Super Bowl XLI

Just a few quick comments on the Colts-Bears Super Bowl.

I’m kind of glad the Colts won, because it ended the ridiculous pre-arguments of whether Peyton Manning would be considered a great quarterback in the future if he ended up never having won a Super Bowl. I’m just not fond of that sort of the idea that you need to win a Super Bowl to be considered great, since football is a team sport. To be the champions, your team also needs to have good offensive players around you, good defense, good coaching, and luck; most of which are outside the quarterbacks sphere of influence. Although what’s funny is that the debate is over, even though Manning’s body of work this postseason has been significantly less than stellar. Reminds me of how the knock on Steve Young was that he couldn’t win the big one, and people stopped saying that once he threw six touchdown passes in his winning Super Bowl. Of course, that was against the 1994 Chargers, one of the weakest Super Bowl contenders ever, so the game technically proved much less than it might have, but nobody cared about that. I’ll end by saying I’m a big Steve Young fan, and the pre-Super Bowl debate over whether he was great without having won a championship was just as silly as it was this time around.

The game was certainly sloppy from a technical, pure football standpoint. But I thought it was compelling emotionally. After the first quarter it definitely looked like the Colts were imposing their will on the Bears. And yet the Bears bent, bent, bent, but didn’t break until the very end. So the tension of not knowing who would win was maintained until well into the fourth quarter. The other thing I liked about the game (and the playoff games last month) was that the Colts won it by accomplishing the things they lacked in years past that had kept them from being champions. They were physical. They responded to adversity, keeping their composure and mounting comebacks in their last two games. And they played a complete game, with Peyton Manning sublimating his ego (or maybe Tony Dungy sublimating it for him) and winning the game by throwing short passes that the defense allowed him, rather than trying to be a hero and bombing away. It showed a maturation on his (and the whole team’s part), which was rewarding to watch.

Last point. Did Manning deserve to win the MVP? I was kind of disappointed that he did, since it really seemed to be a team win, and it was the Colts’ running game that broke the back of the Bears. On the other hand, the award had to go to somebody, and you could argue that Manning really was the hero because for once he didn’t need to be the hero, and played a role that was lesser, but one the team needed more. Naaah, too convoluted. Give it to someone else.