YOU BETTER, YOU BEST


wanting those feeble minded axes overthrown.

As we embark upon a week sure to suffer the endless chatter of Super Bowl hype and over-analytical minutiae, can we please, for the love of God, Tom Brady, and Terry Bradshaw, just make one simple admission: We have no idea, and even less of a way to prove, whether or not the New England Patriots are the BEST TEAM EVER.

I don't. You don't. Mike and Mike don't. Peter King and Dr. Z. don't. John Madden and John Clayton don't. Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon sure as hell don't. No talk show host, columnist, analyst, current player, former player, expert analyst, inexpert analyst, blogger, computer simulator, or Nobel-Prize-Winning economist does.
(I suppose Shannon Sharpe might, but how would we ever know?)

You want my opinion? I don't think they're the best team ever. I think they could beat the '72 Dolphins, yes -- New England haters, take note: if the Pats do win, we can at least take solace in the fact that someone will have finally shut up the most smug and least gracious collection of champagne drinkers in NFL history -- but I don't think they could beat the '78 Steelers or even the '78 Cowboys. And I'm not so sure they could beat some of the 1980s 49ers or 1990s Cowboys teams either. Can I prove that? No. But neither can you or anyone else prove that they could. We'd just go around and around and around and around, and wind up right back -- or maybe even behind -- where we started.

So, for the sake of our sanity, and in the faint hope of getting to next Sunday without wanting to strangle every sports pundit in the land, let's table all this silly talk of the BEST TEAM EVER and declare something we can know and prove for certain: if the Patriots beat the Giants in the Super Bowl, they will have had the BEST SEASON EVER.

That should satisfy everyone's urge to say something big and important and historic about the occasion. And it would have the added bonus of, for perhaps the first time ever in the history of Super Bowl silliness, sticking to the facts on the field.

Posted: Mon - January 28, 2008 at 09:03 AM          

©