Your 2012 Superbowl LXVI Thread

they should have won? they were ahead with the ball and a chance to ice the game?

i mean, if the giants led the whole time and straight up outplayed them you could be like yeah not terrible the gmen were just better. but on the whole it was a pretty terrible loss and i think there's a lot of rationalizing going on up here.

pats had a small lead but it's not like they were dominating in any sense

no of course they weren't dominating.

so there's not really the 'tragic' aspect there. I mean I guess there is if you are a pats fan. but it's not like they blew a huge lead or lost to a worse team. they lost a close and fair game.

might seem more tragic in retrospect if it's brady's last super bowl tho

no not tragic but pretty bad and it seems like a lot of ppl here are surprisingly ok with it?

legacy implications may well be tragic, its true

What would have made me lol would have been if dude had stopped at the goal line and not kneeled, but just waited for a Patriot to actually tackle him. Since the D had been told "let him go in", how many seconds would go by before they realized "oh wait, he's not going in and time is still running off the clock"

might seem more tragic in retrospect if it's brady's last super bowl tho

― iatee, Tuesday, February 7, 2012 10:58 AM (41 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

eh, he's won three! things get a lot more tragic in the nfl.

I was hoping he'd stop and pats players would try and push him in the endzone, that woulda been beautiful

on the one hand i disagree with cad, because despite leading into the 4th, NE were the second best team and the turn was kind of inevitable. the giants played it perfectly - pats can't stop the short-mid passes and brady can't dump points on you if he only gets a handful of possessions and those from inside his 20. they put themselves in the best position to win. it's not like NE lost a 2 score lead or anything.

on the other hand, the loss is a piece of shrapnel moving towards my heart and rationalizing is like the complicated and unlikely iron armor keeping me alive, somehow, with magnets maybe.

there was a quote from the nyg running backs coach who said they'd practiced situations like that and he was supposed to basically wait it out and force the other team to knock him in so it would have been an amazing stand off if that couldve materialized

on the one hand i disagree with cad, because despite leading into the 4th, NE were the second best team and the turn was kind of inevitable. the giants played it perfectly - pats can't stop the short-mid passes and brady can't dump points on you if he only gets a handful of possessions and those from inside his 20. they put themselves in the best position to win. it's not like NE lost a 2 score lead or anything.

i would totally agree with this except for the possession with the welker drop and branch miss. that was the chance to survive in spite of all the above.

yeah brady and the offense are getting some stick for not performing but they did okay in the circumstances. a TD drive in the 4th would obv have been the difference between okay and championship great. would championship years brady have completed one of those drives? maybe. altho his specialty was getting in FG range of course.

brady was performing well during those drives, mostly

I'm still secretly convinced that they'd have scored w/ 2 minutes and 2 timeouts so it's bb's fault

patritos lb was just about to knock bradshaw into the end zone before he fell in

btw, i read somewhere that conceding 5y for having extra defenders on the field to burn some time off the clock is a legit cheaty strategy devised by buddy ryan. i wonder if coughlin really did that on purpose. i didn't realize the clock wouldn't be reset on that play. i was furious.

yeah you should be able to reset the clock if the penalty's against the other team

tho apparently they didn't do it on purpose?

doing it like 5 times in a row would be such an awesomely dickish way to win the super bowl

if the penalty is before or at the snap it should be a no-brainer. crazy rule.

patritos fans should be fine w/ legit cheaty strategies

there must be some kind of unsporting conduct penalty that the officials can impose to avoid a situation like that.

i am referring to iatee's idea obv

cf dudes playing madden online who are losing and run offside on the last play over and over so the game doesn't end

Putting more than 13 men on the field would probably qualify as a "palpably unfair" act, which the refs have significant latitude to punish. The lesson here, as always, is to have plausible deniability.

that's very interesting

that's from the end of the grantland story, which discusses the origins of the strategy as well: http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7545771/the-patriots-giants-super-bowl-rematch-disappoint

also a lot of things that are 'palpably unfair' are just things that haven't been accepted as 'acceptable strategies' (like icing the kicker, etc.) bradshaw stopping at the 1 yd line could also be palpably unfair.

xp oh aye, that is where i read about it. did not see the footnote tho. fuck you grantland footnotes.

fuck you grantland footnotes.

if i was a pats fan i'd be pretty broken up about this cuz really that brady to welker play should be all but automatic...

otoh, not to get all bill barnwell in this bitch, BUT the giants did recover three fumbles that legit bounced on the ground for like 2 seconds at a time... and that can't really be blamed on the pats

but yeah, brady should've closed it out

the welker miss, the branch miss (altho i thought kenny phillips tipped this?) and the awful hail mary were pretty big flubs

it's not like the Giants lucked into a win, you guys

when opportunity presented itself, the Giants executed more often than New England, ergo they won the game

they didn't really play better or worse than the pats overall and teh score was close enough that you can argue that they 'lucked into a win'. footballs bounce pretty unpredictably, one small thing here or there woulda turned the score around.

teh score

that doesn't mean they didn't 'deserve' the win, they played well against a good team. sorta like the niners game. but yeah, luck generally does play a huge role in close games. sorta ruins the narrative to accept that, but I think it's hard to argue w/.

IMO if the Giants got lucky with anything, it was Brady gifting them 2 points right at the beginning of the game. That wasn't the winning margin but I think it gave them momentum/belief that sustained them throughout the game, even after the Pats went up 8 points on them.

that rulebook article was v v interesting.
i'm shocked that welker missed that pass. blame the mustache.

I don't think that safety has anything to do with luck! that was a decision made by brady and a play made by the giants. whereas the ball not bouncing into gronk's hands on the last play of the game = there is an element of luck here.

xp

"lucky" should have been in quotes; I pretty much agree with that was a decision made by brady and a play made by the giants

a lot of those onion predictions basically came true!

yeah also the nyg offense is not motivated or influenced by the safety at all, except maybe on the ensuing free kick a little. it was just a quirky lil thing. when the pats had scored 17 str8 pts the giants were not thinking, but we had that safety!

1. Dropped passes by Welker, Hernandez, Branch
2. 3 failed fumble recoveries
3. Brady safety and INT

If any instance of any of these had gone the other way, I think the Pats have a good shot to win. By that reasoning, I have to call this a Patriots failure rather than great play by Giants. Pats needed to step it up and they didn't.

basically any game decided by one score that coulda been changed by a single turnover or catch or bounce = yeah tons of luck. giants beat niners = lots of luck. giants beat pats = decent amount of luck. giants beat packers = pretty decisive win

lotta sour grapes itt

idk I would be bummed if I were a giants fan w/ that knowledge that robot football historians will judge their wins for their statistical improbability

you can't get too carried away with the luck involved in 2 fumbles not being turnover. the other one was a penalty on the pats, so hang that on them. the brady safety comes from him having to throw under pressure out of his end zone - let's give the giants a little bit of credit for engineering that. you can compare the bad throw to welker to the great throw to manningham, i guess, and say NY just made the play better on that one. but there's no point isolating these pieces from the rest of the game. the giants devised the right game plan, executed it while making hardly any mistakes, and put themselves in the best position to win the game.

http://gothamist.com/2012/02/07/chris_christie_celebrating_the_new.php