Giant Upset in Super Bowl (sports)

photo from the Associated Press


Okay, I missed the Super Bowl or about ninety eight percent of it. My daughter had a tournament and we did the family thing. I could have recorded it, I just didn’t figure on the game being actually interesting. I did see that incredible throw and catch between Eli Manning and David Tyree. It might have been the biggest single play in Super Bowl history. There might be more spectacular scrambles and maybe there’s a better catch, but I don’t think there’s been one with that much riding on it. I guess about the only “knock” is that it wasn’t a touchdown. I had no idea who David Tyree was so I looked him up and learned that he’d caught all of four passes for thirty five yards during the regular season. He has made the Pro Bowl as a special teams player though, so he isn’t a total obscurity.

Two years ago, I was listening to ESPN radio and the subject was how Tom Coughlin’s time in New York was all but up because he was too much of an old school “hard ass” and possibly due to that he had no idea how to develop Eli Manning. I wish I had a tape of that show. I thought it was cool to see older brother Peyton Manning in the stands cheering his younger brother on. Two years ago, Peyton was the brother who had made good but who couldn’t win the truly big game and Eli was the possibly wasted first round draft choice who was never going to survive New York. Now they both have Super Bowl championships (first brothers to do it I think). Ironically Tiki Barber whose twin brother Ronde Barber won one with Tampa Bay, retired from the Giants just before this year after having been the heart of the team’s offense for so many years. It just felt good to see Peyton cheering his brother on even as the ground just shifted around the two.

Some are now comparing Bill Bellichick to Richard Nixon. For many years, Bellichick has been the coach with all the answers and three Super Bowl wins. Now, he’s lost the big one to a team that was supposedly vastly inferior to his undefeated and unprecedented Patriots. Fwiw Randy Moss must bring some seriously strange karma wherever he goes. More significant, Bellichick is the center of a spying scandal that got bigger right on the eve of the Super Bowl. It’s gone from was he stealing signals by videotaping the other team’s bench to did he sneak in a camera of the Rams practice just before the Super Bowl?
Perhaps it’s no accident that the Bush Administration has called its surveillance legislation the “Patriot Act”.

If Bellichick cheated, what do we do about it? My take is that you suspend him for a few years for messing with the integrity of the game.

Anyway, I’m not a Giants fan or a Tom Coughlin fan, but this was a victory for doing things the old-fashioned way: hard work, a good game plan, and a refusal to be initimidated by the hype. It was a game really won by Michael Strahan and the New York defensive scheme. It’ll probably be remembered as the moment when Eli Manning stepped up to elite status as a quarterback. I prefer to think of it as David Tyree’s moment. Somehow it seems fitting that it came at the expense of Randy Moss.

I just hope it’s an omen for these kinds of triumphs in other realms of life (hint 2008 election and don't let the cheaters win). Okay, you want the other weird thing? They had last year’s American Idol winner (Fox carries both the Super Bowl and American Idol), Jordin Sparks sing the national anthem. The clip I saw had her sounding great (it’s lipsynched by the way for some odd legal reason). She was the youngest winner ever on the show and her CD didn’t do very well. In a way this was her comeback too. Guess what? Jordin Sparks’s father, Phillippi, naturally once played defensive back for the New York Giants and her family lives in Glendale, Arizona (the site of the game)In nine years, he never got to the Super Bowl.

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