CHAMPIONSHIP SUNDAY
"I wanna hang a map of the world in my house. Then I'm gonna put pins into all the locations that I've traveled to. But first, I'm gonna have to travel to the top two corners of the map so it won't fall down."

--Mitch Hedberg



With four teams left there are 4 potential Super Bowl match ups:

1. New England v Chicago (rematch of Super Bowl XX, the 46-10 pasting...)
2. New England v New Orleans (battle of the "New", a fitting matchup for postmodern times...)
3. Indianapolis v Chicago (Battle of the Midwest, ho hum...)
4. Indianapolis v New Orleans (Peyton redemption story against Katrina redemption story, ho hum...)

Of them all, which is most appealing? None of them, really. There are massively boring storylines for all of them, save for the Bears who appear to have no story line at all and in any event, at the end of the two week Super Hype we would be sick to death of ever hearing them mentioned again, regardless of the match up.

It's a dilemma, quite frankly for a person who is bored with the consistent consistency of the Patriots who have already won their fair share of Super Bowls and bored with the idea of Peyton Manning no longer being the Elwayesque whipping boy. Hard to be excited about either in the AFC. I'd have preferred watching the Über Team of the season, the Chargers, storming their way to the title disrupting the story lines of parity but they had their chances and they blew it. So this is what we're left with - the lousy leftovers.

For that matter, the Bears with their historically subpar QB and daunting defence are hardly candidates for excitement, not like those Bears of 85. And christ, haven't we had enough of the Saints and Katrina and suffering shoved down our gobs all season already?

The question is really who is least repulsive, which match up would provide the most entertainment for this mind numbing two week interlude between this Sunday and Stupor Sunday?

It doesn't matter much, not yet anyway. Whilst one may dread that fortnight in between and the even duller time between the end of the Super Bowl and the onset of pitchers and catchers reporting, there are two more games to be played this Sunday before then.

For reference, over the past 10 years, the home team is 6-4 in the NFC Championship Game, while the AFC home team is 4-6.

NFC CHAMPIONSHIP
Saints At Bears



NFC best offence versus NFC best defence. Best against best has happened 10 times previously and the top offense has defeated the top defense seven times.

And let's face another disturbing fact. Chicago has a long and lengthy history of disappointing their fans. Sure, there was Michael Jordan. Sure, there were the 1985 Bears which crazy people around the country had the unmitigated gall to compare this meaker, lesser version to at various points during the season. And sure, the White Sox shocked everybody and won the World Series a couple of years ago. But pile that up against the accumulation of crappy Bears teams, disappointing Cubbies teams, virtually non-existent White Sox teams and basically every Bulls team before and after Michael Jordan and what you have is a compelling history of failure and disappointment, a compendium, if you like, of mediocrity. So the Bears have that going against them.

Going for them is the seemingly rabid desire of almost every football fan outside of Chicago to see Rex Grossman fail and fail miserably so everyone (including thousands inside of the Chicago Metropolitan area) can leap off of their sofas at the appropriate time pointing their Dorito dust and salsa-stained fingers at their plasma screens and screaming I Told You So! I Told You So! a thousand times until their voices go hoarse. There hasn't been such a collection of people waiting for a QB to fail since Peyton Manning's last playoff game. (well, that wasn't so long ago but this is after all, a fickle sport of parity and certain things simply have to remain consistent for there to be any cohesion at all to bind these stories together as one season as opposed to a series of weekly random events).

The unknown factor is The Conspiracy of New Orleans and for all those conspiracy theorists out there who think there was never a moon landing, that the American government assassinated Kennedy, that 9/11 was some twisted Zionist plot, the sudden rise of the Saints from the receding flood waters of Katrina must be a virtual buffet.

First of all, how to explain Drew Brees signing with the Saints instead of the more established and certainly more favoured Miami Dolphins? Did someone in the organisation pull Brees aside and show him the blueprint of how to save the NFL season by creating this post-Katrina melodrama? (Here's how it works, kid. You sign with the Saints, the Texans inexplicably draft some non entity defensive lineman instead of the Heisman Trophy winner with the number one pick leaving Reggie Bush to fall to the Saints, every team in their division with a reasonable chance of winning the division, i.e. the Carolina Panthers and Tampa Bay Bucs suffer inexplicable and rapid downslides leaving the division up for grabs between yourselves and the Falcons, a team with a wishbone QB and a gaggle of oft-injured running backs, your third game of the season is a much ballyhoo'd MNF matchup wherein the entire nation of America has the unique opportunity of replacing their collective guilt for having left your city to drown on its own with nary a buoy to save it with some bizarre instant romance that's supposed to make it all better overnight and to give them a new hero (a struggling metropolis) to root for.)

I mean, c'mon. If the sudden, inexplicable rise of the Saints isn't a conspiracy, then Bill Cowher has no chin and last year's Super Bowl never happened. This is what the Bears are up against, The Man, the Feds, the Commish of Corporate Football and the hearts and minds of the American People. Is there a more daunting collection of opponents? And let's not even imagine what the refs are going to be doing for this game.

And let's think about the weather. Blustery SSE winds gust to 20-25 m.p.h. at times. Snow develops mid/late a.m.; Accumulation possible. Bears/Saints game wind chills: 10s. Football in Chicago, in January, just as you'd want it for your homefield advantage. Yet realistically can anyone imagine a team dislocated for a season by a devastating hurricane is going to concern itself about a few flurries and little bit of bitter cold? No chance, so the one thing the Bears might have had in their favour is gone.

In addition to the collective hatred of Rex Grossman the Bears appear to also have in their favour the slighted feeling of being ignored for the better part of the season - ever since the bandwagons turned off somewhere around the time of that pathetic downfall and rise against the Arizona Cardinals on MNF. America never forgave the Bears after that and so now the Bears play their one remaining card: respect. They feel slighted, they're angry and they crave respect. The Saints on the other hand, are just happy to be here.

Prediction: Saints 23 Bears 17

*****

AFC CHAMPIONSHIP
Patriots at Colts



If you could avoid the enormity of the Manning v Brady hype, you might call this the Adam Vinatieri Bowl.

The man who has converted several of the most pressurised field goals in NFL history, including game-winning kicks in the final five seconds of two Super Bowls, was let go by the Patriots and picked up by the Colts between last season and this one and now Adam Vinatieri finally has his chance for revenge, Hamlet and Claudius style.

In the interim we can talk about this being the first time an AFC title match will be played indoors which means of course, the Colts are not worthy of advancing. We could also talk about the Patriots being 5-0 in conference championship games since 1970.

But this would all be so much popcorn chewed during intermission because the real protagonist's revenge tragedy is of course, Peyton Manning: 5-6 in the playoffs all-time, 2-6 against Brady all-time, 0-2 against Brady in the playoffs. In other words, Tom Brady, 12-1 in the playoffs all-time, is everything Peyton Manning is not. Manning is Madam Bovary to Brady's Don Quixote.

The question is which impulse will dominate in the American collective psyche when watching this game? That of redemption, i.e. Manning finally rewarded for his long and painful journey through postseasons past with a victory or Manning reaffirmed as the NFL's whipping boy, the man we can always count on to fail when the zero hour of truth arrives?

Manning is a much larger version of the antipathy we hold for Rex Grossman, the schadenfreude we feel in seeing repeated failure, the justification of our loosely held beliefs in predictability coming to fruition. Whilst unlike Grossman we might not extract ourselves from the depths of our sofas to cheer his every failure, nonetheless it is indeed difficult to find oneself rooting for Peyton Manning with the NFL pedigree, the mediocre brother and the misfortune to play for a franchise located in Indianapolis.

As much as we might enjoy seeing Manning fail there will be the other side of bandwagoneers who want to see just once, the improbable triumph over parity. Week after week this season one team rises and then falls, another rises to take its place and then falls as well. The Saints, an historic NFL laughingstock makes it the NFC Championship and even Peyton Manning gets another shot but through it all, the New England Patriots, despite hemorrhaging players like a ruptured vessel, plod along with that predictable intangible overcoming the NFL's best efforts to usurp them.

Two postseasons ago Sports Amnesia made a living off getting it wrong, picking at every successive turn against the Patriots and never really learning the lesson that this is a not a team to bet against come playoff time.

But this time, rather than the simple reasoning of jumping a bandwagon, we will be rooting for the Patriots not because they will probably win but because to see Peyton Manning overcome his demons and give joy to a miserable place like Indianapolis with its crappy domed monstrosity of a football stadium is simply too disgusting to stomach.

I want to find joy in seeing Peyton fail, not just this season but the one after that and the one after that, much like John Elway did throughout his career before bursting forth in the twilight of his career for the much deserved redemption and quite frankly, Peyton simply hasn't suffered enough yet to have earned such rewards. There is a magical quality to Brady's ability to pull another out of the fire much like Joe Montana did in his own prime and last week's absurdist victory was not an example of good luck so much as smart football and exemplary coaching. And let's face it, Bill Belichick against Tony Dungy is something akin to Lombardi against Art Shell and for that reason, more than Vinatieri or Manning or even Brady, the Colts don't really have a prayer.

Prediction: Patriots 36 Colts 17