NFL Conference Championship Game Picks: Will the Pats Roll?
By Mike Tanier ,
Jim Rogash/Getty Images
Riffs, rants, observations and dissenting opinions from the voices in my head about the NFL's Final Four, with a big-picture look at the Patriots' place in history and a microscopic look at what the Packers must do to upset the Seahawks.
Colts at Patriots
Sunday, 6:40 p.m.
Line: Patriots -6.5
History's Greatest Villain
Bill Belichick's Patriots have reached the playoffs 12 times in 15 seasons. That's an 80 percent success rate, spread over a decade and a half.
Bill Walsh's 49ers reached the playoffs seven times in 10 years, a 70 percent success rate for one measly decade.
Chuck Noll's Steelers reached the playoffs 12 times in 23 years. That's 52 percent stretched across a quarter of a century, though it's really an astounding peak with a gentle slope on the far side.
Joe Gibbs' Redskins reached the playoffs 10 times in 16 years, a 62.5 percent rate spread across two non-contiguous eras, one glorious, one so much less significant that I nearly forgot to include it.
Bill Parcells took the Giants to the playoffs five times in eight seasons, a 62.5 percent rate for a few moments of historical time.
Vince Lombardi became an American icon—not just an NFL icon or a football icon, but a cultural icon—based on six playoff appearances in nine seasons with the Packers, a 66.7 percent success rate in less than one decade, albeit a really important decade.
Anonymous/Associated Press
The last coach to win 20 playoff games wore his hat unironically.
Tom Landry led the Cowboys to the playoffs 18 times in 29 years (62.1 percent success rate). Don Shula led the Dolphins to the postseason 16 times in 26 years (61.5 percent) and did some very important things when coaching the Colts. To find coaches who colonized the playoffs more often than Belichick, you need to turn to civic institutions from an era in which a head coach might take over an expansion team and enjoy six full seasons of sub-.500 football while assembling his roster, or leap straight from Super Bowl glory into the driver's seat of a down-and-out franchise from a rival league.
Landry and Shula are men of Lombardi's time, not our time. And Belichick is still more ubiquitous than they are in the playoffs, from a percentage standpoint, though you can hack out 15-16 season chunks of Landry and Shula's careers (1966-82 for Landry, 1971-85 for Shula) that match Belichick's Patriots run.
Belichick tied Landry for the most playoff wins in NFL history with his 20th last week. His Patriots are a heavy favorite to claim the all-time record outright this week. It was both an impressive accomplishment and an easy one to take for granted.
Every time a Patriots veteran does something good in the playoffs, it establishes a milestone or sets a record. Tom Brady surpassed the career postseason mark for passing yards last week. Brady passed Joe Montana on the all-time postseason touchdown list with 46. Stephen Gostkowski became the seventh kicker in NFL history with 100 postseason points, and Gostkowski isn't even the kicker we think about when we think about Patriots history.
You get the point: The Patriots have been really good for a really long time under Belichick.
Playoff familiarity has bred both playoff contempt and playoff complacency. The contempt is understandable. The Patriots are as irritating on the national level as the Landry Cowboys were, with Gronkowski erotica and Brady metrosexuality filling in for disco-dancing Farrah Fawcett-cloned cheerleaders. It does not help that Belichick is the Nixon to Lombardi's apolitical Kennedy. You can play the "Beli-cheat" card if you want—if Shula is doing it, I can't fault anyone else for doing it—but no one really hates the Patriots because of a decade-old scandal. They hate the Patriots because 14 years of success, combined with that Boston-media we win because we are smarter, more righteous or just better than you on some metaphysical level hagiography makes them easy to dislike.
Hating the Patriots is understandable, given the circumstances. Taking them for granted, however, would be a shame. We all had them penciled into this championship game the moment they lost the last championship game, or (at the latest) when they signed Darrelle Revis. Only the opponent is a surprise. Face it, we all went through the motions this season: the manufactured Chicken Little hysteria after the Chiefs loss, the perfunctory New Year's Eve style hoopla after Brady-Manning: The Final Chapter, ho-hum been-there-done-that wins against all the middleweights and divisional rivals.
The Patriots are the spouse who brings home the bacon and fries it up in the pan. But after 15 years, they needed to spice things up. And yes, there is something inherently squicky about this team that leans toward erotic prose.
Elise Amendola/Associated Press
So Belichick gave both the haters and the granted-takers what they needed last week. With the help of Josh McDaniels, he gave us Julian Edelman-Danny Amendola trick play touchdowns. The Patriots gave us the crazy four-offensive-linemen formation and a staccato play pace that had the Ravens running in circles. While it wasn't by choice, Belichick and Brady gave us two 14-point comebacks, reminders of just who the Ravens and the rest of the NFL are up against when they face a champion of historic proportion.
The yawners got a wake-up call: Belichick reminded everyone that he is the greatest tactician of our era, one of the half-dozen best in NFL history. The haters got another reason to vilify and scream "Cheatriots" for the four-linemen set, because haters aren't likely to let the rulebook get in the way of a good story.
If you read comic books or watch comic book shows/movies, you know that the story doesn't grow stale when the hero gets boring but when the villain gets boring. Oh, they're bringing Lex Luthor back, again. The villain defines the heroes and makes their goals worthy and compelling.
The NFL just rebooted its greatest villain. Now are there any heroes available?
Even Blueprints Get the Blues
What Andrew Luck is attempting this month is not quite David vs. Goliath. It's more like a cross between the feats of Billy the Kid and Alexander the Great. Luck is trying to gun down aging legends by sole virtue of his quicker hand, and he is attempting to topple empires at an age when he should still be mustering his forces.
It's hard to see him pulling it off. Joe Flacco once beat Manning and Brady back to back in the playoffs. Mark Sanchez did it once. But both faced different circumstances and had their own advantages, including very good running games and defenses. Luck does not have a running game, at all. It's not clear whether he has a very good defense.
The Colts defense looked phenomenal last week, far better than it has looked against any playoff-caliber opponent this year. Several players said (via The Indianapolis Star) that the Colts copied the "Seahawks blueprint" to beat the Broncos. The Colts have very good cornerbacks, so they could press Broncos receivers without getting regularly burned. Instead of manufacturing pressure, they kept their fronts and pass-rushes simple, making it hard for Manning to audible into perfect-counterpunch situations. Factor in Manning's sudden aging into the 2,000-Year-Old Man, and you would think that the Colts were a defensive powerhouse, not a team that gave up 93 combined points to the Steelers and Patriots.
Ezra Shaw/Getty Images
The Colts defense is certainly playing its best in the playoffs. But there is no "blueprint" for the Patriots, particularly now that they are emptying the deep recesses of their playbook. The old Giants blueprint of winning multiple one-on-one matchups against the Patriots offensive line still works (that works on everyone...except the Seahawks), but the Colts don't have the defensive linemen to pull it off.
There is a blueprint for frustrating the Patriots defense. The Ravens used it last week. The Patriots hate vanilla-scented, zone-stretch, run-and-play-fake Gary Kubiak stuff. They hated it when the Mike Shanahan Broncos beat them in the playoffs a decade ago. They hated it when Justin Forsett rushed for 129 yards and Joe Flacco threw four touchdowns last week. They even hated it when they beat Kubiak's Texans, though they managed to overcome it thanks to overwhelming offensive superiority and acts of Matt Schaub.
The Colts are collectively more likely to sprout wings and fly around Gillette Stadium lobbing eggs at the Patriots than they are to suddenly morph into a zone-stretch running team. They will be one-dimensional and pass-dependent. The Patriots won't need any special blueprint to stop them.
The Colts face bad matchups on both sides of the ball, just as they did in November's 42-20 loss and last January's 43-22 loss. Luck gets a little better every month. The Colts defense may play above its head for another week. But it's hard to find a bridge across that well-established 21-22 point gap between the Colts and Patriots that does not involve drafting running backs and pass-rushers and waiting until next year.
Next years...they are something the Colts have in surplus, while the Patriots are in limited supply. Luck will have to wait for one of those "next years" before taking his place on the AFC throne. The Patriots have one more season to reign in a way few teams have ever reigned. You can love it or hate it, but with times rapidly changing, be sure to appreciate it.
Prediction: Patriots 34, Colts 24
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