Sporting Madness

It should be an interesting Super Bowl today; a clash between two high-powered offences, as well as two very different game philosophies. The Saints have a balanced attack and an incredibly aggressive defence, while the Colts' defence excels at limiting big plays and their offence is dominant in the passing game, but struggles to run the ball. You can find my full preview piece below , as well as other ones I wrote for Rob Carnell at Salt Water Music and Ryan Gallivan at The Gally Blog . Now, it's time for the prediction. Everyone has the Colts as big favourites, but I think this is overlooking a few things. For one, as Neil Paine points out, SRS (simple rating system, explained here ), which looks at teams' average margins of victory and their opponents' average ratings, is overwhelmingly in favour of the Saints. Yes, the Saints struggled against the Vikings in the NFC Championship game, but the Colts had issues with the New York Jets, a much less well-rounded t...

This year’s Super Bowl is more than just a battle between the New Orleans Saints and Indianapolis Colts; it’s also a clash of styles between the Colts’ pass-heavy offence and the Saints’ balanced attack. New Orleans was sixth in the league in rushing this year, averaging 131.6 yards per regular-season game, and fourth in passing, averaging 272.2 yards per game. The Colts were second in the NFL in passing yards per game, averaging 282.2 yards per game, but dead last in rushing, putting up only 80.9 yards on the ground. The Colts’ rushing game hasn’t improved by the numbers in the playoffs, as they’re still only averaging 2.9 yards per attempt and 71.5 yards per game. However, those stats are somewhat deceiving. The Colts got nowhere on the ground against the Baltimore Ravens in the divisional round, putting up only 44 yards on 23 carries, but that game was out of hand early and the Colts were often running just to control the clock. Against the notably effective rushing defence of the...

I had a difficult time finding a Colts blogger who was available for an interview for this piece , but I found a great pinch-hitter in Samer Kalaf , a colleague of mine from The Rookies and the editor of the excellent NFL blog Second-String Fullback . . Samer really knows his football and gave some great insight into the Colts' matchup this weekend. My questions and his responses are below. Andrew Bucholtz: The Colts were criticized heavily by many for playing some backups in the last few weeks of the season, including against the Jets, instead of going for a perfect season. What did you think of the decision at the time, and has your opinion changed at all since then? Samer Kalaf: I feel like that the decision by Colts head coach Jim Caldwell to rest the starters against the Jets was an incredibly terrible decision. I wrote long-winded posts about it, and how I feel it disgraces the history of the NFL, but I'll try to condense it. The Colts had a chance to be the se...

For the part of my AFC Championship preview focusing on the Jets, I spoke with my Fanball colleague Joe Caporoso . Joe's a great writer who runs Turn on the Jets and knows the team as well as anyone. His Turn On The Jets TV episode focusing on this weekend's game is particularly worth a look. My questions and his answers are below. Andrew Bucholtz: At the start of the season, did you think the Jets had a chance to make it to the AFC Championship Game? How about at the start of the playoffs? Joe Caporoso: At the start of the season, I picked the Jets to go 10-6 and make the playoffs as a wild-card team. I figured they might steal a game in the playoffs, but back in August, it was hard to picture a team with a rookie head coach and rookie quarterback going to the AFC Championship Game. At the start of the playoffs, I felt confident because of how well they were running the ball and how their defense was playing. Also, I loved the matchup with the Bengals in the first rou...

Today will feature the NFL's conference championship games, and I'll have plenty of coverage of them here. For starters, I wrote a pair of pieces for The Good Point talking to notable football bloggers about some elements of this weekend's matchups. You can check out the preview of the AFC contest between the Indianapolis Colts and the New York Jets (3:00 p.m. Eastern, CBS) here and the preview of the NFC clash between the New Orleans Saints and Minnesota Vikings (6:40 p.m. Eastern, FOX) here . To go along with those pieces, I'll be posting the complete interviews I conducted with each of the bloggers here. The AFC ones will be up shortly, with the NFC ones to follow in the morning. I'll also have my breakdown of each game with predictions up in the morning. Finally, I'll be live-blogging both games right here. Feel free to stop on by and join in the fun!

I'm a bit conflicted about the points Bob Kravitz of the Indianapolis Star makes in this column about the anonymity of the blogosphere (found via this post from Deadspin 's A.J. Daulerio ). On the one hand, Kravitz is partly right about how anonymity can lead to a decline in the quality of dialogue; see many sports message boards or the comments on most newspaper pieces for great examples. He goes too far, though, and picks the wrong examples. "My biggest objection is the proliferation of blogs and posts by anonymous weenies -- or pansies, if you will," Kravitz writes. "Everybody is big and brave behind a pseudonym, but confront them face to face, and next thing you know they're changing underwear." The words Kravitz uses are interesting, but counterproductive. The world of sports is too full of ego and testosterone as it is, and it doesn't really accomplish a lot to blast the masculinity of all bloggers who use a pseudonym. Kravitz could have c...

Last weekend in the NFL was a case in point as to why we still bother to actually play out the games, even in this day and age of intensive statistics, research and computer analysis on sporting events. Against the odds and the collected wisdom of the pundits and prognosticators, two underdogs (the San Diego Chargers and New York Giants) knocked off heavily-favoured teams (the Indianapolis Colts and Dallas Cowboys). The classic "any given Sunday" line became true again, which is a great thing for both the league and sport in general. Hopefully, this will continue: it will certainly make next week's games interesting if the Chargers and Giants can at least give the Patriots and Packers a run for their money. All sense, odds, and logical thought again favours the home teams, but as this past week showed, the league can't simply be turned over to the statisticians and computers. It should be a great round of games. Links of the day: - Stephen Brunt has a great piece in...