A classic Super Bowl as NFL braces for the worst

“Just as the Saints had carried the people through their terrible, difficult times, the fans now turned out to carry the Saints. For forty years, through good times and bad, New Orleans had always stuck by its team. Tonight would be no exception. They came together and rallied around these all-too-human beings, their beloved Saints, just when they needed it most.”

Those words were written by Alan Donnes at the end of his 2007 book, Patron Saints. They describe the sentiments of New Orleans Saints’ fans following the team’s heartbreaking loss in the 2007 NFC Championship Game, just a year and a half after Hurricane Katrina destroyed the city.

The final chapter has now been written.


Let’s hope NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell reads the book or gets the picture or whatever it takes to realize just how good he has it and just how much stands to change if the 2011 season is lost due to a lockout.

Goodell got everything he could ask for last night on the world’s largest stage. For once, sports turned out to be everything they’re supposed to be. Even though the 14 point difference was the widest of any Super Bowl since 2003, the game appeared headed for overtime –and a huge controversy— deep into the fourth quarter. In the end, Drew Brees and the Saints proved to be the best Super Bowl story since Joe Namath led another underdog to a championship 43 years ago.

Isn’t it strange to think that such an exciting game had very little buzz over the past two weeks? For awhile, it looked as though this might be the Super Bowl remembered more for a commercial featuring a college quarterback who might never get a chance to play in the big game or for Michael Irvin and Warren Sapp, the two former stars who allegedly can’t keep their hands off women.

But what everyone failed to take into account was just how popular football is. Focus on the Family can’t ruin the Super Bowl. A couple of clowns who still want to live the athlete’s life can’t either.

The only thing that can ruin the Super Bowl is if the game doesn’t get played at all.

And that’s what we’re looking at as we head into an uncapped year. Next season will be fine. But if we’re to believe NFL Player’s Association Executive Director DeMaurice Smith, the following season is seriously in doubt. Asked what the likelihood of a lockout last week, Smith didn’t hesitate to express his concern.

“On a scale of 1 to 10, it's a 14," he said. "I keep coming back to an economic model in America that is unparalleled -- and that makes it incredibly difficult to then come to players and say, on average, each of you needs to take a $340,000 pay cut to save the National Football League. Tough sell. Tough sell."

Indeed it is.

And guess what? Unlike what happened in baseball in 1994, the fans are going to side with the players.

This won’t be a case of greedy athletes just trying to grab every penny they can. Not when you have a leader like Smith, who is willing to tell the world about the demands from both sides. Smith said the league’s owners want players to take an 18 percent pay cut and they want players to accept only 41 percent of applied revenues, down from the current 59 percent.

At a time when everyone is finally starting to open their eyes and realize how dangerous the game of football is, the owners think the player’s deserve less. And they know that even if there is a lockout, they will still make $5 billion from the league’s television contracts.

Goodell can’t allow this to get any uglier. On almost all other fronts, he has been the model commissioner. But if 2011 winds up a year filled with replacement players or –dare I say—no football at all, everything will change.

All he has to do is keep this thing running.

Or he risks becoming Bud Selig.

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A great matchup, but expect a slow two weeks

If you’re going on vacation to some remote island where all you’ll be doing is sipping frozen drinks and relaxing on the beach while staying completely out of touch with the real world for the next two weeks, you should be thrilled with the Super Bowl XLIV matchup awaiting you upon your return.

The rest of us, unfortunately, can only moan about what could have been.

Rather than getting 14 days of Rex Ryan-isms, TMZ following the boy wonder Mark Sanchez’s every move and of course, endless Brett Favre talk, we’ll have the Indianapolis Colts with Silent Jim Caldwell and Peyton Manning talking to us about hard work and discipline on one side and the New Orleans Saints with their standoffish coach Sean Payton and his not-quite-ready-to-be-a-media-darling quarterback Drew Brees on the other. The best chance we have of avoiding an incredibly boring two weeks is if Manning becomes the new Tiger Woods. Of if he slept with Tiger too.

The Jets could have made the buildup to Super Bowl XLIV infinitely more interesting. Last week, I kept comparing the AFC Championship Game to the Massachusetts Senate race. The Jets were the team that came from nowhere, the team that only qualified for the playoffs because the rest of the conference choked over the final month of the season. But they got a little lucky, started to gain some steam and before you knew it, people were actually picking Gang Green to pull off the upset in Indianapolis. The Jets were Scott Brown. Which made the Colts Martha Coakley, although not even Coach Caldwell is as bland as her. They were the traditional powerhouse that paid no mind to the much less established Jets, so much so that they sat their starters in week 14, inadvertently helping them qualify for the playoffs.

Somehow the defense-first Jets became more appealing than Manning and his Colts. I even found myself cheering for them yesterday. I don’t know what it was about the idea of Rex Ryan having to answer questions like, “Tyrannosaurus Rex or Pterodactyl?”at Media Day that made me smile so much. Not to mention, two weeks of Ryan could very well have provided us with twenty years of great beer commercials. Two weeks of Caldwell will only force us to drink beer to excess.

On the other end, we could have had the Bizarro World situation of Favre in a Vikings uniform with the chance to win another Super Bowl ring. Because of all the focus on his many retirements in recent years, I don’t think people really remember just how much Favre meant to Green Bay and what a dagger it must be to see him wearing purple and gold. I mean, how many parents in Wisconsin used to scare their children with threats like, “if you don’t clean your room, Brett Favre will sign with the Vikings” and how many children believed them?

That alone would have made the Vikings a more interesting story than the Saints. Of course, it’s not as though an entire city rallying around a football team following a devastating hurricane isn’t compelling; it’s just that Favre is simply the most polarizing athlete in the world today – maybe ever. Willingly going to Minnesota might make him the biggest traitor in sports since Babe Ruth.

That’s not to say we won’t enjoy the game we have. We will. What’s not to like? For the first time since 1993, the No. 1 seed from each conference we’ll meet in the season’s final game. We get to watch the top two quarterbacks in the league squaring off in a shootout capable of challenging the 49ers/Chargers for the highest scoring Super Bowl of all time. All signs point to this being a classic.

It’s just the next two weeks that concern me.

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