OK, Seth, I’ll take the plunge and explore my rooting interests. Actually, I can’t say I’m “rooting” for any of the remaining teams, because a loss by any of them won’t cause me to mope around the house for two days. But I do have sympathies. Let’s take them, as Der Schottenheimer would say, one game at a time:
Seahawks at Bears: I have irrational indifference for both of these teams. I just find them dreadfully dull to watch, even though I like Shaun “the Third Barber” Alexander, * going back to his days at Alabama. Plus, if you believe those Football Outsiders rankings, the Seahawks are the 25th-best team in football. The Bears? Josh is right: They remind me of the 1995 and 1997 Chiefs (or the 2001 Chicago Bears), with that inept offense and a ball-hawking, scoring defense. I can’t bring myself to think much about them one way or the other. Is there a way they could “auto play” this game, like on Madden, so that it lasts about 10 seconds?
Eagles at Saints: I was born in Louisiana and lived in New Orleans for four years as a Tulane student, so I have residual affection for the Saints. This, despite my father telling me as a young lad, when I asked him as a Catholic and a Louisianan-by-birth about this team called the Saints that I discovered in my football cards: “Chris, that’s the worst team in football. They’ve never even had a winning season.” Historically, the Saints treated football games the way Francis of Assisi treated his possessions. They gave almost all of them away.
Kansas City lives and dies by the Chiefs, and Washington is Redskins-crazy, but no town that I’ve lived in loves its team more than the Crescent City loves its Saints, which is all the more astonishing given how awful they have been. When I was a kid in 1980s suburban Kansas City, you were embarrassed to tell your friends you liked the embarrassingly bad Chiefs. (In my addled, counterfactual universe, KC is still a Royals town, and Buddy Biancalana still shows up for endearingly humble appearances on David Letterman.) But New Orleans never gives up on its team. The typical Saints home game is a jazz funeral, a vibrant, swinging celebration of demise. (I watched the Saints lose to the Chiefs 30-17 in their 1994 home opener, among a crowd of what appeared to be Neil Smith’s relatives, all wearing Band-Aids on their noses.)
So, as they say, Geaux Saints! Or, who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints? The Eagles, I fear. I won’t predict that it will happen, but I worry that New Orleans is the home team likeliest to lose this weekend. Here’s a topic for discussion: Should the Eagles have jettisoned Donovan McNabb instead of T.O.? Sure, he’s a jerk, but the Eagles would be a Super Bowl contender (to win, not just to show) with Terrell Owens still on their team.
Colts at Ravens: Like Seth, I have some sympathy for the star-crossed Peyton Manning, and like Josh, I dislike the Ravens. More for Art Modell’s Irsay-like abandonment of Cleveland than for the obnoxiousness of Brian Billick, though. Still, I’d like to see Steve McNair win a Super Bowl after falling a yard short in the best Super Bowl in history. So, I’m mostly indifferent to the outcome of this game, though it’s the one I’m anticipating the most, after Chargers-Patriots.
Another subject for virtual barroom debate: Are the 2000 Baltimore Ravens the worst Super Bowl champions in history? I’m partial to saying that the 1990 Jeff Hostetler-led Giants are the worst, on the reasoning that their championship was predicated on something the Buffalo Bills did not do (make a field goal at the end of the game). But I’m amenable to deciding it’s the 2000 Ravens instead. Their team defense was admittedly great, but its reputation as “the best defense in NFL history” relied in large part on an extraordinarily weak offensive division that included the 4-12 Cincinnati Bengals and the 3-13 Cleveland Browns, a team in their second year after expansion. In addition, they played against Kerry Collins in the Super Bowl. This might be an open-and-shut case.
Patriots at Chargers: I used to serve up Blizzards (he always ordered Tropical) to Marty Schottenheimer as a 16-year-old Dairy Queen wage slave, so my objectivity is suspect. Despite my earnest wishes, Marty never said, “I’m just going to take this one Blizzard at a time. I’ll celebrate the delicious flavor of this one tonight and then start planning for next week’s purchase on Monday.” I would never root for the Broncos or the Raiders in any game, but the Chiefs’ rivalry with the Chargers is weak enough that I’d like to see Schottenheimer win it all.
Also—and readers should know that I say this at great risk to my personal safety, as my wife and I recently moved to the Boston neighborhood of Jamaica Plain—the hubris of Patriots fans is distasteful. Boston seems to have reached the late stages of dynasty fandom, in which the fans are so confident of victory that they don’t even get that excited about the games, because there’s no tingling, nervous anticipation before kickoff. The talk-radio airwaves are full of mockery of the “San Diego Super Chargers” song and bluster about how the Genius will outwit the Boobenheimer. I’ve never seen a No. 4 seed so confident it would defeat a No. 1 seed. And San Diego is not a weak No. 1, but rather the team that is by general acclamation the best in the NFL this year. Marty’s first Super Bowl, Manning’s first Super Bowl, or McNair’s shot at Super Bowl redemption—I prefer all of those story lines to a “Can Brady match Bradshaw and Montana with a fourth ring?” game.
A question for you, Josh: Everyone seems to think the AFC championship game will be “the real Super Bowl” this year, just as the NFC championship game between the Cowboys and 49ers (or whomever) used to be the critical matchup. I’ve always considered the weekend of the AFC and NFC championship games to be a superior day of football-watching to the Super Bowl, but is that still the case? We’ve had a string of terrific Super Bowls, in defiance of the conventional wisdom that the big game is always a tedious blowout. By my count, at least six, if not seven, of the last 10 Super Bowls were entertaining well into the second half.
Also, why does a league with such alleged Rozelle-inspired parity have such a small number of franchises (17, barely more than half) that have won it all?
Correction, Jan. 12, 2006: This piece originally misspelled the first name of Seattle Seahawks running back Shaun Alexander. (Click here to return to the corrected sentence.)
