BRING ON THE PATSIES!!!!
Posted on 01/20/2008 8:17:12 PM PST by GulliverSwift
GREEN BAY, Wis. - The bone-chilling cold couldn't stop the white-hot New York Giants tonight and neither could the Green Bay Packers, a crushing holding penalty or two missed fourth-quarter field goals.
In one of the more unlikely runs to the Super Bowl in NFL history, the Giants overcame all kinds of obstacles to capture the NFC championship game with a 23-20 overtime win at frigid Lambeau Field.
The Giants, who entered the playoffs as a 10-6 wild card, won their 10th straight road game when kicker Lawrence Tynes made up for his two fourth-quarter misses with a 47-yard field goal that sailed straight through the uprights 2 minutes, 35 seconds into the overtime.
Tynes had missed a 36-yarder at the end of regulation, and when the Packers won the coin toss before the overtime, the sellout crowd roared in anticipation of a home-team victory.
Instead, Giants cornerback Corey Webster stepped in front of receiver Donald Driver and intercepted a Brett Favre pass, giving New York the football at the Packers' 34-yard line. The Giants' offense managed just 5 yards before coach Tom Coughlin sent Tynes back on the field for another chance to win the game.
This time, the kicker converted and the Giants had a ticket to the Feb. 3 Super Bowl for a game against the unbeaten New England Patriots.
The Giants (13-6) advanced to the title game for the first time since the 2000-01 season by beating Tampa Bay, Dallas and Green Bay on the road and after going just 3-5 at home this season. They had lost to Dallas and Green Bay in the regular season.
For Favre and the Packers, it was a disappointing end to a surprisingly outstanding season. Favre, however, threw two interceptions and struggled badly in the second half.
No snow accompanied the bitter cold, but it did rain mustard-colored flags for most of the evening. Time after time it would appear one team had stopped the other only to discover the drive remained alive because of a penalty.
But the most costly penalty of the evening came just before the two-minute warning when it appeared as if Giants running back Ahmad Bradshaw had broken free for a 48-yard touchdown that would give New York the lead.
Instead, referee Terry McAulay reached into his pocket, turned on his microphone and announced a holding penalty on Giants guard Chris Snee.
The Giants were back in their own territory, but remarkably quarterback Eli Manning completed four straight passes and New York got close enough for Tynes to attempt the 36-yarder with four seconds remaining.
After a high snap, however, Tynes hit a knuckeball that sailed wide left and the NFC championship game went to overtime for the first time since 1998. It was Tynes' second miss of the quarter.
Seconds after averting a special-teams disaster, Favre and Donald Driver connected for the game's first huge play, a 90-yard touchdown pass that erased the Giants' early lead.
Tynes' second field goal of the game, a 37-yarder, had given New York a 6-0 lead early in the second quarter, and when Koren Robinson mishandled the ensuing kickoff, the Packers were fortunate that Tramon Williams pounced on the ball before the Giants could get to it.
Green Bay, however, still had terrible field position and zero momentum after gaining just 4 yards on its previous nine plays.
That all changed with one flick of Favre's wrist. Webster tried to jam Driver at the line of scrimmage, but the Packers' veteran receiver pushed the Giants' cornerback aside and ran into open space.
Favre, after a quick pump fake, hit his receiver in stride at the 29-yard line. Driver kicked into fifth gear and outran Webster and two other Giants defenders for the longest touchdown play in the Packers' postseason history: 90 yards.
The Giants, who had controlled the game until that point, lost their momentum and never regained it in the first half.
The Packers, meanwhile, pushed their lead to 10-6 with 1 minute, 30 seconds left in the half on a 36-yard Mason Crosby field goal. Credit the defense - both the Packers' and the Giants' - for that score. After forcing a Jeff Feagles punt from the goal line, Green Bay got the ball back at the Giants' 47-yard line.
A third-and-10 pass by Favre was incomplete, but the drive remained alive because of an illegal-contact penalty against Giants safety Michael Johnson. Favre took advantage of the new life with a 20-yard pass to Driver, getting Crosby into close range for the field goal.
After botching a chance to score a touchdown just before halftime, the Giants showed their remarkable road aplomb once again at the start of the second half. Manning, with the help of a third-down roughing-the-passer penalty on safety Nick Collins, took New York on a 12-play, 69-yard drive that ended with a 1-inch touchdown run by Brandon Jacobs that gave the Giants a 13-10 lead.
The Packers immediately answered with a touchdown on their first possession of the second half, but only after the Giants were flagged for a critical third-down penalty of their own.
Tramon Williams made things easier for the Packers' offense with a 49-yard kickoff return to the Giants' 39, but it appeared as if New York had forced a field goal when a pass from Favre to Driver left Green Bay 5 yards short of a first down.
After the play, however, Giants cornerback Sam Madison pushed running back Vernand Morency and was flagged for unnecessary roughness, giving Green Bay a first down at the 12. Favre found tight end Donald Lee on the next play for a 12-yard touchdown and the Packers were back in front by 17-13.
But NFL clearly meant Not For Long on this chilly evening.
Before the third quarter was over, the Giants regained the lead with a seven-play, 57-yard drive that included an incredible 23-yard sideline catch by Amani Toomer at the Green Bay 12-yard line. Two plays later, running back Ahman Bradshaw scored a 4-yard touchdown and the Giants were up, 20-17.
Green Bay got even early in the fourth quarter on a 37-yard field goal that was set up by a Favre interception. Yes, that's right, an interception.
After scrambling away from pressure, Favre made an ill-advised throw down field that was picked off by R.W. McQuarters. It was McQuarters' third interception of the postseason and it quickly became his least productive one when Packers running back Ryan Grant swiped the ball out of his hands, allowing tackle Mark Tauscher to recover the fumble for Green Bay at the Giants' 19-yard line.
The Packers settled for three points, evening the score and setting the stage for an overtime conclusion.
I'm quite aware of the (now ridiculous) rules regarding completions. If you were watching, the referee nearest the play obviously thought it was a completion with Burris not down by contact as he watched the ball dribble into the endzone and be picked up by a Packer who started to run the ball out. I didn't say that the pass was obviously a completion. I just said that Burris was obviously touched and so down by contact if it was a completion, and so I thought it warranted a booth review.
ML/NJ
There was a lot of boring football in the pre salary-cap days. Unless you were watching a team that could afford to stack their rosters with big-name players, the games could get awfully boring. I remember snoozing through a lot of 17-13 Tampa Bay/New England games (when Tampa Bay and NE were awful) during the 1970s. It was like watching two teams both trying equally as hard not to win.
I was watching, and having officiated football for 10-years, I always like to see the covering officials confer when a call is close...this was correctly done and they got the call right. The "referee" (as you say) nearest the play was blocked and the other "referee" had a better view.
As far as the current ("now ridiculous") rule governing pass completions, I like it.
BRING ON THE PATSIES!!!!
What exactly was he blocked by? They didn't "confer" either, until one of the refs (not sure which one) blew his whistle as the Packer guy was running the ball out of the endzone. I hope you're not refereeing beyond the Pop Warner level!
ML/NJ
LOL...you’re the expert and you don’t know the difference between a referee and a back judge. Keep on posting; your ignorance of the game is amusing.
I know wind can make it suck, wind can make it suck in the heat too.
Actually you can die in the heat just as easily as in the cold. Heat exhaustion, dehydration. Remember all the people that died up north when a big heat wave hit 8 or 9 years ago, remember all the French a couple three years ago. And really heat is probably more dangerous than cold, with cold you have to get a lot further away from out standard body temperature for it to be dangerous than with heat, the highs when over 100 people died around Chicago were only like 101 102, 3 or 4 degrees above normal body temperature, people don’t get hypothermia when it’s 95.
ML/NJ
In the freewheelin free agency days it took two things to make a good team: money and smarts. Now in the cap days it just takes smarts. That’s why now is better, well run teams can actually succeed because the money field has evened out (the TV contracts divide up to pay the salary for all teams, so there’s no excuse anymore). Part of what makes a big market team is the popularity of the sport in the area, the Cowboys are in a big market while the Rangers aren’t because Texas is a football place not a baseball place, the Giants are more popular than the Jets so even though they both have the NYC market the Giants make a lot more money.
The 70s don’t matter, the era of big money free agency is the 80s through the early 90s. 70s payrolls were much smaller, so the market size didn’t matter. And no the Broncos were not a dominant team in the 80s, they were in the AFC’s perpetual also rans killed by the dynasties.
And you’re 100% wrong about how the cap works, you’ve got it backwards, the cap is ALL ABOUT drafting well, finding the roll players at every position in every round. Especially now. This year’s cap is $109 million, for a 53 man roster, that averages to over $2 a player, more than enough if a team doesn’t over spend. What the cap does is prevent the Cowboys from throwing $10 million a year at their 6 top drawer players and not have to worry about other parts of the team suffering. The cap does a great job at punishing teams that draft poorly, look at what it did to the Falcons, they bet the farm on Vick and lost the farm because Vick was never that good.
This IS the time when a good NFL team is built on smart scouting and drafting. Every single team has a key player that was either a second day draft or completely undrafted, EVERY TEAM. From Tom Brady (2nd day) to Tony Romo (undrafted) to Willie Parker (undrafted) to Ryan Grant (undrafted), the list goes on and on. In the cap days if you can’t spot that 2nd day and post 2nd day talent you will not have a good team, period. Just as much sniping from other rosters happened in the pre-cap days as now, actually a lot more, because back then there were just the handful of teams that could afford ALL the talent, now all the teams can afford all the talent IF they spend wisely.
You really want to get a sense of just how dumb that remark about Eli is? While Eli has deserved a lot of criticism it’s really for being annoying during draft time and being a first pick. Eli has belonged in the league his entire career, he’s been a perfectly acceptable middle tier QB for 4 years. The complaints came in because: A - he’s a Giant and the NY media only knows how to overhype and over criticize, players there are either tauted more than they deserve or hit more than the deserve; and B - he was a petulant first pick and wasn’t playing well enough for either his pick or his petulance. Now there might be fewer amazing QBs around now than there were in the dynasty days, but that’s genetics and coincidence not the cap. With or without the cap an era when you get Montana, Marino, Elway, Aikman, Young and Favre all playing the game at the same time just doesn’t happen all the time.
But to prove once again how the cap does exactly the opposite of what you say look at how much better the Giants are this year with Brandon Jacobs (2nd day) at RB instead of Tiki (1st day). See it really is ALL about the smart drafting. Successful teams now are built on the 2nd day, and in the supplemental, and with undrafted free agents.
And the best part is at the beginning of the season most teams, and therefore most fans, actually have a shot. That’s what really sucked about the dynasty era, most teams never had a shot and most of their fans knew it. The season is more engaging to more fans for a longer time now. Yes I do occasionally miss the beauty of the dynasty era Niners, Giants, or Cowboys, they were amazing teams to behold. But I watch more games now because I know that somebody besides those three teams is likely to win the SB, there are actually now important games played that DON’T involve the super teams, because there are no more super teams. Even the Pats at 18-0 have had their tough outs and clearly shown they aren’t one of the super teams, which made their games much more interesting to watch.
No, he was warm and fuzzy inside. He’s going to the superbowl!!!
Tampa Bay didn't join the NFL until 1976, and the Patriots had a winning record every year from 1976 through 1980 (they fell to 2-14 in 1981). And since Tampa Bay never played in the same division as New England (the Bucs played their first year in the AFC West, then moved to the NFC Central), I'd guess they probably didn't play each other very frequently.
Interesting tidbit . . . I did a little research on this, and it turns out that 1989 was the first year in which both the Patriots and Bucs had losing records!
At any rate, I have no doubt that there were some really bad teams back then, but if you go through each of the last 30 or so seasons since the NFL went to a 16-game schedule you'll find that there is no pattern at all to the frequency of downright abysmal teams.
Another interesting tidbit . . . The single worst game in the memories of a lot of NFL fans was the Monday night game in 1983 when the 8-7-1 Cardinals and the 3-12-1 Giants played to a 20-20 tie, in a game filled with dropped passes, missed tackles, and missed field goals (I believe both teams missed at least two field goals at the end of regulation or in overtime). I remember a sportswriter back then describing it as the most hideous game he'd ever seen -- and one which probably set the NFL back 20 years because it was on national television. LOL.
Now my memories of the 1970s might be a bit hazy but I remember that early 80s MNF game very well. I watched that game at the E-club at Camp Pendleton (I was still in the Marines then) and we were falling over each other, laughing at the ineptitude that was happpening on the field. I believe that is the epitome of “two teams trying not to win”. (All those pitchers of 3.2 beer made the game at least fun to watch.)
I can't think of any off the top of my head. In fact, I'm not sure teams even had the ability to sign free agents from other teams back then (I clearly remember players holding out in the hopes of getting traded, since free agency rules were pretty restrictive back then).
Every championship team from the 1980s was dominated by players who were drafted by their own teams. The 49ers had players like Dwight Clark, Joe Montana (a third round draft pick), Roger Craig, Jerry Rice, and their entire secondary (including Hall of Famer Ronnie Lott). All of these players were drafter by the 49ers, and most of them either spent their entire careers in San Francisco or left the team after the NFL's salary cap was imposed.
The Giants had players like Phil Simms, Lawrence Taylor, Harry Carson, Mark Bavaro, and Joe Morris -- all of them drafted by the team.
The Redskins had players like Joe Theismann (played his entire career in Washington), Jay Schroeder (who was drafted by the Redskins but only played a few seasons for them), Doug Williams (who was cast-off from Tampa Bay who had one moment of glory in his career with Washington), a committee of running backs who they picked up off the garbage heap long after their best years were behind them (including John Riggins, George Rogers, and Kelvin Bryant).
The Bears were led by Walter Payton (the perfect example of a guy who spent his entire career with one team, through good and bad), Jim McMahon, and a formidable defense with at least 8 perennial Pro Bowlers and a half-dozen legimitate Hall of Fame candidates.
Who, exactly, were all these big-name free agent players who were signed by those dominant teams of the 1980s?
What the cap does is prevent the Cowboys from throwing $10 million a year at their 6 top drawer players and not have to worry about other parts of the team suffering.
The key word in this statement is THEIR top drawer players. These players all ended up on Dallas because: (1) the Cowboys had some pretty bad years in the late 1980s and early 1990s that gave them good draft positions; and (2) they were on the winning side of one of the worst trades in NFL history (the trade that sent Herschel Walker to the Vikings for a combination of players and draft picks from which the Cowboys eventually got RB Emmitt Smith, DT Russell Maryland, CBs Kevin Smith and Clayton Holmes, S Darren Woodson, and CB Clayton Holmes).
That team was compiled through prudent drafting and trades . . . it was broken up by the salary cap.
The cap does a great job at punishing teams that draft poorly, look at what it did to the Falcons, they bet the farm on Vick and lost the farm because Vick was never that good.
The Falcons didn't get "punished" by drafting Vick . . . they made the mistake of paying him an exorbitant amount of money in a long-term deal several years after he was drafted. In the salary cap era they could have made the same mistake signing a player from another team (see Scott Mitchell with Detroit).
The complaints [about Eli Manning] came in because: A - he’s a Giant and the NY media only knows how to overhype and over criticize, players there are either tauted more than they deserve or hit more than the deserve; and B - he was a petulant first pick and wasn’t playing well enough for either his pick or his petulance.
The complaints about Manning are really based on the fact that the Giants basically gave up a #1 pick to get him and he hasn't been a franchise player. Those are legitimate complaints -- at least for now.
Now there might be fewer amazing QBs around now than there were in the dynasty days, but that’s genetics and coincidence not the cap. With or without the cap an era when you get Montana, Marino, Elway, Aikman, Young and Favre all playing the game at the same time just doesn’t happen all the time.
It's not about genetics at all. It's mainly about the salary cap, because teams do not have the luxury of carrying a young, untested quarterback on their roster for several years while they learned to play their position under the tutelage of an established veteran. In previous years it was rare for rookie quarterbacks to start right out of college, and rarer still for any of them to have a big impact in the NFL (Dan Marino was the classic exception to this).
Nowadays, a team can't carry that kind of depth at ANY position -- and the quarterback position is where the lack of experience really shows.
There was a definite pattern on who stank, in the 80s it was simple:
The AFC at best was OK, most of it stank.
The NFC Central, except for the Bears a couple of season, stank.
The NFC West, except for the Niners, stanks.
The Cardinals were involved in a lot of really bad games, the franchise stinks. Bad owners. But really anybody claiming any game that wasn’t Green Bay- Tampa Bay in the 80s the worst game ever is just wrong. The hard part about picking the worst game ever was that those two truly terrible franchises were in the same division and played two horrid games a year against each other, the mighty Bay of Pigs series. Of course most people didn’t watch those games, the league was never dumb enough to make them primetime, and CBS only showed them where they absolutely had to. But definitely one of those is the worst game in NFL history.
Oddly enough, those Cardinal teams of the early 1980s really had a lot of talent. They had a potent offense with players who were among the best in the league at their respective positions (QB Neil Lomax, RBs Ottis Anderson and Stump Mitchell, and WRs Roy Green and Pat Tilley . . . and Lawrence Taylor always said that the Cardinals' Luis Sharpe was the best OT he ever played against).
They were certainly a perfect example of a poorly-run franchise . . . and the move to Phoenix (and the salary cap!) sure hasn't helped, has it? LOL.
Easy meat: Deion Sanders, 5th overall draft pick, drafted by the Falcons a team that was always low revenue, sniped by the Niners. Hmm you forgot to mention Sanders in the SB Niners list of dominant players.
Drafting was important then, drafting has always been important in the NFL, largely because so few trades take place. It’s at least as important now.
And they stayed in Dallas because Dallas was the highest revenue team in the league and could afford to write blank checks to players to keep them. Now a team not only has to draft well, they have to spend smart, you can’t overpay for talent, you can’t tie up $60 million on 6 players and not suffer. Now is the time when character matters most for players, you need top tier players that are smart enough to know they’ll make more money with a good team because of endorsements and outside the game money.
That Cowboys team wasn’t broke up by the cap, that Cowboys team was broken up by STUPIDITY and inability to use the cap. Jones fell into the greatest trap of sports, and it’s a trap even when there is no cap, many NHL teams fell into the same trap in the 90s: deferred salary. Jones used deferred salary to pay over the cap in one season, mortgaging the future for success now. The Niners and Broncos did the same stupid thing, deferred salary sounds good this year but turns next year and the year after into nightmares. That’s what broke up the Cowboys, they deferred a bunch of salary and then found nearly 1/4 of their cap space taken up paying for the past. Had they not overpaid with deferred salary they’d have been able to keep that team together. Like I said: it’s all about the SMARTS now, you can’t be stupid with the money in the cap era, especially the early cap era.
No the Falcons got punished for drafting Vick. They wasted their first round pick on a mediocre QB, then have spent years trying to find the magic coach that can make the mediocre QB worth the pick and the money. The fact that they then threw a ton of money at the mediocre QB is just compounding the stupidity and prolonging the punishment. But the Vick experiment was a failure from day one, long before they tied too much cap space to him.
That is a legitimate complaint about Eli, but it has nothing to do with the cap. That’s bad drafting, exactly the thing you said doesn’t matter in the cap era. They wasted a #1 pick on a guy that for 4 years has demonstrated 3rd or 4th round talent, the fact that they tied up #1 pick cap space to him just puts a dollar value to his lack of performance.
That’s not true at all. Reference: Aaron Rodgers. Green Bay’s first round pick whose waiting around begging Favre to retire. And again I’ll bring up Tony Romo, signed as an undrafted free agent in 2003, learned, was seasoned, started in 2006. Then there’s Tom Brady, 2nd day pick, spent an entire season on the bench, only became a starter when he did because Bledsoe got injured. Philip Rivers spent 2 fairly expensive years holding the clip board given when he was drafted. Smart teams still let guys season on the bench a while.
Smart teams have plenty of depth in many positions. It’s still a 53 man roster, with 109 million dollars to spread around, plenty of room for depth on the chart. If the team is smart. They have to scout smart, draft smart AND spend smart. That’s all the cap really does, force smart spending on ALL the teams, not just the teams that aren’t the Cowboys.
Coming from NFC central territory I saw way too many Bay of Pigs games. Simply horrible, the ultimate proof that the dynasty era was only great at the top, below the top the quality of football in the 80s and early 90s was mostly bad. That’s the real difference, back then there were a handful of teams you could count on for A games most of the season A+ when they played each other, but the rest of the league provided C entertainment at best. These days the A+ is basically gone, but there are more A games, and the rest of the league is running a solid B, there are actually more competitive entertaining teams than playoff spots most years, that’s simply not how the league was in the dynasty era after free agents got expensive.
In the 70s, before athletes got pricey, things were fine, but he 70s ended, the USFL hit, players got expensive, high end free agents got REALLY expensive, and the quality of the game suffered, power started focusing to the teams with the big pocketbooks, and the rest of the league stank. If you were a Giants, Cowboys or Niners fan it’s easy to think of that era as being an era of wonderful football, because it was when YOUR team was on the TV. But for the rest of the league, it really wasn’t.
The Cards frequently have a lot of talent, but it’s always been a poorly run team. Actually the cap has helped a little, the Cards got their second playoff win in franchise history in the cap era. And they actually challenged for a playoff spot for a while this season, they were undone by QB injuries, and Leinert not performing up to his draft spot. But the Cards just don’t have the organizational smarts. The cap can’t make teams smarter, it just made some teams dumber.
He's also an unusual case, and hardly representative of the entire league. Because he played both football and baseball professionally, he had the luxury of playing off his baseball and football employers against each other (with the implied threat of "retiring" at any time from either sport). It's worth noting that Sanders left the 49ers after that one season and signed a deal with -- you guessed it -- the Dallas Cowboys!
I'll answer the rest of these points later . . . I've got some work to do here!
Sanders wasn’t a cap hit though, the Falcons had plenty of cap room for him, but they didn’t necessarily have the money.
Sanders only signed a 1 year deal. It is odd that he played on both sides of that rivalry. Sanders is as much a free agency thing as a gravitate to good team thing, that’s happened in and out of the cap era, usually more second tier guys than Sanders but there’s always that crowd of people sick of being on bad teams who want to use their talent to get a championship. Now in the cap era those guys tend to need to take pay cuts, but it’s always been something that helped good teams stay good, good (not necessarily great) players want to play on good teams.
I got today off. Going to see Cloverfield. Later.
Congrats. I Just hope you beat the Pats this time.
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