XLI: The Day After

I've had the night to digest the game. Certainly, it was one where we would all call "peculiar". Here are some thoughts I had about the Colts-Bears match-up.

• Super Bowl XL was the most boring close Super Bowl ever. So, it only makes sense to follow that up with the most exciting lopsided Super Bowl the next year.
• From the pre-game I realized how terrific it was to see a Super Bowl affected by the weather. Football is supposed to be the hard-nosed tough guy game. But playing the championship indoors or in sunny and warm weather defeats the purpose. So seeing all that rain was refreshing.
• That said, CBS could have done a better job covering the camera lenses. On several plays, the offensive and defensive lines looked like a white and black smudge.
• The opening kickoff return for a TD started what may have been the most thrilling first ten minutes in Super Bowl history. Incredible.
• Hats off to Tony Dungy. He is a class act and he has finally won the big game.
• The Bears need a new defensive coordinator. I don't particularly buy into the idea that they had a great defense this year. They kept guarding against the big play and subsequently got burned on little plays all game long. That they failed to adjust is embarrassing.
• Peyton Manning deserves all the praise in the world. He is a class act. He is a great quarterback. And by winning a Super Bowl, has launched himself into the next level. One can legitimately call him the best of his generation now. He's years away from being compared with the best ever (Montana and Elway), but he's certainly done what he needed to do to step up when it mattered.
• Which also leads me to this: Peyton Manning can not be compared to Dan Marino. Marino is no Manning. He couldn't win the big one.
• Still, Manning did not deserve the MVP. No single player contributed more to the Colts' success last night than Rex Grossman.
• I wanted the Bears to win. I didn't like how the press hammered away at Grossman and I hoped he would win and shut the media up. Instead he proved them right. And in the process, made guys like Patrick Ewing and Alex Rodriguez look not so bad in the clutch. Neither of them singlehandedly cost their teams a championship.
• Let it be said that anyone saying this is the Colts' second Super Bowl victory is categorically wrong. The Indianapolis Colts have won only one Super Bowl. What happened in Baltimore stayed in Baltimore. When a team moves, they lose the right to their history. That history stays in the city it had abandoned. The San Francisco Giants never won a World Series. The Oakland Athletics won four, not nine, championships. And Indy has one Lombardi trophy.
• Which still is one more than my beloved Eagles.