Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Your early, early, too-early Super Bowl pick

So already last night people were asking who I thought was going to win the Super Bowl, and I resisted the temptation to fire off my standard wise-guy answer, which is that it will definitely be a football team.

Instead, I said it was too early for that.

I should have known better.

I should have known that it's never too early to start filling up the blogosphere with my crackpot theories, because it's the Super Bowl.  People start predicting who's going to win the next Super Bowl the morning after the previous Super Bowl. Seriously. I've seen the posts.

And so, let me say this: I think the Seattle Seahawks are going to win.

I think they're going to win even though they played like utter goofs for 57 minutes Sunday.

I think they're going to win because, if you can play like utter goofs for 57 minutes in a conference championship game and still find a way to beat Aaron Rodgers, then clearly you can find a way to beat Tom Brady if you don't play like utter goofs for 57 minutes.

(If you do, though, you're toast. Bill Belichick won't leave points on the table the way Mike McCarthy did. He'll throw LeGarrette Blount at you on fourth-and-inches down on the goal line instead of kicking eleventy hundred field goals. Bill Belichick was born without the chicken gene that inhabits most NFL coaches. He was also born without the ethics gene, but that's another discussion for another time).

Anyway ... I'm picking the Seahawks, at least for the time being, because I can't conceive of Russell Wilson playing any worse than he did for 57 minutes against the Packers. He's not Brady, but he has one key Brady trait, Sunday notwithstanding: He rarely makes bad decisions. And, Sunday notwithstanding, the big moment rarely overwhelms him.

I'm also picking the Seahawks because their coach, Pete Carroll, is every bit as devious as Belichick. He knows his way around a tackle-eligible play, too. Belichick won't surprise him with gimmick plays because he's a gimmick monster himself. There's nothing his counterpart can spring on him that he hasn't tried himself, or at least knows about.

So, there's that. There's also this: That Seahawks defense isn't going anywhere.

Lost in all the commotion about the Comeback was the fact that the Seahawks' defense did exactly what it needed to do to keep the team upright while the offense was tripping over footstools. Except for one Rodgers touchown pass, it kept the Packers out of the end zone. It forced three-and-outs on half of the Packers' six second-half drives. And on the Pack's two second-half scoring drives, the Seahawks "D" limited them to two field goals -- and it took Green Bay 10 plays to move 57 yards on one drive and seven plays to move 48 on the other.

Not exactly a sieve, that defense. And that was with Richard Sherman playing most of the second half with one arm.

It was the Seattle defense that dominated the Super Bowl last year. It says here, at least right now, that it will do the same this year, to a somewhat lesser degree. And the Seahawks will become the first team since, you guessed it, the Patriots, to win back-to-back Lombardis.

That's the Blob's call.

Well. At least for now.  

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