Believe it or not, we actually need to THANK the media

Did that get your attention?  Hopefully right now you are all thinking I'm flat nuts but you want to read what I have to say just in case.  But it's true, we do need to extend thanks to the media... for being their usual idiot selves.

Lets be honest about things, the two teams in the Super Bowl were very well matched and fairly even.  I think we were the better team and so do all the rest of us, but if we were it wasn't by much.  But at the same time, if we weren't, it wasn't by much there either.

But the media wasn't smart enough to see reality.  And their stupidity helped us win.

Think I'm kidding?  I'm not.  They helped in four key ways:

1) Gregg Williams comments on the radio.  Can you believe that such innocuous words of mild honesty become such a ridiculously blown-out-of-proportion nearly-riot-inducing scandal?  I mean, the horror of it all! a defensive coordinator who wants to pressure the opposing QB into making mistakes?  And then that bit about "you hope he doesn't get up".  Admittedly probably would have been better to leave that out entirely, but what he actually said -- which was acknowledging his mad dog reputation and saying that people wanted him to say that when it wasn't his real feelings -- and what it was twisted into weren't the same thing.  Which was an easily proven fact if you looked at his actual words, but few were willing to listen to that beforehand.

By blowing this non-story up into a massively over-hyped "scandal", the media unwittingly helped us out a great deal.  Manning and his team were so busy preparing for constant blitzes that they were largely unprepared for what they actually got, which was a constantly shifting set of alignments with almost no blitzes at all.  Bet none of us saw that coming did we?  I sure didn't.  I did foresee the concept of shifting game plans, but that's as far as I can go.  But I'll bet you just about anything Gregg knew exactly what he was doing on the radio and his "slip of the tongue" was no such thing at all.  He wanted them overly worried about blitzes because he knew from the start that wasn't a viable "full-game" game plan.  Not against Manning, at least.

2) Mindlessly reporting what they saw instead of trying to figure out what it meant.  When the reporters saw the Saints team admitting that Manning is a great quarterback and one of the best in the game right now (which is the truth regardless of what Big Ben's idiot worshipers think), they assumed the Saints were "just happy to be there" and were "overwhelmed" with the big stage.  Nothing of course could be further from the truth, but I think the Colts ate the cheese just a bit.  And instead our boys were gleefully pulling the wool over everybody's eyes.

3) Motivation to prove them wrong.  When a media idiot says you have "no chance" it doesn't really make that much of a difference, but it does help give a bit of extra motivation if you know that you really do have at least "a chance".

4) Motivation to seek revenge for the ridiculous MVP voting.  Let's face it, Sean Payton is never going to be timid (not that we want him to be), but it was a bit out of line when he slapped the media in the face from the championship stage by calling Drew the league MVP.  And I don't care.  I laughed out loud and loved it.  Because they deserved it.  In spades.  P. Manning put up MVP caliber numbers.  Anybody who says otherwise is either stupid, biased, or completely blind/uninformed.  But so did Brees, and so did Favre, and anybody who says otherwise there is also stupid, biased, or completely blind/uninformed.  At the very least it should have been a MUCH closer vote.  Something like say 21 for Manning, 20 for Drew and 17 for Favre with one or two left over for CJ or some other deserving candidate.  In a truly fair world it would have been split as co-MVPs between at least two of those three if not all three of them.  Manning won that award based on his name, not his performance, and that travesty deserved to be treated with the scorn it deserved.

In the end, we won Super Bowl XLIV because we had a great team playing that day.  No player or coach can do it all by themselves.  But it also helped a great deal that we had one of the three greatest quarterbacks in the NFL, one of if not the best offensive play-callers in the game, definitely the guy with the biggest brass ones in the entire NFL, and a much smarter defensive coordinator than the media gave him credit for beforehand.

And it helped that the media was their usual idiot selves, lulling the Colts to sleep and firing up our players to perform at their absolute best.