homegame

Biggest Game Until the Next One

The game between the Patriots and Colts Sunday night should be most entertaining-good enough so I'm considering inviting company over to watch it. Significant? Not so much, unless some vital star on either team suffers major injury.

Significant and entertaining are not synonyms, which is why so few of us enjoyed our Great Books surveys as college freshpeople. Nevertheless, attempts to use the contests results to soothsay the future of the 2006 NFL season will be widespread next Monday. They'll also be pure bunkum, foolish attempts to reconcile the needs of the American hot air industry and the fact pro football teams only play once a week.

The mundane truth is that a teeny, tiny minority of NFL games played in early November have implications that carry up to, let alone past, Thanksgiving. Yes, there are regular season games that mean more than a W or L on the schedule. They almost always take place in December. Even then, for every "big" game that forecasts the future correctly, two equally "big" contests get it wrong.

I was at a couple of the latter as an NFL reporter. In 1989, Buddy Ryan's Eagles played Bill Parcell's Giants for the NFC East lead in December. Thanks to a 90-yard quick kick by Randall Cunningham, Philly won going away, thereby establishing the two teams' relative strength forever, or, as really happened, the Eagles blew their next two games and handed the division to New York.

The next season, the undefeated Giants played the undefeated 49ers in San Francisco on the Monday night after Thanksgiving. The Niners won 10-7, thereby accurately predicting the eventual NFC title game between the two teams-except for the final score, which was Giants 15-49ers 13.

In the case of the Colts and Patriots, there's nothing about the two clubs we'll know after Sunday night we don't know already. Let's review the relevant facts.

1. They're two of the top teams in the league, and Grace Ross is a better bet to become governor than Indy and New England are to miss the playoffs.

2. In their encounters of the recent past, the Pats have had the better of it, the major reason why New England has won three Super Bowls and Colts have yet to play in one.

3. Given fact no. 1, there is no possible outcome of this game that could serve as an indicator of what lies ahead for either team. This was proven in their encounter last season, when the Colts thumped the Pats 40-21, and both clubs wound up losing in the same round of the playoffs.

Let's do some forecasting of our own. Suppose the Pats thwart Peyton Manning one more time and win by a blowout. That would prove they're playing well right now. We knew that. It would also complete another edition of the strange round-robin where New England beats Indy who beats Denver who beats the Pats. If anyone knows why the Denver defense can drive Tom Brady nuts yet can't do a thing to stop Manning, I'd really like to be let in on the explanation. Until the playoffs arrive, we can't know how those three will be forced to deal with their dysfunctional triangle. Since I just wrote this paragraph, such a result cannot contain new information.

Now let's assume the other extreme. Suppose the Colts blow out the Pats. That'd make them the strongest team in the league right now, a distinction more meaningless to them than to any of the other 31. November's not the Colts' problem-January is. You know it, I know it, and boy, do they know it. Indy is to be congratulated for the character it shows rolling that rock up the hill year in year out after getting crushed by the damn thing every season. They're like the old Bills, destiny's ultimate foster children.

So we won't learn anything about this season Sunday night. Either two teams will be 7-1, or one will be 8-0, the other 6-2. Nobody ever lost a Super Bowl by having any of those three records at the halfway point of the regular season.

There's no item in my fan's notebook, or even my old pundit's notebook, that says anyone has to watch a football game to learn something. In this case, we can leave that to the worrywart coaches and spend three hours enjoying ourselves.

posted by Michael Gee @ 12:35 PM