus ye Gods, this was Miami and I couldn’t even get a direct line to the Punting Ace penthouse to explain the situation. The fury swelled me into a rage. The resignation letter has been half written…
Miami. I had the white linen suit out and the facial hair appropriately groomed. All I needed was a first class ticket and the better part of a week in a high quality hotel with a decent pool, dark carpets and a friendly barman. Maybe the Delano, on South Beach, though the carpets may be a problem there. I would have been locked down in the wild frenzy of Super Bowl week in one of the great cities of decadence and excess, finding The Story of Super Bowl XLI. In the spirit of Sonny Crockett, with perhaps a little bit of Bea Arthur in the air, your heavy-haired penman would have hunted down the true tales of the Super Bowl, slipping from the straight-up ceremony of media day and other organized functions to the seedy nightlife of dank clubs and Cuban hustlers like Peter Fonda circa 1967. A man for all scenes, so to speak…
But it wasn’t to be and the bitterness will last until league season and maybe longer. And those high rollers at Punting Ace have now got a renegade on their hands, a man fuelled by fury and driven by drama. Lets just say I will not be easy to deal with.
So now, with all hope of a Miami run off the board, I have no choice but to nut out a winner from the Koorawatha Hotel, a public house so far removed from civilization in central New South Wales. I will be able to clear my head shooting, drinking and gabbing with the local illegal butcher.
And the choice is not good. This is Sophie’s Choice lined with testosterone. The choice is now perennial big-time fuck-up Peyton Manning or the most incompetent quarterback to ever reach a Super Bowl (and yes, I was there for Kerry Collins, Stan Humphries and Tony Eason) in Rex Grossman. The NFL season has been a wild ride but I never expected it to end like this. Ah, the madness of it all.
From the ineptitude of early season selections to the hot regular season finale and early playoff glory, through to the carnage of Conference Championship weekend, the NFL roller coaster has sent me to ecstatic highs and plunged me to depths so low that projectile vomiting became an immediate reaction. And now, the lasting legacy will be determined this Sunday on the green turf of Dolphin Stadium and either Peyton Manning or Rex Grossman will be written in as the hero and be lauded as such from that day forth. And that is fairly hard to comprehend and conceptualise when, for as long as you can recall, you have one marked a high grade choker and the other an incompetent donkey more suited to low level accountancy than professional football.
But a choice has to be made. This is of course, the Super Bowl and professionals ride the train all the way to Death Valley.
And after delving through a veritable hatful of numbers, spending an inordinate amount of time analyzing personalities, hammering out the pros and cons of all the key match-ups, undertaking extraordinary actions to channel the gut feel and plowing through the Book of Revelation for three days while sitting high up in a gilded paddock outside Grenfell in pursuit of any clue, the decision became relatively simple.
The Indianapolis Colts will win Super Bowl XLI and they will win well. The Peyton Manning that we all know now- the man who has fallen at the big jumps time after time- will be slain, the legend of big-game ineptitude buried and forgotten. It will be heart-wrenching…I loved that Peyton. Cue sad, reflective background music. I loved betting against him when his stones were on the line. I loved that look of fear, trepidation and knowing of his impending defeat that would slide across his face in the dying seconds of the big one. I loved the ads of that Peyton. And come Sunday evening, Miami time, that Peyton Manning will be dead.
The Colts, simply, look a better side than Chicago. They win the match-ups, they win the numbers and they have history on their side.
On the coaching front, the Colts get the edge as Lovie Smith was a protégé of Tony Dungy. Dungy is a great thinker and great unifying presence, as is Smith, but it is always wise to favour the master over the student. At least until the student proves otherwise. And for all the good Lovie Smith has done in Chicago, he has shown faith in one of the worst QB’s in the NFL and you can’t give a coaching edge to somebody prepared to back Rex Grossman.
On the ground, both have very good tandem backs who can impact the game. Where the Colts will benefit and where the Bears will hurt will be Chicago’s over reliance on running the ball. Thomas Jones and Cedrick Benson will get a lot of carries and the Colts will look to force the Bears to throw by having eight in the box to clog up the gaps and stop the run. Popular opinion seems to give the edge to the Bears in the running game but that is not true. The Colts get the nod, with their underrated offensive line led by Jeff Saturday making gaps for Addai and the Colts are rejuvenated in their run defense since Bob Sanders returned.
In the air war, the Colts hold a significant advantage. Aside from having clearly the better quarterback, the Colts receivers of Reggie Wayne and Marvin Harrison are of a pro bowl standard week-in and week-out while the Bears can go hot and cold. The Colts also have Dallas Clark at tight end, a great third option. Throw in the questionable Bears secondary and if Manning gets hot, it could get messy.
The one area of love for Chicago is special teams. The Colts have the greatest kicker of all time knocking over shots but the Bears have a decent one themselves, as well as a great tactical punter and the most dangerous kick returner in the NFL.
But more important than all that, the Colts have the better quarterback and that will prove the real point of differentiation. Bad quarterbacks do not win Super Bowls. Bad quarterbacks rarely defeat good ones. Peyton Manning, for all his failings to date, is a great quarterback who has put up astounding numbers and is on his way to the Hall of Fame and will probably take a fair few throwing records there with him. Rex Grossman is a bum. The only way he is getting into the Hall of Fame is by paying the $14.95 ticket price and standing in line like the rest of us. Of the sixteen future Hall of Fame QB against non-Hall of Fame QB Super Bowl match-ups (and for recent Super Bowls, certain Hall of Famers like Brett Favre and Tom Brady have been included), the team led by the Hall of Famer are 11-4-1 against the spread. That is a pretty damning statistic and one that is well worth remembering today and tomorrow and as long as you, my beloved reader, plan on betting Super Bowls.
Not only will the Colts win the Super Bowl, they will win with some ease, covering the 6 ½ and leaving all who swung the blue and white horseshoe just a little richer. At least in a financial sense. At the end of the day, with the Colts against the Bears, none of us are going to be any richer for the experience. Not unless your name happens to be Mike Ditka or you get your kicks from hanging around downtown Indianapolis.
That’s the story and that’s how it is going to roll. Peyton will jump through the looking glass and we will all forget the last decade. There is no way to stop the train now. Brace yourself and hope like hell you survive to tell the tale. Logic and proportion have fallen softly dead. The White Knight is talking backwards and the Red Queen appears to be off her head.