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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
I surrender: I'm backing the Patriots until someone beats them in the playoffs. Plus: Don't believe everything you see in the divisional round.
Jan 18, 2005 | I'm picking the Patriots over the Steelers Sunday. I give, I've been won over. I won't pick against the Patriots again until somebody beats them in a playoff game.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me every damn time for four years, well, you know.
How could I have been so dumb? How could all of us who picked the Colts -- and almost everyone who does anything like what I do for a living picked the Colts, though as usual the fans were smarter -- not have seen the customary Indy meltdown in the flurrying snow of Foxboro? It seems so obvious now that one of the best offenses in the history of the league would be rendered impotent by a defense missing three important players, including its starting cornerbacks.
And who didn't know coming in that Peyton Manning, who had destroyed opposing defenses all year partly by throwing downfield, wouldn't try to throw downfield against that patchwork secondary that included a wide receiver, several undrafted free agents and a guy who two weeks ago was unemployed, with no extenuating circumstances?
I don't care if your quarterback is Peyton Manning or Todd Marinovich, how can you play a game in 2004, the Year of the Defensive Holding Penalty, and not uncork some long throws? A lot of them.
This was, after all, a rematch of last year's AFC Championship Game, which the Patriots won by mugging the Colts' receivers, and which resulted in the league, at the behest of the Colts, cracking down this year on the rule that forbids defensive players from touching receivers more than five yards past the line of scrimmage.
In that atmosphere, throwing down the field has become the best bet in town. Just sending four or five guys into the pattern gives you pretty good odds that a defensive back is going to look at one of them a little funny and draw a flag.
Instead, Manning spent all day dumping off screens and checkdown passes, which the Patriots' speedy linebackers gobbled up like things that get gobbled up by speedy linebackers.
How could I have not seen that Manning wouldn't do his line-of-scrimmage Watusi, changing the play and imposing his will on the defense time and again? Who didn't know that Manning would merely try to take what the defense gave him, like ordinary mortal quarterbacks do, the kind of guys who have gone 2-26 against New England since Week 5 of 2003?
It should be noted that that 2-26 mark is better than the 0-4 record Manning's Colts have put up against the Patriots in that same stretch, but at least in the first three losses the Colts went down swinging.
