The Moral Victory Slow Clap Award: Carolina's Defense
As dismal as things were for the Panthers on Sunday night, one side of the ball had a nearly flawless performance. Carolina's defense was absolutely superb, holding the Broncos to less than 200 yards of total offense, one--one!--third down conversion and Peyton Manning to an abysmal 9.9 QB rating. Those three stats are the worst a winning team's offense has ever "achieved" in the Super Bowl, and while this unit will understandably be eclipsed by Denver's even-more-spectacular performance, they did everything they could to give their team a chance to win. That's why they get first dibs on this here Lady Blitz post. Had the Panthers been able to pull off the W on Sunday, the MVP would have assuredly gone to Kony Ealy. He was just as good as eventual MVP Von Miller with two strip sacks on one drive and a one-handed interception for the highlight reel. The whole 14-point difference in this game came down to two Broncos fumble recoveries deep in Carolina territory, only one of which the Panthers defense even had a chance to stop. As ugly as some would call this game, it was tragic from the start that only one of these two defenses could walk away victorious. With Ron Rivera at the helm and a young set of draft classes that just can't miss, Carolina's defense will be good enough to contend for a long time. There's just some cosmic injustice right now that Denver's offense has rings and these guys don't.
The Beautiful Vortex of Destruction Award: DeMarcus Ware & Von Miller
When I was nerding out reading billions of Super Bowl recaps on Monday, probably one of my favorite things came from Jeremy Stahl. He made the point that low-scoring games get written off as sloppy and boring because we define success in terms of the offense moving the ball downfield and scoring, preferably profusely. That obviously didn't happen this week, but if you were only looking for electrifying quarterbacking, you really missed out on a once-in-a-lifetime tandem performance from DeMarcus Ware and Von Miller. The big line stats were all there - Ware and Miller combined for 4.5 sacks and 6 knockdowns on Cam Newton as well as two forced fumbled that sealed Miller's MVP honors and set up the Broncos' only two touchdowns. But in subtle and then obvious ways, this dynamic duo altered what the Panthers could do on just about every offensive snap, even when it didn't show up on the stat sheet. They completely collapsed the pocket and forced the elusive Newton to throw, often to the sideline and off target. They made Carolina tackles Michael Oher and Mike Remmers household names for all the wrong reasons. Switching up their alignment and blitz packages as part of Wade Phillips' diabolical plan, they had the league MVP seeing ghosts from all sides by the third quarter and held the NFL's top-scoring offense to just 10 points and 3 of 15 third-down conversions. Was it ugly? For the Panthers, absolutely. But for Denver, pulling off perhaps the biggest upset since the Giants stunned the 18 - 0 Patriots in 2008, this was the Sistine Chapel of what a truly special pass rush can do.
The What Will the Aliens Think of Us Someday? Award: All Those Bowel Meds Commercials
There are times when I have a surreal feeling that if I was watching most pop culture in the U.S. unfold in another country/language, it would seem about ten times as absurd. That's probably how Germany and Nigeria are thinking about us if they happened to catch the not one but two Super Bowl ads concerning miserly or generous bowels and the pharmaceuticals that love them. The Weinstein-quality black and white number for constipation had all the class in the world, but it just couldn't compete with a CGI-ed sack of intestines going to the big game without its host body. What a terrifying experience that must have been for his fellow spectators, not knowing if or when his irritable bowel syndrome would come back at an inopportune time! To be fair though, there weren't any real standout commercials to me in the "Super Bowl of Advertising" on Sunday other than maybe those little dachshunds in hot dog costumes because, c'mon, so maybe this truly was the Year of the Bowel Movement.
The Lady Blitz Philosophical Nugget Award: What Do We Actually Expect Out of Sports Press Conferences?
In these past 36 hours, I think the hot take train has gone full circle from Cam Newton being a petulant sulk monster to a lightning rod for racist morons to a guy getting ridiculed by his opponents behind a curtain to maybe just a football player who had an awful game on the most public stage and is trying to deal with that in the 12 minutes or so after it happened. It's all a circus, no doubt manufactured by the sports media brain trust to get us to bite on the click bait. Newton didn't have a great press conference by any measure, but the sheer volume and flavor of the criticism toward this guy makes me ponder, What Do We Actually Expect Out of Sports Press Conferences? Without Googling, can you remember any poignant moments from the losing team's conference after the last five Super Bowls? The reason for that is, we expect them all to comply with a forgettable boiler plate script of "Give all the credit to the other team, they outplayed us" and "We'll be back - this is only motivation for us to get stronger." To have a successful conference is to act out the play we all know by heart, not to say what you're actually feeling or thinking. And if that's the case, why have them with the losing team immediately after the game? You're either going to get a guy going through the motions so he can get the heck out of Dodge or a guy who's so despondent he can't follow the script we wanted to hear so we could forget it. From my vantage point, at least some part of Newton's shut down might have had to do with the fact that he got zero help from the rest of his offense and didn't want to put them on blast - his tackles got destroyed and gave him no time to throw, Jonathan Stewart couldn't get anything going on the ground after what looked like a bad leg injury, Ted Ginn dropped six passes. Sometimes it's better to say nothing at all. And for those of you wringing hands about his lack of leadership and maturity, how did you feel about Peyton Manning when he left Super Bowl XLIV without shaking any of the Saints players' hands? I thought not.
The Interception of the Night Award: Beyoncé
In a game featuring a big nasty six turnovers, the interception of the game had to be when Beyoncé ripped the spotlight away from Coldplay and spiked it in the end zone like a boss at halftime. She's already in Formation, and the revolution has started.
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