What the Super Bowl Taught Me

It really is funny how people can make predictions about a game -- especially one as big as the Super Bowl -- time and time again and more often than not, those opinions end up being wrong. Watching the Super Bowl yesterday with some friends, we struck up a conversation about what we thought would happen during the course of the game and all four of us (myself, my buddy Jon and two very sports-smart women) were convinced that the Bears' defense would come through and shut down a Colts offense that had been stumbling its way through the playoffs. Imagine our surprise when the Colts D did what the Bears D was supposed to do: completely shut down the Bears O. Now let's not give the Colts too much credit, the Bears offense will never be confused with the Rams offense of '99, but we all thought that they would do a little better than they did. Not enough running by the Bears (Cedric Benson's injury certainly didn't help) and poor play by Rex Grossman down the stretch pretty much sealed their coffin. The Colts, despite giving up 3 turnovers and an electrifying first quarter kickoff return by Devin Hester, looked like the best team in the league last night. Peyton Manning did just enough to keep the offense mobile (249 yds, 1 TD and 1 INT) and how about Joseph Addai and Dominic Rhodes? These two should have definitely won co-MVP honors last night because combining for 253 all purpose yards from scrimmage is just too much of an impact to justify ignoring. The Colts knew exactly what they wanted to do coming into the game and the word that sums it up is CONTROL. In the 3rd Quarter, they kept the Bears D on the field for just under and HOUR. That's 59 minutes of chasing Addai and Rhodes. 59 minutes of blitzing Peyton and 59 minutes of sitting back and wondering why you just cannot seem to get past Jeff Saturday and a Colts O-Line that just wouldn't give. All that being said, there was one point in the game where the Bears could have made serious run at getting back into the game. with about 11 minutes left in the 4th quarter, the Bears offense was moving rather briskly down the field. Rex Grossman was connecting finding his receivers with smart throws over the middle and with the screen. Yet, something seemed very odd. Why though, during the beginning stages of that drive (which eventually ended in an ugly looking pass that Bob Sanders intercepted), were none of those receivers looking to run out of bounds and stop that clock. I laughed about this with my buddy Jon after I saw seconds continue to tick away. Sure, 11 minutes seems like a lot of time, but when you are out of timeouts, as the Bears were, you'd want to stop the clock any chance you got right? I won't sit here and pretend like I know everything, but watching that game, it looked like a poor job of clock management by the Bears O. I guess you can't really blame them though. It's not like they were really on the field for much of that game. At the end of the day, it was a great win by the Colts and Peyton, Tony and the rest of the team should be very proud of their season. Getting past New England was huge, but getting past New England AND winning the Super Bowl sounds so much better. K.A.T.