NFL Thoughts, Wildcard Round

Though it was arguably the worst of the four games to usher in the postseason, there was at least one interesting aspect of the Chiefs-Colts game. And though that aspect encompasses the irony that the Colts defense—against all expectations—completely shut down Chiefs running back Larry Johnson, it’s not the entirety of what was interesting about the game. In fact, in a true testament to the shortness of our memories, the Colts run defense has already performed this exact same “miracle” once this year, and not even that long ago. If you can somehow journey mentally far, far back into Ancient Times, a.k.a. “Week 14,” you may remember that what started the entire Colts-Can’t-Stop-the-Run movement in the first place was their horrendous performance against the Jaguars. This led to a succeeding week of near certitude that their impotence against the run would spell their doom against their next opponent, Rudi Johnson and his band of Bengals. And what happened? The Colts limited R. Johnson to 79 innocuous yards en route to a victory on Monday Night Football.

No, what made the Chiefs-Colts affair interesting was that it took the storyline that had been leading up to the game and immediately replaced it with its near-perfect antithesis once the contest actually started. The out-gong storyline (“erstwhile storyline”? “ex-storyline”?) was, of course, “Can Peyton Manning overcome what will be undoubtedly a horrible showing by the Colts run defense?” But in a Hitchcock-ian plot twist, the compelling question quickly got turned on its ear to become, “Can the Colts run defense overcome a horrible (that’s probably a bit harsh—more like “mediocre”) showing by Peyton Manning?” And best of all, the game remained faithful to this conflict, carrying it out to a tidy conclusion (that conclusion being, "Yes").

I say “quickly” because the Chiefs got the ball first, handed it off to Johnson on the first two downs for negligible gains, and ultimately went 3-and-out. Meanwhile, on just his third drive, Peyton threw a costly interception. That these counterintuitive trends happened early is key, because they allowed the viewers at home to delete their presupposed notions of what would happen, upload the new ones, and become involved in the game as a coherent, evolving story. Their consistency is crucial as well. If at some point in the third quarter, Larry Johnson began busting through holes and chewing up the clock (and finishing the day with, say, 105 yards), while Peyton overcame his first half problems and went for 300+ yards and four touchdowns, we would have had nothing for a story, except maybe the old “it was a tale of two halves” deal, which has been done enough (it’s like football’s version of movies involving an underachieving team of kids who rally around a charismatic coach to win the championship). But this didn’t happen, as Larry finished with just 32 yards and Peyton threw three interceptions that, if they weren’t horrible, were certainly “un-Manning-like” (unless you’re talking about Eli, that is).

Thus we were treated to an interesting, “alternative reality” story. The game still wasn’t great, though. If I had to name its cinematic equivalent, I’d say it was White Man’s Burden or possibly Vanilla Sky (the gold standard being Memento).

One other surprise of the weekend: when I woke up this morning, there were NOT approximately 450 articles on ESPN.com, CNNSI.com, etc. analyzing Tiki Barber’s downright cheerful demeanor at the end of the Giants loss to Philly. Evaluating and judging football players’ momentary facial expressions on the sideline in full-length articles has become a journalistic bonanza lately—saying someone looked too upset or not upset enough is easy action for a sportswriter, I suppose. Thus after Fox showed several shots of the future talk show host smiling repeatedly despite the clock winding down on the game and his career, I could sense the upcoming controversy. As Troy Aikman would put it, “it was to the point where” I could practically see all the Monday headlines criticizing Tiki for his shallowness/selfishness/disinterest, followed by an opposing group on Tuesday insisting that it’s his right/his life/none of our business. As it is, no one said much of anything—weird...