Big Blue Supremacy

For the second time in four years, I got to enjoy the New York football Giants win another improbable Super Bowl at the expense of the New England Patriots. There are a bunch of scattered thoughts after this win, so I'll just throw them out there in no particular order:

• As a father with young children, the tradition around the game has changed a little. No longer is the Super Bowl about hosting or heading to a buddy's house with a bunch of guys with eyes glued to the television from 4pm to midnight, punctuating the time with cheering, groaning with an occasional break to go to the bathroom or get a refill of food and drink. The tradition is now family get-togethers where one eye is on the game and another is making sure my kid isn't defacing my friend's wall with crayon.
• Generally, I think Super Bowl parties - especially family parties - are completely incompatible with a Super Bowl in which you have a strong rooting interest. These parties are often more about socially getting together and catching each other up about work and family. The last thing that a die-hard fan wants to talk about as his team lines up for a game-winning field goal is whether he plans on signing his kid up for Cub Scouts next year.
• As I did four years ago, we left a party with the kids to bring them home so they could go to bed at a reasonable hour. This basically enabled me to only watch smatterings of the first half, which the Giants largely dominated but somehow reached halftime trailing by one.
• The fact that the Giants dominated the first half were actually losing was of great concern to me, as this was a scenario that Boston superfan Bill Simmons actually wrote about in a pre-game article in his prediction for a Patriots win, except that in Simmons' scenario, the Giants were only winning by 10, with the Patriots coming back in the 2nd half to win.
• After the Patriots scored to open the 2nd half to open up a 17-9 lead, Bill Belichick's decision to kickoff in the first half to enable the the "double score" (this is when a team tries to close off the first half with a score and receive the kickoff and score to open the second half) seemed brilliant. At that point, Brady seemed to be in a zone, and every Giants fan worried if missed opportunities an a Kevin Boothe holding penalty were going to be the turning points of the game.
• The Giants hung in there and kept driving the ball, but couldn't punch the ball in for touchdowns. With 5 minutes left in the game, the Giants having only one remaining timeout and the Patriots driving up by 2, everyone knew that the Patriots could put the nail in the coffin with a touchdown or at rtleast make it really difficult for a Giants comeback with a sustained drive and a field goal. This was pretty much the point at which I started having blood pressure issues. Every play mattered.
• After the Giants held, thanks to a missed hookup between Tom Brady and Wes Welker which would have taken the Patriots deep into New York territory, the Giants took over deep in their own territory.
• After the ridiculous Mario Manningham catch, which will forever draw comparisons with the David Tyree "helmet catch" in the Super Bowl win four years earlier, the Giants drove into the Patriots red zone and into a strategic decision that will continue to be debated:
• Here it is, the Giants are down by 2 and a field goal will put them up by 1 and a touchdown and extra point will put them up by five. The other factor here is how much time they allow the Patriots and Tom Brady to drive down the field to possibly win the game. The merits of either argument has been a hot topic, and Bill Barnwell of Grantland provides the stathead rationale:

Win Probability charts aren't perfect because they don't adjust for the teams involved, but they're the best tool for answering a question like this. Here, the Giants-Patriots WP chart on advancednflstats.com notes that the Giants had an 89 percent chance of winning the game when Hakeem Nicks picked up a first down on the New England 7-yard line with 1:09 left. From there, the Giants could have chosen to kneel three times, force the Patriots to use their final timeout, and then attempt a game-winning field goal with seconds on the clock without ever giving the ball back to the Patriots. The model might even be underestimating their chances; history suggests that an average field goal kicker will convert a 24-yard field goal about 96 percent of the time, and the Giants were playing on turf with the options to both move the ball onto Lawrence Tynes' desired hash mark while falling on the ball and trying again in the case of a bad snap. And if you think Tynes is a terrible kicker, note that he's 56-of-57 on kicks from 20 to 29 yards during his career.

Instead, when Bradshaw scored the most mournful game-winning Super Bowl touchdown in history, the Win Probability analysis suggests that the Giants' odds of winning decreased to 85 percent. That's right: Bill Belichick was likely correct to allow the Giants to score, and the Giants should have taken a knee and decided to kick the chip shot field goal instead.3 If you use the 96 percent win expectancy that we're suggesting instead of the model's 89 percent, it's patently obvious that the Giants should have kneeled and kicked.

• Fair point, but I completely disagree. What's are two things: #1 is the inherent pressure in having to make an offensive play to win as opposed to make a defensive stand. #2 is that even with the field goal scenario, the Giants would still need to kickoff with sometime life on the clock. To expound on point #1, we've already recently seen a supposedly "gimme" field goal missed in the heat of playoff pressure. Can you imagine the pressure on the long-snapper, holder and kicker? As ESPN.com sports host Michael Kay quipped, "Take the nervousness of all Giants fans during the last four minutes of the game and centralize it into a single person." As far as #2, even with minimal time how hard do think it would get to the 45-yard line for a winning field goal Patriots kicker Stephen Gostkowski? In a dome with perfect conditions? You need to put the most points on the board and let your team play defense.
• The whole Boston vs. New York rivalry just tallied another check mark in Gotham's favor. And the thing that stinks for Boston fans is playing under the looming reality that even a win by the Patriots wouldn't have made up for Super Bowl XLI, when the Giants wrecked the Patriots perfect season. Even Bill Simmons conceded this, when he printed the following fan e-mail:

Q: I'm sorry, but you can't really believe that a 2012 Patriots Super Bowl win will atone for 2008. As a sports fan, you know that not all championships are equal. The 2008 Super Bowl was the equivalent of someone punching you in the face, stealing your wife and posting an Internet video of them having sex (which your friends occasionally played just to mess with you). You now meet this man in 2012 and are trying to get revenge by keying his new car. Good Luck!

— Jesse, Ann Arbor

• Unfortunately for Boston fans, the man who previously did all those things to you just keyed your new car. But you'll always have the 2004 ALCS and World Championship.