NFL: Rough Justice

I didn't get much support when I chided the Indianapolis Colts and the Dallas Cowboys for easing up in their final games of the regular season and ceding playoff spots to division rivals. The conventional wisdom seemed to be that those teams, by dint of their superior play and records, had earned the right to do whatever they wanted. And if their coaches believed rest was the best playoff prescription, then so be it.

Last weekend the football gods delivered a double dose of rough justice to those favored teams, in support of my view. The Colts were outplayed by the battered but spirited San Diego Chargers. And the Cowboys, in losing to the New York Giants, couldn't shed the lackluster play that has dogged the Dallas team for a while now—a collective torpor that suggested the last thing the team needed in that final regular season game was any excuse to take the day off.

Dallas coach Wade Phillips is turning into the new Marty Schottenheimer, a bulldog in the regular season and a bust in the playoffs. But Cowboys fans are having far more fun blaming the upset on Tony Romo's romantic getaway to Mexico with Jessica Simpson during the team's bye week. And they are not entirely wrong.

Romo's defenders say that Tony Boy's vacation was nothing different from Tom Brady's trip to New York to spend time with his girlfriend, Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen. But there are several notable differences. Brady's three Super Bowl rings, compared with Romo's playoff résumé: two bitter playoff losses and a reputation as the number one goat of last year's playoffs. The sense that Brady's relationship with Bundchen is seasoned now, comfortable enough that he can be left behind to babysit her dog, versus the newer Romo-Simpson romance. And, of course, there is the bottom line from last weekend: Brady, 26 of 28 for 262 yards, three touchdowns and another victory; Romo, 18 of 36 for 201 yards with one TD and one interception, as well as license to go back to Mexico until training camp opens in July.

Having signed a new $67.5 million deal midseason, Romo was expected to assume certain responsibilities. And one of those is to convince everybody—fans, teammates, coaches, and Cowboys owner Jerry Jones—that the playoff game was paramount in his life. It may have been, but nobody was buying it—except possibly a tearful Terrell Owens, who, apparently preferring to attack his quarterback only when no one else will, rose to Romo's defense.

To fully appreciate Romo's inadequacy last weekend, we must adjust our perspective in line with the new-millennium NFL. There was a time, not all that long ago, when completing 18 of 36 passes in a game would have been quite respectable. But the changes in the NFL—particularly the way they don't call holding on offensive lineman and do call holding and everything else on defensive backs—has put the passing game on a new footing. Romo's .500 completion percentage in last week's competition should be viewed not only in comparison Brady's MVP standard of 93 percent but also next to all the other quarterbacks who toiled last weekend: Eli Manning, 12 of 18; David Garrard, 22 of 33; Philip Rivers, 14 of 19; Billy Volek, 3 of 4; Matt Hasselbeck, 19 of 33; Bret Favre, 18of 23; and Peyton Manning, 33 of 48. Seven of the nine quarterbacks completed at least two-thirds of their passes, and four of them were well above 70 percent.

The Giants' win was the happy counterpoint to my just-deserts view of the Cowboys and Colts losses. The Giants had nothing to gain from playing all out in their final regular season game against the hell-bent-for-perfection Patriots. And in playing one of the most thrilling games of the year, the Giants paid a high price—the kind warned of by those who insisted that resting key players was an imperative—by losing three starters to injury. Still, it seems apparent now that the Giants gained something more in that game than they lost: they left the field with newfound confidence—most importantly, in their old-school coach and young, unproven quarterback.

Now the Giants travel to Green Bay to take on everyone's sentimental favorite, Bret Favre, in the NFC Championship. The single-digit temperatures predicted for Lambeau Field recall the last time these two NFL mainstays met in a championship game, 45 years ago. I happened to be there at Yankee Stadium, woefully unprepared for the deep freeze. My heart that day was with the Giants—the New England team before we had NFL football in Boston. Sunday my heart—and pretty much everybody's outside of New York—will be with Green Bay, as the 38-year-old Favre plays out his improbable fountain-of-youth story.

Cold suited the Packers back in that '62 title game, and again in the famed "Ice Bowl" against Dallas five years later, and on countless other occasions. I have no reason—especially since the Packers have developed a strong running option with Ryan Grant—to think Sunday will prove an exception. A Packers-Patriots Super Bowl would certainly render the most compelling story line, a couple of fairy-tale seasons as well as a rematch of Super Bowl XXXI—with the classy trio of Favre, Tedy Bruschi and Troy Brown the only holdovers from '97 and that 35-21 Green Bay victory.

There is far less history between the Patriots and the Chargers than between the Packers and Giants, though a few of us diehards can still recall the Chargers throttling my Patsies 51-10 in the 1964 AFL Championship. Most of the history is recent and nasty. Last season the Chargers, as the 15-1 number-one AFC seed, were bounced from the playoffs by the Pats, a loss that cost Schottenheimer his job. Rather than focus on their own failures, San Diego's players got hysterical about how the Patriots danced on their logo. They then kept up the trash talk through the off-season and ratcheted it up a notch after the Pats' "videogate" incident in the opening game of the season. All that wasted energy and venom contributed mightily to San Diego's 38-14 whipping by New England in the second game of the season.

The Chargers are loaded with talent, even if their biggest-name offensive stars are gimpy and iffy for Sunday, and the team has a ball-hawking defense that may have the best chance of any NFL squad to disrupt the Pats' record-breaking passing attack. Still, San Diego will have to prove itself a more mature team and cope with the antithesis of San Diego weather to boot.

In the end I don't think Norv Turner's conservative approach is the right one to derail the Patriots from their path to an unprecedented 19-0 season. Last weekend Turner played to give the ball back to Peyton Manning with more than 1:40 on the clock, to my mind a losing strategy, and was bailed out by a great punter and a fired-up defense. But conservative won't cut it in New England, where Jacksonville's Jack Del Rio demonstrated his grasp of that notion by going for a first down on fourth and two on the opening possession of the game. Besides, I'm a man who believes, or at least wants to believe, in fairy-tale endings. And these results would guarantee a remarkable one no matter which team prevails in the Super Bowl:

Patriots 31, Chargers 17

Packers 24, Giants 14.