Who Da...(no I'm not doing that crap)

I rooted for the Saints yesterday.

Not because of Katrina (a truly devastating situation, but like Pittsburgh in the 70’s, did Terry Bradshaw touchdown passes help the steel industry; no, not really).

Not because the Saints had been putrid for years.

No, I rooted for the Saints on Super Sunday, because the Colts had offended my sensibilities.

When Indianapolis coach Jim Caldwell, pulled Peyton Manning and the rest of the Colts key starters at halftime in his team’s second to last game of the year (a game that THEY HAD THE LEAD IN by the way), it, for the lack of a better term, pissed me off. To paraphrase someone else, when the Colts removed Peyton Manning against the Jets and put in Curtis Painter (Who? Exactly!) they spit in the face of perfection. Indy was 14 and 0 going into that game, and considering the way they beat New York in the AFC Championship game, they probably would have run their record to 15 and 0. While I despise Bill Belichik, I respect the fact that he figured out a basic premise; there are now 44 Super Bowl winners (42 when the 2007 Patriots were playing the Giants), there’s only one NFL team with a perfect season in their back pocket (’72 Miami). If you can do both why not shoot for it? That’s why America still remembers those geezers that played for the Dolphins. If not for the fact they all start getting interviewed the minute someone makes a run at perfection, no one would know most of those players.

But when I think more about it, it wasn’t just the decision to pull everyone and give up a game; my anger came as much from the faulty logic that resulted in the decision. Reportedly the decision to pull starters at the half came from the Colts Team President, Bill Polian. This guy is a genius at picking players; he’s built three franchises from the bottom up (early 90’s Bills, expansion Carolina and the Colts). But he never was the coach of a football team at any type of high level, so I can’t understand how he was qualified to make a day to day decision about a squad that was contending for a Super Bowl. It’s comparable to Boston Red Sox GM Theo Epstein telling his manager Terry Francona, “I want you to go to a 7 man pitching rotation down the stretch”. Francona (the guy who actually deals with the players day to day) would probably not like that since he wants his pitchers to stay in their normal rhythm in a 5 man rotation. If Epstein made him do it, he’d likely be pilloried in the press. Polian should be too.

The main point behind the Colts pulling nearly half of their team and virtually guaranteeing themselves the first loss of the year was so that they would be fresh and not suffer any injuries – of course this didn’t matter the next week when Manning, Dallas Clark and Reggie Wayne all played on a treacherous snowy field in Buffalo to pass individual milestones. I find two things wrong with that hypothesis. One, guys get hurt all the time, randomly; Dwight Freeney getting hurt for the Colts was huge, and oh yeah, it happened late in the AFC Championship when Indy already had the game in hand. Two, I still don’t think giving football players more than one week off from their regular schedule has any benefit. This year’s win by the Saints was the first time a top seed in conference has won the Super Bowl since 2004 when the Patriots took home the title. It doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that teams who have clinched the top spot (and who have gone on to rest players during their “meaningless” end of season games) have all not managed to make it to the big game. When you get out of rhythm in this league you lose, and to me, there’s not a better way to get out of rhythm, than to go three or four weeks without playing hard for an entire game.

So that brings me back to my original point. The Colts were wrong for basically tanking a game, and giving up their undefeated season. And if they had won yesterday, the Indy “braintrust” (and I use that term loosely in this situation) would have claimed their approach was right. Peyton Manning would have had to sit there and be happy about having the Lombardi Trophy, all the while knowing that he and his teammates would have been immortal if they had gone 19 and 0. Instead, the Saints, a team that also made a run at perfection, gave their best shot but lost, ended up winning the title. Karma or Katrina they took home the win. Hopefully, other teams that have a chance at going for an undefeated season will follow their lead, and not the team from Indiana, that might have just outsmarted themselves.