What a great matchup. The top 2 vote getters for MVP and the best quarterbacks in football right now match up in the Super bowl. I love it and I expect it to be a great game.

The Colts have to be the favorites here with the experience they have and the Qb who has been there before. I think the Saints will win and I’ll tell you why: The Saints are used to this position and they like it.

When did the Saints start losing games this season? It was when everyone started talking like they were going to be undefeated and were this great team. They don’t like that role. The Saints are best when they are expected to lose and underperform and Drew Brees is the leader of this type of team. He’ll feed his guys constantly with underdog talk until they have bought in completely that everyone thinks the game shouldn’t be played. He’ll feed his defense with how great Manning is and how they don’t belong on the same field. Truly great athletes typically respond best to challenging or negative criticism and this will be on full display in a couple weeks. We are going to watch an angry Saints team come to play and be fully prepared for what they will get and they are going to use that anger the whole game.

Sean Payton will have a game plan and the city of New Orleans will continue to inspire through their adopted son Drew Brees. I see the Saints winning a close game.

In the end we could all sense it was coming. I imagine his teammates felt the same way also, but as Favre rolled out and refused to run you could sense that the play was going to go bad for the Vikings. I’ve watched Jay Cutler roll out all year long and Favre had that same presence about him. This sounds bad but at that exact moment I said “here comes the pick” and it happened. It was perfect Favre.

For all the good Brett Favre has done throughout his career and all the amazing plays we are all not astonished at all when he throws interceptions on plays he shouldn’t make. This was no different and just like a couple seasons ago, Favre had his season end on an interception and now the talk will start up again.

I’ll give the man credit because he is an amazing athlete and competitor and he does things at 40 that are incredible. He can still throw the ball as hard as anyone and was 1 bad pass away from another super bowl run. However, in the end 20 years of experience wasn’t enough to overcome the same stubborness that makes Favre who he is. He couldn’t help but throw the ball and as a result the Saints couldn’t not intercept it. It was perfect.

This game is going to be very exciting and I think very high scoring. Both teams are prone to give up big plays and both teams are very capable of making big plays. On one hand you have Brett Favre and the other you have Drew Brees. Everyone, including myself, seems to be waiting for Brett Favre to implode and have a 3-4 interception game and this could be the one. It seems when he gets down or behind in years past he has tried to score 21 points in one possession and it doesn’t work well. Favre is one of the best qb’s ever and deserves all the praise for this season but we have a long history of viewing his playoff failures and we sense one is coming.

Who knows? Maybe Brees is the one who will choke and give the Vikings the win but at home in front of a loud loud crowd will only help the Saints and give them a great advantage. If the Vikings win this one it will be because they deserved it and really took it from the Saints. I will say that the more the Vikings pass the ball and stop the clock the tougher the game will get for them. They need to really control the ball and the clock and force Brees into thinking he has to hurry. If it is coming free and easy for Brees then the Saints will put up 40 points and cruise to the Super Bowl.

I like the Saints by a touchdown. 38-31

That was a great football game. I know that San Diego put 8-9 players in the box the entire game and the problem wasn’t the defense, it was the offense. Countless times San Diego shot themselves in the foot with penalties and dropped passes while the JETS blitzed every way you possibly could. In the end the Chargers couldn’t stop the run even when they knew it was coming. Even when they knew that the Jets would give the ball to Shon Greene. The Jets controlled the line of scrimmage at the end of the game and as a result Norv Turner is heading home again.

Speaking of Greene, what a find that guy was. That run he had for 53 yards and the touchdown was impressive. I think he could’ve easily taken that one 80 yards because only 1 guy was closing and he wasn’t closing very quickly. His speed really impressed me. Do the Jets have a shot against the Colts though? NO. NO. NO. The Colts will beat them good because Manning will be a bit more prepared than Rivers and the Colts want this one more. They want to prove to everyone in football that resting the final 2 weeks didn’t hurt them and that they are still the best team in football.

I don’t fault the guy for leaving and going to USC but I can fault USC for hiring him. I’m still not sure that he’s proven he can coach at this level let alone take over the top football program in the entire country. We can talk about the SEC and all that but USC is the benchmark or at least was. There has to be a very long list of coaches who would be able to take this team quickly and be able to do things the right way but instead Kiffin gets the job and immediately questions arise. Everyone knows the guy lives in the gray when it comes to recruiting and it obviously has worked for him so the questions that have come up in the past couple days surely aren’t surprising. In fact, we would all be surprised if he didnt’ have Orgeron call those potential recruits. We’ve come to expect that from Lane Kiffin in recruiting but we still don’t know what to expect of him as a coach. Tennessee got better this past year but they were still years away from being Florida, Alabama or LSU consistently. He’s no Nick Saban is what I’m trying to say.

I know USC needed to do something quickly because the signing period is weeks away and they had no coach. We know they looked several different places and it just surprises me they’d make this selection considering what the basketball team went through with Tim Floyd and what the football team is going through now with being looked at a little bit. Kiffin’s name is the lightning rod of the NCAA and now he’s going to the school with arguably the most talent of them all in the brightest city in the West. I just can’t see this going well. Kiffin had a job in California before as coach of the Raiders and that didn’t last long. He’s got a career winning percentage of somewhere near .400 yet somehow that qualified him to coach USC. You can’t tell me thats the best you can do?

I won’t lie when I say I hope that he falls flat on his face here and ends up as a recruiting coordinator for Appalachian St. He won’t though because he can talk the talk and he is one of those guys who will land on his feet. We all know he has the connections for it.

As the ESPN writer said “he’s a guy that was born on 3rd base but acts like he’s the one who hit the triple.”.

It took Nick Saban nearly no time at all to turn a program that had struggled for years into THE powerhouse in college football and no the SEC was served notice that Alabama is the official king of the mountain. Urban Meyer has taken a leave of absence at Florida and with that leave of absence he has to be very careful because the longer he stays away the greater the stranglehold will be for Saban at Alabama. Don’t forget that Alabama returns a bunch of players next season and have had consistent top 5 recruiting classes since Saban came back. They are reloading now and the other schools are quickly going to be after thoughts. I’m serious when I say that the SEC, the best conference in college football, is quickly going to be a 1 horse race.

Florida had a great run with Tebow but that era is over. Les Miles is great at LSU but he’s not that great of a coach to be honest. The other schools simply won’t be able to rival the consistent product that Nick Saban will be able to put up year after year and we need to all recognize it.

Before the game I had a thought that Boise would be able to play with and probably beat TCU. Boise is a great program with a great coach who if given a month to prepare could beat nearly anyone and they’ve proven it time and time again. I live in the Mountain West and everyone around here wanted TCU to win to give the conference an undefeated 5-0 mark in bowl season. Instead the win did what the BCS intended. Boise st got a win that didn’t mean as much as if they beat Florida or Ohio St or Texas. Since they beat a mountain west school it didn’t give them as much power as it would have. If TCU won it would’ve been the same thing.

Do we fault Boise for going undefeated and no decent team willing to go into boise to play them? Oregon did and lost badly so why would other schools go in there and risk the national championship being over before it even started as it did with the Ducks. Boise can only play who is on their schedule and win what they can. TCU did the same. Both schools will now have to keep playing toughter teams on the road as fewer and fewer teams want to go to their fields to play them on their turf. It’s sad and that’s why we need something to change.

Every season brings about some coaching decisions that I shake my head at and wonder what is really going on behind the scenes. Today I learned that Lovie Smith is going to be retained by the Bears and for the life of me I can’t figure out why. Then I got thinking about it and I can’t understand why Lovie would want to stay. His entire defense was injured last season including Urlacher who missed the entire season. His Gm traded away the farm for a qb who would play behind one of the worst lines in football with no name receivers to throw to. Then his gm decided to trade away their 2nd round pick on a guy that was a bust for another team and we are talking about LOVIE losing his job? Should be Angelo who is leaving.

Raheem Morris gets to stay at Tampa Bay despite a 3-13 season. The Lions head coach will stay on there. Still up in the air is Mangini, Wade Phillips, Tom Cable and others.

It’s a tough league and teams need to win now. Coaches who have buyouts on their contracts have some good leverage now because teams don’t want to pay money for them to leave and then pay to have someone else come in and coach. I like the Bucs keeping Morris because they had a rookie qb for most of the season. I’m not a Mangini fan or a Tom Cable fan but that’s just personal opinion. If Mangini gets ousted at Cleveland then he will never be a head coach in the NFL again and he’s a young individual.

Teams and Gm’s need scapegoats for sometimes poor decisions that were made above them. It’s how the game has always been. We won’t see an Angelo fire himself for handcuffing the Bears for seasons at a time or Al Davis sit himself down because he knows nothing about today’s game. Instead we will see coaches continually fired and in some cases deservedly so.