2004-01-30 - 10:17 a.m. Bill Simmons is God I know most of you couldn't give two flying fucks about the Superbowl coming up, but let me say this: We are going to win. The New England Patriots are the best team in the 21st Century, and are clearly the best team in the NFL. We are talking about the BEST defense and a good offense. The Panthers don't even have a great defense, and their offense won't look anything like the Titans or Colts that the Pats took out. To think the Panthers are going to win is C-R-A-Z-Y. Consider the following things: The Pats lost their last game against the Redskins on Sept. 28. The baseball playoffs started two days later. Now, we're about three weeks away from pitchers and catchers reporting ... and they still haven't lost a game. Only one other team in the history of the league -- the '72 Dolphins -- has won more games in a row than New England. And nobody seems to be even mildly impressed by this. Richard Seymour and the Pats defense have allowed just one 100-yard rusher this season. Of those 14 victories, eight of them came against teams that won 10 games or more. The Panthers only played four teams with a winning record all season ... and they still lost five games! If this were the BCS, they would have been playing in the Galleryfurniture.com Bowl. Looking back over these past four months, the best teams were the Pats, Titans, Eagles and Colts. They were the cream of the crop. And the Pats went 5-0 against those other three teams. Has that ever happened before? During the duration of this streak -- 14 consecutive wins over nearly four months -- do you know how many times the Pats made the cover of Sports Illustrated? Zero. Not once. They were never favored by more than eight points in any of the 14 games. So why not continue to overlook them this week? As amazing as this sounds, they still haven't played their best game. In none of those 14 wins did they slap together four top-notch quarters in a row. Seriously. Maybe the closest was the Buffalo game in Week 17. The Pats defense has only allowed one 100-yard rusher all season. Sixteen of the 18 quarterbacks they played ended up with a lower QB rating then they had for the rest of the season. They also have the best coach in the league. And their starting QB has a record of 39-12. Apparently none of this matters. Remember Tom Brady has already won a Super Bowl. They're playing the fourth seed from the NFC ... and the NFC absolutely sucked this season. The disparity between the two conferences hasn't been this glaring since the early-'90s. Just look at what happened with that Packers-Seahawks-Vikings-Cowboys debacle in the past two weeks -- the Pack went from needing a miracle to make the playoffs to being everyone's sleeper in the span of 12 hours. Anyway, if the Super Bowl has taught us anything, it's this: When the best team from a superior conference has two weeks to prepare for an upstart team from an inferior conference, the game usually gets out of hand early (see San Diego-San Fran, Denver-Atlanta, Baltimore-N.Y. Giants, Chicago-New England). Especially with a shaky QB on the inferior team involved. For the team from the inferior conference, the Super Bowl feels like jumping from the All-Pro level to All-Madden. That's just a fact. The Panthers lost three consecutive games less than two months ago. They also prevailed in three of the luckiest games of the season -- the fourth-and-10 to beat the Jags, the blocked extra point to beat the Bucs, and Jim Haslett's meltdown in New Orleans. Yeah, you need some luck ... but they were three plays away from being 8-8. You could make a case that the Panthers are the weakest team that has ever made a Super Bowl (and if I had more time, I would). It's between them, the '95 Chargers and the '99 Falcons -- at least on my list. Has any team ever won a conference championship by having their QB throw three times in the second half of a relatively close game? Come on. You think John Fox took the ball out of Delhomme's hands because he wanted to rest him? And with all of that said, here's the line for this week's game: Patriots by 7. And the majority of people like the Panthers. Please tell me how any of this makes sense
by Bill Simmons | |||||||||||
