Championship Sunday 2008

Well, neither team that I was half-heartedly rooting for today came away with a victory, but I think the Super Bowl match up is decent: New England Patriots vs. New York Giants. These teams met in Week 17, and the Giants gave them a run for their money. Even though the game was in New York, and pre-playoffs, I think the weather was good and the Patriots were definitely playing to win and make history. So, I think it was a pretty good predictor of a potentially good game in the Super Bowl. I don't care for Eli Manning all that much, but I'm willing to root for him for a day. I'm beginning to come to terms with the Patriots being undefeated anyway. I'll still be rooting for them to lose, but I don't think I will be all that upset if they win. It's about time for a team to go undefeated anyway, so we can stop hearing about it. Teams have been flirting with it the past few years anyway--Indy was supposed to do it in 2005, until they ran into their nemesis San Diego. Kansas City was 9-0 a few years before that, when they were scoring about 40 points per game. Heck, even the Steelers had a 15-1 2004 regular season, in Ben's rookie year. It's quite an achievement if the Pats do complete the task, but I don't think it is going to be another 35 years before we see another team go perfect. In fact, N.E. might do it again next year (yawn).

The Giants probably have one of the better pass rushes in the game. They were a few big plays away from beating the Pats in Week 17. I think Burress needs to have another big game, Eli needs to continue to not throw interceptions, and the defense needs to maul Randy Moss, Wes Welker and the rest of the receiving core. I know Maroney came up big today, but I would try to force the Pats into relying on the running game as much as possible. At least it would slow down the tempo of the game. Can the Giants come up with some big turnovers? I think it is all going to have to do with how much pressure they are able to get on Brady.

One thing that struck me today is that the Giants did what the Steelers did a few years ago--win three road games to get to the Super Bowl to face the opposing conference's #1 seeded team. Pretty impressive win by the Giants. They are definitely playing their best football of the season at the right time. I think the Packers have been playing a bit beyond themselves most of the season, and the Giants had been underachieving until lately. And, Favre. Man, he just can't go without throwing the big interception. I'm glad the guy had a good year, and I know a lot of people like him because of his gun slinging attitude. His consecutive games started streak is amazing. He'll be back next year, I have no doubt. Today would be a terrible way to go out.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The agony of victory....a.k.a. picking my jaw up off the floor

Allright. I've now had nearly 24 hours (although its taken me a couple of days to complete this post) to calm down, reflect upon and digest the improbable gut wrenching game yesterday in which the heavily favored Colts lost to the Steelers 21-18. I wrote last year of not being as emotionally attached to the Steelers as I have been in the past. I wrote last week of how I thought that I might be spending too much valuable time following the Steelers, especially since I have absolutely no control over the outcome of their games. Let me just say this: yesterday's game was probably in the top five emotionally draining, and ultimately gratifying, experiences of my life. Ouside of my wedding and the birth of my two sons, I can't remember being as nervous, deflated, joyful, stunned and exhilirated as I was yesterday----all withing about a ten minute stretch of seemingly neverending time! What could have been a devestating loss to live with in the offseason (and, forever, for Jerome
Read more

"The Axis of Evil and the Doctrine of Preemption Three Years On"

Jerod and I attended a lecture by Brookings Institution fellow Michael O'Hanlon last night at Park University in Parkville, MO. The lecture was part of the Jerzy Hauptmann Distinguished Guest Lecture series. As a Park University M.B.A. alum, I received an invitation to the 13th annual lecture in the series. I like going to events like this, especially since I was interested in the content of this particular lecture, of which the title was the title of this post. Dr. O'Hanlon described himself as a Sam Nunn Democrat at the beginning of the lecture. It's always difficult to prevent political feeling from entering into objective analysis, and I don't know how you measure the "objectiveness" of analysis, but I feel that most Brookings scholars are at least "fair", and Dr. O'Hanlon was no exception. His analysis of the doctrine of preemption was focused on the effectiveness of the doctrine, as opposed to any moral righteousness or implications of the
Read more

Removing a password that was created in a previous version from an Access 2007 database

Earlier this week I was banging my head against the wall trying to figure out how to remove a password from an Access 2007 database (file extension .accdb). The database was created in a previous version of access and subsequently "upgraded" to the Access 2007 format. I believe some type of a wizard was used to perform the "upgrade." The security model is evidently different in Access 2007 than in previous versions. It doesn't appear that you can set/unset database passwords. Instead, in Access 2007, there is an option to Encrypt with Password. I'm not sure if this is supposed to be logically similar to the earlier version password architecture, but there was no way that I could find to easily remove the password that had been created in the earlier version when using the Access 2007 interface. Access security has always been confusing to me, and I need to take the time someday to understand how the security model is supposed to work in Access 2007. An
Read more