Blogger's Note: Hey, look! It's my 200th post just in time for the Super Bowl!
We’re less than a week away from Super Bowl XLIX, and the hype/controversy storm is swirling. There are the few and proud New England and Seattle fans who are waiting for their shot at another Lombardi Trophy on Sunday. For the record, I'm going Patriots because Rob Gronkowski needs a ring, dang it! Also, a significant portion of my readership will hobble me if I don't go Pats, and I like having the ability to walk. But for that other 94%-ish of fans who’ve watched their own teams go down in somewhere between predictable and agonizing fashion this year, you’re probably still on the fence about who to adopt until September finally rolls around again. Fear not, dear reader! Here’s the fair and balanced Lady Blitz guide for you to weigh your options with Reasons to Love and Hate the Patriots and Seahawks:
Reasons to Love the Patriots
It’s the Year of the Gronk - This year, only two players in the entire NFL were voted All Pros unanimously and only one of them made the playoffs (the other being J.J. Watt). It’s laughable to put any tight end in the same stratosphere as a healthy Rob Gronkowski, and this season he picked up right where he left off the last time the Patriots made the Super Bowl. Dude is an unguardable certainty in the end zone and in the middle of the field, and unlike your Jimmy Grahams and Julius Thomases of the world, he’s a spectacular run blocker too. He parties in ways that 20-year-old you couldn’t have dreamed of, much less been able to afford. He even inspired some delightfully cringe-worthy fan erotica that will force you to rethink the capabilities of human imagination, or not. But I digress. The point is, Gronk is the brotastic keystone to this high-flying offense, and he gives the Pats their best shot to win against that scary Seattle defense. Ever since he got back to full strength in Week 5 against the Bengals, the Pats have gone 12 - 1 and the Gronk has twerked his way to a second Super Bowl appearance.
This Could Be the Last Hurrah for the Brady/Belichick Dynasty - As we saw from Peyton Manning just a few weeks ago, you can never quite predict how or when the decline will come but it will come, even for a Hall of Fame quarterback. Tom Brady is 36 and seeking out his fourth Super Bowl ring, a QB feat most recently accomplished by Brady’s childhood idol Joe Montana. Not everyone loves the Brady/Belichick dynasty as a rooting interest, but we probably won’t see another truly dominant franchise stretch like this one for a long time. Since Brady first took the helm for an injured Drew Bledsoe in 2001, the Patriots have had a winning record every single year, had a 16 - 0 regular season, won their division 12 times, won 19 playoff games, went to 9 conference championships and will have gone to 6 Super Bowls by this time next week. But for all that success, they haven’t won the big one in over a decade, and no one knows how many more chances they’ll have as the Andrew Lucks and AFC Norths of the world wait on the doorstep each year. This might be the Pats’ last best chance to make a little more history during an era every single other team would kill for, and they thankfully won’t have the chance to be embarrassed by Eli Manning this time.
Their Coaching Shenanigans Are Fun! - I’m not talking about any cheating antics… yet (see the next section). I’m talking about the kind of insane scheme designs and strategic adjustments the Patriots make on a weekly basis to outwit opponents and make it impossible to predict what you’ll get out of this offense or defense next. If you’re an Xs and Os nerd, you can’t help but fawn over the ways this team innovates to expose others’ weaknesses and stay one step ahead in the chess match. Take New England’s first game against the Colts when they added an extra lineman on most offensive snaps and made Jonas Gray [a very temporary] household name. In that same game, they went against conventional wisdom that says you should put your best corner on the best receiver so they could bracket T.Y. Hilton and put Darrelle Revis on Indy’s #2. Against the Ravens in the divisional round, the Patriots transitioned deftly to the no-huddle in the second half without a single running play and finally let former college QB Julian Edelman throw the ball to Danny Amendola after keeping that play under wraps for six freaking years. They also threw John Harbaugh and Baltimore’s secondary off with some bizarre substitutions and eligibility changes at the line of scrimmage to keep them guessing [poorly] where Brady was headed next. So if you want to expect the unexpected in coaching strategy, the hooded dark lord is your guy.
Reasons to Hate the Patriots
They Definitely Cheat and Ginger Hammer Don’t Care - I’m firmly in the “this deflated ball scandal is overblown” camp given that: 1) it didn’t really impact the Patriots’ performance in a run-heavy blowout, 2) apparently a lot of teams do this to some degree, and 3) its scandalization benefited heavily from the slowest media week of the NFL season. I’m also in the camp that Ballghazi is a much better scandal name than Deflategate. Enough with the -Gates, already. But they definitely cheated here. I trust in the science of Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson far more than I do in the convoluted, delayed explanations of Bill Belichick and Tom Brady, anyway. Had this been New England's only infraction in modern memory, I don't think it'd get a lot of air time (punny, I know!). But it only served to revive the ghosts of Spygate 2007 during which the Patriots were caught filming opponents' defensive signals and for which Roger Goodell doled out a wrist-slap fine and single lost draft pick. Given that the NFL has no interest in dealing with this scandal until the offseason and that Goodell and Patriots owner Robert Kraft are exceptionally chummy, many have speculated that this will all get swept under the rug too. So unless you're a diehard Pats fan with a lot of great rationalizations we can't wait to hear, you're probably seething a little bit at all of the Patriots' righteous indignation and the league's continued, inevitable inconsistency in handling these disciplinary issues. It has certainly given New England's critics more ammo to put an asterisk next to an extraordinary dynastic run whether or not that is deserved.
Tom Brady Is Kind of a Tool - I've known many a Patriots fan to gush about Tom Brady and then in a moment of clarity add that they would absolutely hate the guy if he played for any other team. After so many spectacular seasons, it's easy to forget that No. 12 was basically Mr. Irrelevant when he was first drafted in the sixth round. Heck, it's easy to forget that people thought he was done or headed to Houston just four months ago after an uncharacteristically slow start to this season, so I simply cannot knock Tom Brady the quarterback. But as a person, he strikes me as someone you'd actively try to avoid at a party for his overly intense toolishness. The guy wears Uggs and dog collars by choice for crying out loud, and he's back to his headbutting bro-ed out ways on the field too. You may think I'm reading too much into this, but why else would the guy's teammates continually leave their best player hanging on the bench? There's something to that. So just remember, if you decide to cheer for the Patriots this weekend, you're also cheering for this:
Reasons to Love the Seahawks
The Legion of Boom Is Still Great - It's logical to expect a little drop off every time a team has a dominant season and braces for a subsequent Super Bowl hangover. Indeed, Seattle looked a little shaky after they dropped more losses in their first ten weeks this season than they did in all of 2013. But then Seattle's defense turned the water off and notched eight straight wins to get to the Super Bowl again. For the second year in a row, the Seahawks lead the league in defensive points and yards allowed, and they are #1 against the pass and #3 against the run. While they weren't as masterful in generating turnovers during this regular season as they were last year, they've already forced a fumble and four interceptions in their two playoff games including a beautiful 90-yard pick six by Kam Chancellor. From Chancellor to Richard Sherman to Earl Thomas, it's still suffocating to try to throw the ball at all, much less to throw the ball well against this team. You better believe Seattle will be leaning on LOB for another heavy-hitting beatdown against Tom Brady & co. on Sunday, and it will be another treat to watch.
Pete Carroll Is the Anti-Belichick - File this one under "Reasons to Hate the Seahawks" if you're a Patriots fan since Pete Carroll was oustered to make way for Belichick in New England 15 years ago. But if you don't care for the gruff command-and-control ways of the Patriots coach, Carroll might just be your guy. Ever since the Seahawks pulled off the upset against the heavily favored Saints in the 2011 Wild Card, Seattle has held Pete Carroll in its loving arms and never let go. He's an impossibly cheery, gum-chewing optimist who turned the Seahawks into a perennial contender in just three years, but he and his players still play like scrappy underdogs with everything in the world to prove. I pretty much wrote all of this to point you to Andrew Sharp's brilliant piece on Grantland where he compares Belichick to college basketball's Coach K and Carroll to John Calipari. Belichick and Coach K are "the last vestiges of the idea that supreme authority and a fearsome temper are the best ways to run a team. The rest of the word has moved on, but these two have been grandfathered in to the future, and they are both too successful to question... If they lose, they get excused, because they just didn’t have quite enough pieces this year. They’ve also been more successful than anyone we’ve seen in the past 25 years. It’s not like either one has anything left to prove." On the other hand, Carroll, like Calipari "is stockpiling outrageous amounts of talent, his players adore him, and he’s pathologically upbeat in a way that almost makes him suspicious.... While guys like Coach K and Belichick can lose without hurting their legacy even a little bit, no matter how much Carroll and Calipari win, they will always have something left to prove to people convinced they can’t really coach."
Reasons to Hate the Seahawks
They’re Getting a Little Full of Themselves - I guess that works as a steroids jab too - Hey, the Seahawks probably still use a lot of steroids, even though they've been busted before! But also, they've built up quite an arrogant streak ever since winning the big one last year with no signs of slowing down. Interpreting Marshawn Lynch's antics above differently, he thinks nothing of inflicting obscene gestures on opponents he's already beaten in the end zone and puts velvet ropes around his parked Lamborghini when he's off the field. Rarely a day goes by where we don't hear something from Richard Sherman about being the greatest cornerback of all time when his stats would speak perfectly well for themselves. And most recently, I was plain dumbstruck by these guys' hubris after stealing the NFC Championship from the Packers despite the fact that it was a game they had no business winning. Doug Baldwin absolutely went off on reporters for "giving up" on the team earlier in the season, even though the Seahawks went 3 - 3 during that stretch. But the last piece of cake goes to Russell Wilson, who has convinced himself that his abysmal 4-interception performance during that game was all part of God's master plan to reward him with a Seahawks' comeback. That's right. A grown man believes: 1) that an all-powerful omnipotent God would spend any time whatsoever influencing a professional football game through divine intervention instead of working on, say, pestilence and famine; and 2) that God hates the Packers so much that he would completely crush their spirits so that Russell Wilson could easily rationalize away the worst performance of his NFL career.
This Isn't 2014 - And now a small preview for my Super Bowl predictions later on this week: The Seahawks are certainly still a stacked, resilient group, but they just haven't looked quite like the totally dominant team they were a year ago. Although they finished the season 6 - 0, five of those games were against the rest of the reeling NFC West. Despite having homefield advantage throughout the playoffs, the Seahawks let an inferior Carolina Panthers team hang around a lot longer than they should have and, again, really had no business winning against the Packers even though Aaron Rodgers was basically playing with one leg. Seattle's run defense took a step back against Jonathan Stewart and Eddie Lacy, and the offense has looked far from ideal with Russell Wilson getting very little help from his thin receiving corps and shuffled offensive line. So I don't expect the same kind of smackdown that these guys delivered to Peyton Manning in SB XLVIII. To the delightful contrary, I expect a very good, highly competitive game.
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