I said it myself, but I didn't listen.
People would ask who my pick was for the Super Bowl. My answer was always the Colts, but then I'd qualify that with something similar to what I said on twitter: "Everyone is so sure the Colts are going to win the Super Bowl. If I were Indy, that would terrify me."
Think of what little chance any "expert" gave the Saints. The build up to the big game gets pretty out of hand (and by "out of hand" I mean if some catastrophic event happened this week, we never would have heard about it) so I limit my TV time, but any person I saw predicting the outcome picked the Colts (including me in this post).
New Orleans needed three things to align to get its 31-17 Super Bowl win. Here's why they pulled it off:
1. The Saints kept Peyton Manning from getting into a rhythm. The time of possession was nearly equal, Saints 30:11 to Indy's 29:49, but the game had a feel that Manning was not on the field enough to get the offensive motor going. Remember after the AFC Championship game, what New York Jets head coach Rex Ryan said?
"With Peyton Manning, if you can't disrupt his rhythm he's going to kill you," Ryan said, "and we couldn't disrupt it enough."
The Saints simply didn't let Manning kill them. At the end of the game, Manning started rifling 150 MPH-passes at people. Uh, that would be the definition of forcing it, my friends. They flustered Manning, and that turned out to be all the Saints really needed to do to neutralize the entire Colts team.
2. Drew Brees played nearly perfect. It hardly seems realistic for Brees or anyone else to even dream of performing the way he did in the Super Bowl: 32-39, 288 yards, 2 touchdowns, no interceptions. He never got flustered (the Colts defensive line can blame themselves for that) and he just methodically moved his team down the field almost every series they had. His team backed him up and didn't cough up the ball 150 times like they did in the NFC Championship game against the Vikings.
3. The Saints got their huge momentum moment. This is a team that is used to feeding off a frenzied fan base. Maybe more than any team in the NFL, they feed off of emotion. New Orleans needed a moment where they felt like, "hey, we can win this." It came at the start of the second half.
In what could be one of the gutsiest calls in Super Bowl history, the Saints did an onside kick to start the second half. It's one of those, "if we pull this off, we're geniuses, but if not, we're idiots" moves, and it caught Indy completely off guard. It changed everything.
If the Colts get the ball there at the start of the half, they probably score at least a field goal, and New Orleans starts to worry that they just won't be able to stop the Colts and Manning. Instead, the momentum goes crashing onto the Saints' side and it never leaves.
My friend James, an avid Saints fan, brought up an interesting point after that onside kick. The cameras showed Dwight Freeney getting his bum ankle re-taped on the sideline.
James said, "Do you think they went for that onside kick knowing Freeney would be getting his ankle re-taped at halftime?"
I think that's a total possibility; they knew he wouldn't be ready right at the start of the third quarter. Either way, a brilliant move by the Saints.
When it was all over, the Saints had their win and my friend James was sitting on the floor, crying tears of joy. When they first showed Bourbon Street, it didn't look all that crazy. But I pictured many of those people sitting together after the game was over, crying tears of joy like James was, and saying what he said:
"I never thought I would see this happen in my lifetime."
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