Riffs, rants, observations and dissenting opinions from the voices in my head about the NFL's Final Four, with a big-picture look at the Patriots' place in history and a microscopic look at what the Packers must do to upset the Seahawks.
Lines for the games, as usual, are courtesy of Odds Shark. Times are Eastern. Unless otherwise stated, all stats are from Football Outsiders' internal database or the firewall-protected, media-only treasure trove NFLGSIS.com.Tom Landry led the Cowboys to the playoffs 18 times in 29 years (62.1 percent success rate). Don Shula led the Dolphins to the postseason 16 times in 26 years (61.5 percent) and did some very important things when coaching the Colts. To find coaches who colonized the playoffs more often than Belichick, you need to turn to civic institutions from an era in which a head coach might take over an expansion team and enjoy six full seasons of sub-.500 football while assembling his roster, or leap straight from Super Bowl glory into the driver's seat of a down-and-out franchise from a rival league.
Landry and Shula are men of Lombardi's time, not our time. And Belichick is still more ubiquitous than they are in the playoffs, from a percentage standpoint, though you can hack out 15-16 season chunks of Landry and Shula's careers (1966-82 for Landry, 1971-85 for Shula) that match Belichick's Patriots run.
Belichick tied Landry for the most playoff wins in NFL history with his 20th last week. His Patriots are a heavy favorite to claim the all-time record outright this week. It was both an impressive accomplishment and an easy one to take for granted.
Every time a Patriots veteran does something good in the playoffs, it establishes a milestone or sets a record. Tom Brady surpassed the career postseason mark for passing yards last week. Brady passed Joe Montana on the all-time postseason touchdown list with 46. Stephen Gostkowski became the seventh kicker in NFL history with 100 postseason points, and Gostkowski isn't even the kicker we think about when we think about Patriots history.
You get the point: The Patriots have been really good for a really long time under Belichick.Playoff familiarity has bred both playoff contempt and playoff complacency. The contempt is understandable. The Patriots are as irritating on the national level as the Landry Cowboys were, with Gronkowski erotica and Brady metrosexuality filling in for disco-dancing Farrah Fawcett-cloned cheerleaders. It does not help that Belichick is the Nixon to Lombardi's apolitical Kennedy. You can play the "Beli-cheat" card if you want—if Shula is doing it, I can't fault anyone else for doing it—but no one really hates the Patriots because of a decade-old scandal. They hate the Patriots because 14 years of success, combined with that Boston-media we win because we are smarter, more righteous or just better than you on some metaphysical level hagiography makes them easy to dislike.
Hating the Patriots is understandable, given the circumstances. Taking them for granted, however, would be a shame. We all had them penciled into this championship game the moment they lost the last championship game, or (at the latest) when they signed Darrelle Revis. Only the opponent is a surprise. Face it, we all went through the motions this season: the manufactured Chicken Little hysteria after the Chiefs loss, the perfunctory New Year's Eve style hoopla after Brady-Manning: The Final Chapter, ho-hum been-there-done-that wins against all the middleweights and divisional rivals.
The Patriots are the spouse who brings home the bacon and fries it up in the pan. But after 15 years, they needed to spice things up. And yes, there is something inherently squicky about this team that leans toward erotic prose.
Source http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2329652-nfl-conference-championship-game-picks-will-the-pats-and-seahawks-roll
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