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The Saints Go Marching HomePlus, how the Colts finally beat the Patriots.

By Josh Levin
Posted Monday, Jan. 22, 2007, at 2:04 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

How did this happen? Brendan I. "Love the Colts" Koerner says the turning point came when center Jeff Saturday saved Indy's bacon, recovering a fumble in the end zone to tie the game at 28. "When I looked in his furious, lard-ass eyes, I knew we were gonna win," Koerner says.

To my eyes, the Colts' key moment came after Pats cornerback Asante Samuel's brilliant interception and return put the Patriots in front 21-3. In simple terms, Manning didn't go limp. Rather than resorting to safe, short passes, he kept flinging the ball down the field. With Samuel and a surprising Ellis Hobbs playing sticky defense on Indy's Marvin Harrison and Reggie Wayne, Manning repeatedly found tight end Dallas Clark running free in the middle of the field. Those routes were open because the Colts smartly maintained a balanced offense when playing from behind, mixing in runs from Dominic Rhodes and Joseph Addai. But even so, the Patriots got a consistent pass rush from their defensive line and blitzers off the edge. Manning dealt with the pressure by flouting the conventional wisdom that a quarterback must step up in the pocket. Rather, he backpedaled to buy his receivers enough time to break into the clear, then lofted the ball into the wide open spaces between the Pats linebackers.

In the Belichick era, the Patriots have won bushels of games they had no business winning. See, for example, last week's game against the Chargers. The Pats have done this so many times that it almost stopped making sense to evaluate them rationally. Now that they've finally lost a game in January that they should've won, their mystique will dissipate. It's about time.

Bill Belichick and Tom Brady never had a magic formula for winning in the postseason. The Patriots won three Super Bowls because they were a talented, well-coached team and because they made winning plays at the end of tight games. That the Pats, and Tom Brady, continually made these clutch plays doesn't make them lucky, or undeserving. But it also isn't evidence that New England won because of some kind of innate "clutchness." Just like Peyton Manning's postseason failures prior to this season didn't mean he was a choker.

Manning's late-game drive to send the Colts to the Super Bowl will burnish his legacy. The fact that he finally beat the Patriots, though, doesn't mean he's suddenly a better player than he was last week. It just shows that if you give a great quarterback enough chances, he's going to succeed. And Tom Brady's game-ending interception? If you give a great player enough chances, he's going to fail, too.

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Josh Levin is a Slate associate editor. You can e-mail him at .
Photograph of the Bears' Adewale Ogunleye dumping Gatorade on coach Lovie Smith by Al Bello/Getty Images.
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