The Newest Testament

Everyone, I have some great news - anything is possible.

Yup, I am a firm believer now that anyone, no matter what, can do anything. Miracles are possible. I was never really sure before if stuff like this could happen but after what transpired over the last six weeks and culminated Sunday night, I am born again. I see now. It all makes sense. You could call it a religious awakening(although I am still firmly nonreligious)!

Maybe this new found respect for the unbelievable-coming-to-pass only applies to a
small realm of reality but I want to believe that its scope is much larger. I need to know that its scope is much larger. It would make me a better person, I feel, if I knew that this new found sense of possibility was universal. That this applies to everyone in every way of life under any circumstance. Anyone can get what they want and accomplish what they set out to accomplish. Maybe this was always the case and this Natural Law never really reared its head until now. Maybe it has before but only does so every 75 years like Halley's Comet. I don't know.

Maybe I'm not supposed to know. The world is a complex place and it's hard for any one of us to understand how things work. Karma? Maybe. Evolution alone? Maybe. Complete and total randomness? Probably not. This is why certain people believe in some kind of religion. It's generally agreed (amongst learned people) that science is the answer to "how" and religion is then, therefore, considered to possibly be the answer to "why." This is fair. When something unimaginable happens, say, like someone walking again after being paralyzed (i.e. Kevin Everett of the Buffalo Bills) or a man falling 47 stories and surviving, we cannot grasp the end result through reasoning or logic. This is where religious people attach the "miracle" tag or that their god willed the event to result the way it did. This situation? I don't know what to think. Like I said, I'm not a religious person so I'm searching for what could possibly explain this phenomenon.

You're probably asking yourself, "what are you referring to?!" I'm sorry, I felt I should get the major theme of this article out in the open first before I delve into specifics. The event to which I'm referring, if you couldn't already tell, is the rise to glory of the 2007 New York Giants.

Now, many of you (mostly Giants fans) are going to immediately roll your eyes and call me a bitter Patriots fan. I want to first denounce both those claims. For one, I'm not bitter. The system we have in football to decide a champion has been in place for over 80 years (more or less) and it's worked out fine so far. I trust the system and I am not arguing that by this system the Giants aren't the 2007 Champions - they are. Secondly, I am not a Patriots fan so their loss doesn't bother me past the small wish that it would have been fun to see New England make history. Any time something of that magnitude happens in your lifetime it's a special moment. The Miracle on Ice in 1980. The 1972 Miami Dolphins. The 2004 Boston Red Sox. Wilt Chamberlin's 100 point game. There are countless spectacles in sports that regardless of your affiliation are just tremendously entertaining to see. I am a fan of that.

I'm not going to deny that I am not a fan of the Giants. I am not going to deny that I am a fan of one of their biggest rivals. In fact, I'm happy for my friends that like the Giants that truly appreciate this championship. It pains me to see the Giants do better than my team but sports are sports and this kind of stuff happens all the time. It wasn't the first time my team did worse than its rival and it won't be the last. That doesn't bother me. I can honestly say that while I don't like seeing my favorite team's rivals succeed I do not disagree that in said instances those rivals accomplished greater feats than my favorite teams and therefore, in the context of and by the rules of said sport, are the better team. These are facts and I live in a real world. I don't live my life in denial and I don't pout and make excuses when my team has been honestly beaten. All you can do is tip your cap to the better team. You'll get back at them one day. This is all you can do.

This 2007 NFL season was an incredible one. The Dolphins almost went winless while the Patriots became only the second team in history to go undefeated in the regular season while obliterating everyone they played. Records were set and there were fantastic finishes (Dallas over Buffalo and Green Bay over Denver come to mind). But the last six weeks really puzzled me. In fact, they still do.

Here's the long and short of it. For the New York Giants, the road to the NFL Championship started in week 17 against, oddly enough, the New England Patriots. The Giants didn't win the game but gave Goliath all it could handle. This threw me, and many others, for a loop because there had been little evidence prior to this game that the Giants could give the Pats any problems. Somehow the Giants found a way and nearly toppled the New England juggernaut.

Next was the Wildcard Playoff game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. This game proved to be a fairly even game however most Giants fans, check that, reasonable Giants fans would agree that they didn't give themselves much of a chance against the Bucs. Personally, I wasn't surprised New York won as Tampa Bay was fairly overrated. After all, they played in a very weak division and really had no offensive threats.

Following this was a third meeting with the hated Dallas Cowboys. The Cowboys beat the Giants in both meetings in the regular season and scored a total of 76 points against the G-men. New York, even with its stout defensive line, didn't challenge Dallas all that much in either contest despite scoring 35 points in the first game. The Cowboys won the division with a 13-3 record tying a franchise record. The problem for Dallas was that they hadn't won a playoff game in 11 years. Well, they found a way to keep the that streak alive. The Giants won again, this time in Dallas, astoundingly, and moved on to the NFC Championship game.

Many assumed it would be Packers/Cowboys in this game. The Packers had been hot all season - never showing any chinks in the armor and getting better as each game passed. Even for a Cowboys fan, a Giants/Packers NFC Championship game seemed like an overmatch. Even after the previous week's victory most people did not give the Giants much of a chance to go into frigid (it was -1 degree without wind chill at kickoff) Lambeau Field and win. Even though Dallas had clinched homefield advantage throughout the playoffs and beat the Packers in Week 10, many people still considered the Packers to be the best team in NFC. Even Giants fans understood this. Yet, for the second week in a row the Giants opposition found a way to lose. Brett Favre wasn't himself and ended up throwing the game-deciding interception in overtime that led to New York's gamewinning field goal. Now the Giants had found themselves in the Super Bowl against the then 18-0 New England Patriots.

Immediately following the Giants win over Green Bay, Las Vegas made the Super Bowl spread: 13.5 points. Eventually the line fell to 11.5 as video surfaced of all-world quarterback, Tom Brady, in a soft cast on his right ankle. Still, the line for the meeting between the supposed two best teams in the league was 11.5. If you know nothing about gambling, that is a huge line for any NFL game let alone a Super Bowl. That means that Las Vegas was saying that the Patriots should win by at least 11 points. And remember, there is a reason Vegas makes money.

What happens? The Patriots offense doesn't play the way they had all season until their final drive and ultimately this cost them the game. The Giants defensive line played great just as they had all season but you can't win championships with just good defensive line play. Unfortunately, the Giants offense didn't play so well. They played as well as the Patriots' which in and of itself is a bit strange. But they didn't do much to win the game. So how did the Giants escape Glendale, Arizona with a championship and monumental upset over, what we debated to be, the greatest team of all time in the New England Patriots?

Well, that's what I've been wondering for 24 hours now. How did this happen? By any sort of logic or statistical reasoning the Giants had no business even making it past the Cowboys let alone winning the Super Bowl. So how'd they do it? I understand that games aren't played on paper. If they were Georgetown would have beaten Villanova in 1985. The Colts would have beaten the Jets in 1969. The Yankees would have beaten the Marlins in 2003. And the Soviet Union would have beaten team USA in the semifinals of the 1980 Olympics. But we don't play games on paper or, as we generally do now in the 21st century, in video game simulations. No, that's the beauty of sports. The underdog always has a shot and I do love a good underdog story. Who doesn't? It's a very American thing. Rooting for the little guy. Hell, if the Giants weren't in the Super Bowl I would have had a tough time picking between watching an underdog win vs. watching history in the making. I would have probably just rooted for a good game.

But I'm puzzled. I'm puzzled because through 16 rounds of play, through 16 games, a full regular season where the cream always rises to the top, the New York football Giants were barely treading water in the sea of mediocrity. They finished with a 10-6 record, just one game above .500. They lost both games to Dallas, got ripped apart by the Packers by 20 points, got murdered by a decent Minnesota team at home, and only beat lowly Miami, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit by an average of four points. Not what you would call an impressive resume. Not only that but the Giants quarterback, Eli Manning, finished the season by throwing 23 touchdowns and 20 interceptions (not a good ratio at all) with a 73.9 quarterback rating (above 90 is considered good).

Statistically Eli Manning played better last year and virtually no one, even through this regular season, has been terribly impressed with anything he's done. When he plays well it's very sporadic. He's been consistently inconsistent not unlike my golf game (that's another story). What did Eli do this postseason though? He threw six touchdowns and only one interception and that was in the Super Bowl and wasn't even his fault. His quarterback rating was 95.7 for the playoffs.

Now you are starting to see why I'm so confused. Eli's career quarterback rating is 73.4, five tenths of a point lower than what he put out this year. And then all of a sudden in January he manages to play 22 points better than that? Did I miss something?

I'm not the only one questioning what happened over the past six weeks. Even the experts agree something peculiar happened. ESPN.com said, "The Giants are good, but they also conjured magic." No one's questioning their Super Bowl win. It happened. It's just a little hard to figure out how and why.

Some might say that the Giants changed defenses in the middle of the season and that's what brought about their turnaround. Well, that was in Week 3. They still played mediocre football after those first two losses. The Giants defensive coordinator, I'd say, deserves the vast, vast, vaaaast majority of the credit for the improbable run. His blitz schemes worked well. But even with a great defensive front you can't win. You need more than that. You need an offense and you need some luck.

Here's how I desribe the offense of New York. When talking with Giants fans over the last few weeks during this run (and let's keep in mind a couple of these fans are the generic obnoxious New York fans you all know about) the defense of New York's offense was this, "Yea well, Eli's not making any mistakes." So basically what you're telling me here is you're satisfied that your quarterback, your leader, your captain is doing just enough to not lose the game himself. That's what you just told me. Well...I suppose you add that and an above average (but not fantastic) running game and you've got yourself a "good enough" offense to maybe make the playoffs.

A "good enough" offense plus a solid defensive front (their secondary made plays when they had to but generally weren't anything to be frightened of in the regular season) should not be enough to win you a championship. It will get you into the playoffs. Look at Tampa Bay this year. But there isn't enough talent there to get you over the hump. Nine times out of 10 that team will realize who it really is and falter. Not these Giants though. Somehow they played better than they were for five straight games. They managed to play that one out of 10 game four games in a row in the playoffs. This goes against everything natural in our world. It's unconscionable.

So we come right back to the beginning. How and why did the Giants manage to overcome all of this and become NFL Champions? Well, there's only one answer left - miracles do happen.

If this New York Giants team, this 2007 version, managed to defy every odd, every statistical reasoning, every shred of logic and normalcy in our sports world and conquer the sport of football, then anything is possible.

I truly was angered and annoyed when the game was over. After all, like I said, I'm not a Giants fan. I never want any of my favorite team's rivals to do better than my teams. But after a day's thought (and believe me, I've been pondering this outcome almost nonstop), I've realized that a positive truth has risen from the aftermath. I now see that the unthinkable is possible.

If you ever think that there is something you cannot do in this life, just think of the Giants. If you think you can't write that screenplay, think of the Giants. If you think you can't become CEO of your business, think of the Giants. If you think you can't record a Grammy-winning album, think of the Giants. If you think you can't win an NBA Championship, think of the...wait. Are you small and white? Are you the Knicks? No! Even the Knicks! Anything is possible!

From now on go about your life with the knowledge that if the 2007 New York Giants can defy everything that makes sense in this world and sit atop the NFL mountain alone, then you too can achieve what you wish to achieve.

I'm off to go wrestle an alligator! Good luck everyone; if it worked for the Giants it'll work for you.