Colt Proves Mightier than Bear

A few brief Super Bowl-related thoughts as we attempt to reconstruct an army of chicken skeletons from the copious amounts of bones that were left lying around these parts after the game:

1) Rex Grossman’s line – 20/28, 165 yds, 1 TD, 2 INT’s – doesn’t properly reflect how awful he was. He couldn’t move the Bears down the field and his deep ball consistently looked like it was being blasted out of the air with an elephant gun. Granted, it was raining which didn’t help, but that still doesn’t forgive how many times Grossman underthrew his receivers.

Brian Griese should have been in that game in the third quarter. By that point it was obvious that “Bad Rex” had shown up (as he so often does), and regardless of whether or not the guy’s your QB of the future, if you’re Lovie Smith, you’ve got to give your team a shot to win the game. There was at least a chance Griese was going to give the Bears a spark. Not so with Grossman.

(Despite not saying one nice word about Grossman in these two paragraphs, it still feels like we let him off a little bit easy. That's how bad he was.)

2) Peyton Manning played a perfectly fine game (25/38, 247 yds, 1 TD, 1 INT), but was a lame pick for MVP. Sure, Peyton winning the MVP award would make for a great capper to his reasonably compelling tale of redemption – if it didn’t feel like the award was going to go to him no matter what if the Colts won.

Let’s face it – 247 yds and a TD pass is a rather pedestrian game for Manning, and Dominic Rhodes (21 rushes, 113 yds) picked up key yards all night, and scored the TD that put Indy up for good. But Dominic Rhodes winning MVP doesn’t quite make the same headlines, does it?

3) On the subject of commercials: Couldn’t help but notice (as I remarked to a friend) that there was a strong theme of violence running throughout many of the ads. Apparently I wasn’t the only person to notice this.

4) Hopefully you didn’t get up to do something else or change the channel to alternate programming during halftime, because then you would have missed undoubtedly one of the most spectacular moments of the evening – a giant silhouetted image of Prince holding his strange purple guitar in a position that made it look quite a bit like a phallus. Which could have perhaps come across as an accident… had he not done it approximately 7 times.

5) And on a non-Super Bowl related note, there's a video that you must see. If you’re a Deadspin reader you’ve likely already happened upon this, but for anyone who missed it, Wizards’ teammates Gilbert Arenas and DeShawn Stevenson recently had a post-practice shooting contest in which Arenas shot 100 one-handed threes from college distance while Stevenson shot 100 from regular NBA distance.

And in case you had forgotten or didn’t truly appreciate it as much as you could, NBA players are really, really nasty shooters. We all know Gilbert can shoot, but seeing a player who has a reputation as a slasher like Stevenson wax j after j really makes you appreciate how amazingly skilled all of these guys are, even if the games aren’t always beautiful to behold.

Also, Gilbert Arenas does not look like a fun guy to compete against. The level of taunting he was laying on during Stevenson’s shooting was close to over the top, if not completely out of bounds. How D-Steve didn’t slap him is beyond me.

But even more infuriating (and considerably less comical) than Arenas taunting Stevenson was the harsh reminder that NBA players have a lot more money than we do. The stakes for this particular contest were 20,000 dollars. And when one of the two ultimately loses (I won't spoil it here because it's actually a little bit suspenseful), you get the feeling that he's far more pissed about his tainted pride than he is about his 20 g's.

And as happy as such a revelation should make us – after all, we're always saying we want players to compete for love of the game beyond monetary reward – those of us who are scraping meat off leftover chicken bones for lunch today would like to think that losing 20k at least stings these guys just a little bit.

Because around these parts, the thought alone of such a loss is enough to induce vomiting.

Or perhaps that's just the foul stench of leftover chicken...