Post Championship Game Thoughts

One thing I know for sure in the wake of the Cutlerkneegate, or the frowniefacegate, is that Jay Cutler will not replace Drew Brees in all of the post Super Bowl MVP commercials next year. Brees is rooting for the Steelers because Ben Roethlisberger is not taking over those snoring NyQuil commercials, even though having Roethlisberger in an empty bed might be more appropriate than the married Brees.

I found a comment by Mike Lombardi in the shockingly short Sports Guy podcast to be telling. He mentioned that quarterbacks now have to be somewhat mobile. This is, of course, because the mobility of Roethlisberger and Aaron Rodgers made the difference in key plays of the game. Of course last year's Super Bowl featured two of the least mobile QBs in history in Drew Brees and Peyton Manning. They can be mobile inside the pocket, and having historically good accuracy doesn't hurt.

I sympathize with the Twitterverse. We are all emotional creatures and got sucked in to the whole "why is Cutler not playing" debacle. Today was mostly full of apologies, which means that Tweeps are nicer people then the gen pop. I don't know what it is about the 140-character format that makes people more prone to look at old posts and say "my bad". Maybe it's because posting a Tweet is as easy as sending a text or a chat message to a friend before realizing that you sent it to the wrong friend.

Subjects pass through Twitter like waves in the ocean. The day before the playoff games, multiple people reported that Dick LeBeau was in the last year of his contract. Titan tweeters said "why not us?" That's exactly what a 70-year-old assistant wants to do, take on a rebuilding project. Yeah, he'll stick with his all-world linebacker corps.

I thought it would be funny for Eric Mangini to sign as the Titans' defensive coordinator and a week later decide to take a better contract with the Eagles.

The Super Bowl is going to be a two-week referendum about whether Ben Roethlisberger has been reformed. I'm still glad that I dumped his jerseys in the trash after his Milledgeville incident. It's not whether he was guilty or innocent. It's the situation he put himself in. It's sweet that he points to the sky after touchdowns and is apparently engaged. While I think you can fundamentally change as a person, it's a painful, long process and something that a quarterback in the National Football League generally pushes to his underlings. He's a really good quarterback who was as fortunate that he was drafted by a team that already had a good foundation as Mike Tomlin was. Yeah, Tomlin's bad ass, but he took over a team that won a Super Bowl less than two years prior. Let's have a little balance.

And what is it with the Packers looking like the '99 Rams for a quarter and a half and falling apart for the rest of the game? They're a big tease to their fan base. I wouldn't be surprised if the Steelers led 24-0 at the half again and the Packers rallied to tie. It's the kind of game that would surprise no one. And it would suck to have the first Super Bowl overtime since I have it in my manuscript that takes place in the 2011 season. This season already murdered the plausibility of Vince Young as Super Bowl MVP. Yes, that's why they call it fiction.