This Too Shall Pass

*Sigh*

Well, there it went. A city's hopes for a Super Bowl championship washed away in the Miami rain. Alas.

But that's all the whining I'm gonna do about it. Dudes, we went to the freakin' Super Bowl this year. Do you know how rare that is? Do you know how many teams have never even made it this far? Yeah, we lost, blah blah who cares. It was an awesome season, and I am sad to see it end. I cannot wait until next year.

And for all you douchecakes who are bitching about Rex Grossman: Shut the hell up, bitches. You display a vast ignorance of the game of American football. You do not get rid of a quarterback who, in only his first complete season as a starter, leads his team to a 13-3 regular season record, a division and a conference championship. Yes, he had a few awful games. But perhaps you are forgetting that he tied the league for the most games with a passer rating above 100. Or that he was the NFL offensive player of the month in September. Or that the Bears scored the second highest number of points in the league this year.

Now, my boy Sexy Rexy has the off-season to relax and give a good long think on where he went right, and where he went wrong. And he can brush up on his mechanics - specifically the center-QB exchange, because really, I could forgive a lot of the interceptions if that fundamental bit of football had not gone wrong quite as often as it did. Yikes. But still, Grossman has, as a certain Super Bowl-winning QB put it in one of his many endorsements, a "laser rocket arm." More importantly, the rest of the team plays better with him in the game. They rally around him. It's inspiring to watch.

So, the Super Bowl. What went wrong? The Colts, mostly. They're a damn good team. We underestimated their defense, and their offense was so intimidating before the game even began that our defense played conservative the whole night. Had we aggressively pursued either the run or the pass - one or the other - from the beginning, we could have controlled them better. But we did not play against the run at all, and we worked so hard to protect against big pass plays that they killed us with small ones instead. And Peyton Manning, genius that he is, knew that on those few plays we did try to stop the short pass, he could burn us long instead.

On offense, yeah, Grossman could have played better. But so could our O-line. They kept letting the pocket collapse, forcing Grossman to either scramble or throw in a hurry, which is no good unless you are Peyton Manning. And once Cedric Benson went down our running attack became one-dimensional, and the line just couldn't open up any holes.

My point is, there is plenty of blame to go around. It was not a good game. But then, it's hard to watch a team lose a Super Bowl, because the fact that they are playing in it means they haven't lost much all year.

Between the Bears and the Florida Gators this has been my favorite year of football since 1985, if not ever. Congratulations to Tony Dungy, Peyton Manning and the rest of the Indianapolis Colts. You guys earned it. I can't wait until pre-season starts, and we can do it all over again.

Bear Down!