Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

So, we're down to this: the Oakland Raiders versus the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Observations galore:

:: I know that the Buccaneers have been one of the league's better teams over the last three or four years, but my football-fan "coming of age" was during an era when it was the Bucs who were the standard-bearers for hapless football franchises (much like the Bengals or Cardinals of today); when the proper response to someone saying "I'm a Bucs fan" was "BWAAHAAHAHAHA!!"; when if at the end of the season a Bucs fan said, "Man, we had a great year this year!" you knew that the Bucs had gone 7-9. So, it just feels...weird to me that the Bucs are NFC Champions. Oh well; at least they're not wearing orange pants anymore.

:: A hearty "Well done!" to Team Geritol, the Oakland Raiders, for their AFC Championship. They managed to shrug off the AFC's home-field curse to become the first AFC top seed to get to the Super Bowl since the 1998 Broncos, and only the third since the 1993 Bills.

:: Odd symmetry: both starting quarterbacks in Super Bowl XXXVII are former Vikings.

:: My original Super Bowl prediction, cast in cyber-stone back in August, became officially false yesterday when the Eagles lost. I predicted Steelers-Eagles; I got Raiders-Buccaneers. Oh well. At least both of my picks won their divisions, with one exiting the playoffs in the second round and the other in the NFC title game.

:: I started watching the NFC game in the second quarter, when the Eagles were down 17-10. I was shocked, almost from the time I started watching, at the lack of spark they showed. The Buccaneers yesterday looked like a team that wanted to win and get to the Super Bowl; the Eagles just looked like they didn't want to lose. That, plus their rigid adherence to an overly-conservative game plan, is what I think doomed them.

:: As for the AFC game, the outcome wasn't really surprising. Tennessee's plan was "Keep it close and win in the fourth quarter", but as the game wound on I could see that the Titans simply didn't have enough gas in the tank to win it in the fourth. Even with the bye week in Round One of the playoffs, the Titans were just too banged up, too hurt, too riddled with injuries to win an AFC title game on the road with a game plan that called for a war of attrition. Hence, exeunt the Titans. (I'll say this for the Titans: they are a gritty bunch, and Jeff Fisher is, in my opinion, curiously underrated as a head coach.)

:: OK. If grown men can show up at a Raiders game dressed as extras for an Alice Cooper concert, and that's perfectly normal, then no one gets to laugh at me when I wear my Phantom Menace t-shirt in public. Got it?

My thoughts on the Super Bowl, specifically:

:: History doesn't seem to favor the Buccaneers, since teams making their first appearance in the Super Bowl have traditionally tended to lose. But, on the flip side, the last team to make its first Super appearance -- the 2000 Ravens -- won their game, and they happened to ride the same basic modus operandi to their championship: the league's stingiest and most physical defense, coupled with as unspectacular an offense as you'll find. (Those Ravens, you'll recall, had a stretch of something like four games during the 2000 regular season in which they failed to score a single touchdown; but that didn't matter, since they had a defense that set an NFL record for fewest points allowed.) Recent Super Bowl history offers another reason to favor the Bucs: four of the last five Super Bowl champions (1997 Broncos, 1999 Rams, 2000 Ravens, 2001 Patriots) were teams that, to that point in their franchise history, had never won a Super Bowl before.

:: I've been thinking about NFL parity a bit lately, and I have some thoughts on that which will wait for another essay, but I want to note that one effect of parity has been that the Super Bowl -- once a traditionally lousy game more notable for the commercials -- has become a better sporting event since free agency began and whittled away the last of the old dynasties. Up to Super Bowl XXIX, the average margin of victory was 16.9 points (and, if you take out Super Bowl XXV, in which the Bills lost to the Giants by a single point, that number goes up to 17.4). Since then, the average margin has been 11.4 points. The only real blow-out since then was Super Bowl XXXV, when the Ravens pummeled the Giants 34-7. Two of the last three Super Bowls were decided on the final play (last year's field goal that made the Patriots the champs of SB XXXVI, and the Rams' goal-line tackle that kept the Titans from tying SB XXXIV), and a third was decided in the final two minutes (the Broncos' stop of the Packers as they were driving to tie the game in SB XXXII). Finally, the most competitive Super Bowls have historically been the ones where there was only one week between the Conference Championships and the big game. That's the case here.

:: We'll probably hear a lot about the league's Number One Offense (the Raiders) matching up against the Number One Defense (the Bucs), but I think the reverse may be the key matchup. I think the Bucs defense can contain the Raiders, so if their offense can score -- say, twenty points -- the Bucs should win.

:: And at last, prediction time. The old adage is "Defense wins championships", and the Buccaneers have the defense. I expect a surprisingly low-scoring game, decided by less than ten points -- and I expect that, when the clock ticks to zero in the fourth quarter, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers will be hoisting the Vince Lombardi Trophy. Unless, of course, the NFL comes to its senses and lets the Steelers and Eagles play the game.