A game worth watching

Published 7:00 pm Tuesday, February 6, 2018

Some of us are old enough to remember Super Bowls when you could always count on the commercials for your entertainment, which was fortunate since the game would inevitably stink to high heaven.

No more. Not in recent years.

But kudos anyway to Eli Manning and Odell Beckham, Jr., just for saving the commercial break sideshow with their “Dirty Dancing” routine.

Fortunately there was a game worth watching because otherwise Corporate America let us down with one snoozy commercial interlude after another.

It was safe to take a bathroom break again.

Wayward kickers kept most of America’s squares in play on the game boards across the country.

Eagles 41, Patriots 33.

I don’t know if it was the greatest Super Bowl game ever played. Hard to say that when there were only two memorable defensive plays and one of them was a right-place-at-the-right-time fluke (Duron Harmon’s thank-you-very-much tip drill).

 I do seem to remember at least one punt in the midst of a combined 1,151 yards.

You wonder when is the last time an NFL team did not punt and had only one turnover and yet still lost.

You also have to love a Super Bowl where the difference might have been which quarterback had the best pass-catching hands.

Who knew there was something Tom Brady couldn’t do?

The refs even stayed out of it for the most part. 

But, mainly, let us hope that every coach in America was watching Philadelphia coach Doug Peterson, who 10 years ago was a high school head coach in Shreveport but became a folk hero Sunday night.

That is the way you win a Super Bowl. There’s an outside chance the same formula might work in lesser games. If this catches on, the NFL could become watchable again.

The Eagles weren’t going to claim that trophy the old-fashioned way.

The bigger the game, it seems, the more most coaches appear to be, first and foremost, trying to avoid losing it.

Not Peterson. 

From the very beginning, he was all in to win. A few plays may define it, but the entire game Peterson was aggressive, almost devil may care. If a few times his fool-hardy ways had a chance to backfire and let the game get away from the Eagles, so be it.

He wasn’t going to sit back and depend on the Patriots losing it.

The fourth-and-goal gamble that gave the Eagles a 22-12 lead just before halftime is being compared to the onions Sean Payton showed when he opened the second half of the Saints’ 2010 Super Bowl win against the Colts with an onsides kick.

Not really comparable.

 That Eagles’ flim-flam might have been the best-designed, best-executed play of the year. There were 31 other NFL coaches watching Sunday night who wondered, “Why didn’t I think of that?” And somebody had. Peterson said afterwards they’d stolen it from something the Chicago Bears did a few years ago.

Any time the play-acting on a play is as important as the blocking, you know you’re on to something. And after quarterback Nick Foles sold the notion that he was just chit-chatting with an offensive tackle to double-check an assignment, it was a thing of beauty watching a direct snap to a back turn into double-reverse pass from a backup tight end to a wide open quarterback. 

Gotcha, Patriots.

But a gamble?

If you knew you had that gem of a play in your back pocket, by all means you use it. It was just lagniappe that it was trolling, to a degree, as Brady had just dropped a pass. It looked pretty fool-proof.

It will be in every team’s arsenal next season.

But, no, the big gamble for the Eagles came during their game-winning drive in the fourth quarter.

That’s when Pederson really tore up the staid version of the coaching manual and wasn’t afraid he might lose it.

The Eagles, trailing 33-32  with 5:39 to play, faced fourth-and-1 at their own 45.

I remember thinking, they probably ought to go for it here. But it never occurred to me they would.

Fail to pick it up, and the game is probably over.

Coaches will do the math. Normally it seems they just want to extend the inevitable as long as possible, to make sure they have a chance — no matter how Hail Mary remote — at the end of the game.

But maybe Pederson was figuring that, the way this track meet was going, a punt meant that on the odd chance they saw the ball again, they’d be another seven points in arrears.

That was the decision that compared more to Payton’s onsides kick against the Colts.

Back then the Saints trailed at the half and hadn’t slowed the Colts down much during the second quarter.

It probably didn’t really matter if the Saints  had kicked off deep to the Colts or given up an onsides kick at midfield. The Colts likely would have scored either way.

It was convenient that the Saints recovered and used it as the turning point.

The Eagles faced the same option basically.

And it was nice too see somebody thinking outside the box.