At the end of the third quarter and the start of the fourth, as I drove my family back from the Super Bowl Party we attended (if my four-year-old stays up much past 8 p.m. the moon gets high enough and she turns into a were-girl), we had a chance to listen to a little of Marv Albert and Boomer Esiason’s call on the radio.
We picked it up as the Colts began the drive that would end in Matt Stover’s missed 51-yard field goal attempt. As it began, Esiason, the former Bengal and Jet quarterback, surmised that the game would still come down to which team could make one key defensive stop. And it did feel that way, despite the fact that what many believed would be a shoot-out had featured just 33 combined points during its first 50 minutes.
Shortly thereafter we returned home, turned on the TV, put it on pause (modern technology!) and took my younger daughter up to bed. A little while later we returned to watch the amazing end of another dramatic Super Bowl (the last decade of football season-enders has featured a half-dozen exciting games following blowout after blowout in the ’90s) at the end of another remarkable NFL season. Ultra-parity lives in the League when two of the teams from its smallest markets meet in the Super Bowl. Indianapolis versus New Orleans should be less likely than the Kansas City Royals against the Pittsburgh Pirates in the World Series, and yet who can imagine the latter happening in this day and age.
And then the fairy tale ending (the Saints pull it out for their epically embattled city) caps it all off.
Later on, in the blizzard of post-game numbers, one statistic stood out. In the finale of a season in which the high-powered Colts had averaged 12 possessions per game, a variety of factors (most of all the Saints’ successful short-passing offense) conspired to limit the number of times Indianapolis even had a chance to score. The favored Colts ended up possessing the ball only eight times in Miami.
And that difference was huge. It didn’t feel like the Saints defense had even made a dent in the Indianapolis offense but somehow they’d managed to make it into the fourth quarter down only 17-16 (how many people would have predicted that after the Colts rushed to the 10-0 first quarter lead).
So when the Saints did achieve the one critical stop at the end of my family’s radio drive, and their offense caught the huge break of great field position despite the defense having allowed the Colts to drive deep in their territory, it was the game’s second huge pivot point.
Stover’s poor recent history on field goal attempts of 50 or more yards made that option the least sensible of the three that presented themselves to Colts coach Jim Caldwell at that point didn’t it?
Go for it coach (yes, I know it was fourth-and-11 – Peyton Manning can complete a pass for a dozen yards in his sleep) or go for a pooch punt. But don’t give the Saints the ball at their 41.
The first pivot point was, of course, the ballsiest call in the history of the Super Bowl.
Never before in the last 44 NFL championship games had a head coach called for an onside kick before fourth-quarter desperation time.
But local guy Sean Payton did it at the start of the second half.
Folks will talk about it being a huge momentum shift and amazingly aggressive, but mostly it was a call grounded in cold, analytical reasoning. The Saints couldn’t let the Colts offense have the ball too many times. They had to do something outlandish to increase their overall possession time.
The final pivot point was the only turnover of the contest (in addition to no fumbles in this gem of a game in which there were virtually no penalties). It was the interception returned for the game’s final points and it is the play that will haunt Peyton Manning. All of the silly stuff about Manning approaching greatest-ever status was exposed for the foolishness it is. The guy is now 9-9 in the playoffs in his career. Heck, there’s another active quarterback whose post-season record towers over that mark. And you may recall that Tom Brady has still won three times as many championships as Manning.
Bulls Beat
A large win for the Bulls Saturday – bad losses so frequently turn into sizable losing streaks in the NBA and when the home team again failed to solve the mysterious (to the Bulls and the Bulls alone) Clippers early last week, just such a skid loomed. It appeared the home team would follow its remarkable five-game win road streak with a similar run in the other direction and, sure enough, two more setbacks followed.
The good news, though, was that the Bulls played much better in those two losses than they had against Los Angeles. And their work paid off in Saturday’s stop-the-bleeding, 95-91 win over Miami.
The home team pulled that one out despite the absence of Joakim Noah due to plantar fasciitis in his foot (the news on that was creepy – team doctors extracted blood from Noah’s shoulder and injected it into his heel to speed healing) and Tyrus Thomas.
Thomas, whose time with the Bulls is almost certainly nearing an end (they’d love to trade him but almost certainly won’t be able to – he’ll have a chance to be a restricted free agent at the end of the season and if they sign him, they could limit their options under the salary cap), was suspended for cursing out our coach Vinny.
The guys who did play, particularly Derrick Rose down the stretch and Luol Deng (who averaged over 25 points in the Bulls’ two weekend games) all game long, did just enough to hold off Dwyane Wade’s Heat.
The Bulls improved to 24-25, travel to Indiana on Tuesday and then host Orlando the next evening to wrap things up before the All-Star break.
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Jim “Coach” Coffman rounds up the sports weekend in this space every Monday. He welcomes your comments.
Posted on February 8, 2010