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Fat Packers Lose One In A
Row
Victory. Elway. The AFC. It
even happened.
For once, the AFC team
played NFC football, resulting in a heretofore
impossibility: a good game.
And then the AFC won,
causing NBC to lose football.
There will be no more
mention of the inability of the Class of '83 to win a
Superbowl. Elway's victory will forgive Marino and Kelly.
There will be no more mention of O'Brien or Eason. Todd
Blackledge will only be noticed when he flubs his lines on
ABC's college football.
For once, a good guy even
gets to win. Elway was consistent and dependable rather than
brilliant. Terrell Davis received a second-quarter headache,
but returned to dish a fourth-quarter whammy. The defense
was smart enough to occasionally corral Green Bay's
explosive offense.
Favre and Company did their
very best imitation of an AFC team. A bunch of big plays.
Enough dumb AFC things to lose. Turnovers. Ill-advised
throws. Heck, squint hard enough and Mike Holmgren starts
looking like John Madden. But without the pork chop
stains.
Terrell Davis proved that
three quarters of T.D. was far superior to three quarters of
Gilbert "Too Fat For The Drive-Through" Brown and even less
of Reggie White. Denver's win coupled with the mid-season
Bizarro Indianapolis game illustrated the formula for
beating Green Bay. Survive long enough to be able to run in
the fourth quarter. Green Bay's D-Line has about all of the
conditioning of Kirstie Alley on Fen Phen.
Now the two weeks of Green
Bay hype smells like spoiled cheese. When Dallas broke
through, it wasn't "if?" but rather "how many?" San
Francisco had its own gravitational pull. The NFC
Championship was supposed to be the true Game of the Year.
At least we won't get an instant more of sanctimonious
Cheeseheads predicting three-in-a-row. Two weeks were quite
enough.
Denver's win was a long time
coming. And with this win, many things end. The season. The
AFC's incontinence. Class of '83 ghosts. Elway's resume. It
feels kind of nice.
Plus, Vegas lost its
shirt.
 .Banico
Roberts
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Last Week's
Results:
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Do
the Denver Broncos have a snowball's
chance in hell of ending the AFC's losing
skein?
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Yes.
Favre blinded by Elway's teeth, Broncos
win 42-0.
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No.
Gilbert Brown finally gives up the charade
and eats everyone.
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35%
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65%
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By the time you read this, we'll be dead.
The Super Bowl will be over, and the journalistic menace
will have retreated from San Diego. The post-free-buffet
carnage will parallel Hiroshima. The amalgamated post-game
reporter-urine will be able to float a battleship. The Left
Coast will suddenly find itself bottom-heavy again, once
again lacking 300-pound sports analysts.
Super Bowl Hype Week sucks harder than Pamela Anderson
must've to get that new tube-gig of hers. It doesn't just
suck because it's boring; the sin of sloth would be welcome
in this sea of sausage-grease. No, it sucks hardest because
the sports media--already more inbred than the latest Jim
Varney vehicle--gets a chance to descend on the same city
and inflict white-hot death.
Emblematic of this is Joe Theismann. Joe Theismann needs
to go away. He needs to take that fake hair and that fake
knee and make skin flicks or something. The man isn't only
on ESPN. He's on "Mike & the Mad Dog." He's on "The
A-Team with Eddie Andleman." He's chucking a few high hard
ones at Martha Stewart. Joe Theismann is more annoying than
unsightly deodorant stains. He is Tonya Harding and Nancy
Kerrigan made singular. He is dirty bathroom grout.
Do you know what San Diego was last week? A convention
center filled to its pork-chop-scented gills with television
and radio crews. And sports personalities--Fred Biletnikoff
to Tony Gwynn to Ron freakin' Meyer--did the circuit,
getting interviewed by every single one. Then the reporters
got up and interviewed one another. If a nuclear bomb
had fallen on San Diego last week, Phyllis George would own
sports journalism. If only.
Oh, and there's a new twist to this Bataan Death March of
football. Now it's cool for reporters to do stories on how
many reporters there are, and how bored everyone is. Ha.
Look. Another shot of a sleeping cameraman. Stop. Another
Green Bay Packer interviewing a reporter. What a hoot. If
ever there was a moment in time to which you could point and
say: "This is when the NFL started to look like Chris
Farley," this is it.
Self-congratulatory. Bloated with TV cash.
Self-referential to the highest degree. The Super Bowl is a
festival of shitheads, and unless the league changes it, it
will suck and die.
And, like us, it will sleep with the fishes.
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