Your 2012 Superbowl LXVI Thread

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

Naughty by Nature will be there!

the question that remains is how NE could have approached game differently. i know i hated seeing them drain time off the clock in their second-last drive, erring on the side of assuming a successful drive. i feel like they needed to make it a faster game, ratchet the tempo and make it a shootout. that is 3 close, tight games in a row lost to the giants. a shootout has to give NE the edge. throw the fuckin house at eli every other down and pass the ball 50 times. the actual NE gameplan seemed to be 1. hope we can keep scoring on them 2. hope eli regresses five years and fucks up

guess i am ready for stage 2, anger

the pats were 'lucky' that billy cundiff blew a v. makeable fg attempt in the afc championship. it evens out.

it was a close game and the giants took better advantage of their opportunities than the pats did. that's all.

it was a close game and the giants took better advantage of their opportunities than the pats did. that's all.

bingo

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.

bingo #2

there is a key difference between "took advantage of their opportunities" and "made better opportunities to take advantage of" is what i am trying to say

idk, I'd think the right game plan would result in more than 15 points by the 4th quarter.

like they played *well enough* to win but only scoring 15 points in 3 quarters is effectively a mistake

I just can't give too much credit to a team that only really had a single (real) td drive the whole game

yeah geez guys let's not go nuts here

xp you noticed that they won, though, right? turns out there's more to do in a football game than score points.

My takeaway was that neither of these teams were really that great (

I mean really, if they replayed the playoffs, id think that every team sans denver would have a roughly similar chance at it

:-/

right, I think they played well enough to win! looking at the stats, the only thing they really dominated w/ was time of possession, otherwise the game was v. even. but they didn't do much w/ the ball considering how much they had it, and that margin is mostly due to the 1st quarter safety. xp

parity

scoring is only one of the desirable things you can do when you have the ball, and sometimes not even the most desirable (eg the bradshaw td). NY made the game shorter and improved their field position on every single drive. those were critical factors in why they won.

yet scoring was an even more critical factor and they mostly failed on that front!

tho they ultimately failed at scoring less than ne failed at scoring

your glass is half empty

scoring was not necessarily more critical - if they had scored often fast instead of scoring less often but slowly, they probably would have lost that more expansive game. you are oversimplifying a complex business

the slow consistent possessions were the obvious strategy versus the patriots, the key weakness exploited and the key strength to nullified, and the giants did just that. i really think they were excellent in that game.

if u rly think about it pats won the game in a way

discus