Friday, February 02, 2007

Super Bowl Exly is who I thought it was!

Here's the thing, all season there were a number of teams that I didn't take seriously. Chief among them were the Bears and the Ravens. The Colts were 8-0 this year, and yet no one seemed to think they were a Super Bowl contender.

What's going on? Well, the Ravens never seemed that good, but they kept winning and won their division and had a home playoff game and a playoff bye. And then what happened? Uh, they weren't that good. I picked them to beat the Colts because Peyton chokes in the playoffs, right?

And all year, I looked at the Bears offense and thought how would they over move the ball down the field? But they kept winning. And their defense gives up a lot of yards sometimes. And in the Saints-Bears game, the Saints were moving the ball up and down a lot more than the Bears. So how come the Bears blew them out? The Bears attack the ball, forcing turnovers. They have special teams (punter included) that got them good field position. And just for one drive, Grossman found his groove.

It's still easy to dismiss the Bears -- they play in a terrible division, they have a quarterback that can play terrible at times (most games with passer rating under 40) (also tied with Peyton for most games above 100), their whole conference is terrible, they squeaked by the Seahawks in overtime at home, and then got a bunch of turnovers of a dome team in Chicago weather. They won 2 playoff games at home, the first one unconvincingly, and the second one they got outplayed in the first half.

All that said, the Bears made it here. And they could do the same thing to the Colts that they did to the Saints. Force some fumbles, get some field goals, get one drive out of Rex and hold on to win.

I don't think the game will be all that interesting when the Bears have the ball. They won't move it much, whatever. The Colts stuffed the Chiefs running game and forcing them to throw.
The game will be won and lost when the Colts have the ball. If they can avoid turnovers they should win easily. If they have 2 turnovers, advantage goes to the Bears.

The line has stayed at -7 Colts for the last 2 weeks. If I were betting I would put the money on the Bears.

But I'm not. And my real pick is Colts 26, Bears 16

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