Vallee View’s: Super Bowl 50 Game Notes

Posted By on February 11, 2016

APTOPIX Super Bowl Fo_Schu
Von Miller was in Cam Newton’s back pocket all night. 
-The D Stands for Dominate:  So I guess that means in 9 months there is going to be a slew of babies named Peyton and Von born in the Denver area.  In an ugly defensive game that looked less like the high-flying, pass-happy fantasy-obsessed NFL of today and more like the nasty bare-knuckle NFL of old, the Denver Broncos D channeled their inner Steel Curtain and swarmed the hapless Carolina Panthers offense, on their way to a hard-hitting 24-10 win in Super Bowl 50.  And to the surprise of virtually every writer, analyst, fan, degenerate gambler and useless pre-game in-studio blowhard, the man who felt the brunt of that D was quarterback Cam Newton.  The Broncos defense, led by Super Bowl MVP Von Miller, harassed and humbled the chest-thumping, endzone-dabbing Carolina quarterback for 7 sacks, 3 turnovers and one severely bruised ego.  Every Carolina third down was like an opportunity for the Broncos front seven to transform into grizzly bears with Cam Newton forced into the role of Leonardo DiCaprio.  Only there would be no rise from the dead and ultimate revenge in this football tale.  Instead, Newton and the front-running Panthers collapsed under the relentless pressure of Denver’s front seven, registering an embarrassing -8 yards on their final four drives.  
 
The defining play for Denver was a bone-shifting first quarter sack by Miller, that separated the Carolina QB from the ball, resulting in a defensive touchdown for the Broncos.  Miller hit him so hard it was like a scene out of the movie ‘Ghost’ with Newton’s competitive soul ripped from his body and gang tackled by an army of Grim Reapers dressed in Bronco jerseys.  Gone was the confidence.  Gone was the arrogance.  Gone was that cocky thousand-watt smile prized by corporate America.  With one hit Denver’s defense set the tone for the game.  As Denver linebacker Brandon Marshall succinctly put it, “That play did it, that play rattled Newton.”  After coasting through the first two postseason games, the bullies from Carolina finally got hit in the mouth and they seemingly had no answer.  Great teams are often defined by how they respond when things aren’t going their way.  At the first sign of adversity the 2015 Carolina Panthers crumbled, and despite winning 17 games, that will be their lasting legacy.
 
-Superman not so Super:  Nobody’s reputation took a bigger hit in the Super Bowl than Cam Newton’s.  On the threshold of winning his first Super Bowl, and under the sport’s brightest spotlight, the reigning MVP wilted.  Newton had an interception, two fumbles, and repeatedly airmailed passes over the heads of open receivers on his way to completing just 43.9% of his passes for a QB rating of 54.  But all of that pales in comparison to what happened on one play late in the 4th quarter with Carolina trailing 16-10.
 
Facing a 3rd and 9 with just over 4 minutes on the clock, Newton dropped back to pass and the ball was swatted out of his hand by Von Miller.  With the ball resting on the turf in front of him, Newton stepped forward to recover the fumble.  Then Newton, the NFL’s self-anointed Superman, suddenly and inexplicably recoiled as if the game ball was a chunk of Kryptonite.  Denver recovered the fumble.  For those watching at home it was as baffling as it was gutless.  The face of the Panthers, their team leader, their emotional engine, had a chance to recover a fumble, HIS fumble, in a 6-point Super Bowl and instead he tapped out.  He threw up his hands and said “No mas, no mas”.  Newton quit on himself and quit on his team.  It is a choke that belongs in it’s own unique category. At least the Scott Norwoods and Bill Buckners were never accused of not trying.  I have had 24 hours to think about it and I still can’t come up with a single name of an athlete in a team sport that ever did anything like that in a championship game.  And he did it on the biggest stage in North America.  It is an image that will be hard for the 100+ million watching to ever shake, most likely cementing his infamy permanently into American culture.  
 
If you think I’m going to far, read this quote from Newton about the now infamous play, “We didn’t lose that game because of that fumble.”  No ownership.  No accountability.  And no perspective.  The fumble might not have been the definitive reason they lost the game but to so cavalierly dismiss a play that would have kept the Super Bowl a one-score game and most likely given Newton and the Panthers offense one more shot at a game-winning drive, is astonishing.  It is too early to know if it was a career-defining play, but either way, it is a decision that should haunt Newton for years.  
 
-Phil Simms Briefly Suspends his Awfulness:  Perhaps most telling about the play was Phil Simms reaction.  It normally takes a crowbar to pry any criticism from the docile and boring Simms, but after watching Cam Newton make no attempt to recover his fumble, even Simms couldn’t hold back.  Simms immediately blasted the Carolina quarterback and seemed completely dumbfounded by Newton’s decision.  It was a rare moment of lucid candor from Simms.
 
Of course that didn’t last long.  Moments later when Carolina coach Ron Rivera made the baffling decision to punt with just over two minutes left in the game, Simms rushed to his defense offering the pointless and trite, “He’s doing what he thinks gives his team the best chance to win.”  Simms criticism of Newton happened with 4:16 on the clock.  His defense of Rivera came at the 2:08 mark.  That means for roughly two glorious minutes Phil Simms was not a terrible broadcaster.
 
-Truth Serum:  I would love to inject all of the Panthers players and coaches with sodium pentothal and find out exactly what they thought about Cam Newton’s decision not to fall on that fumble.  I would be particularly interested in linebacker Thomas Davis’ answer after Davis played Super Bowl 50 with a broken arm.
 
-Flipping the Script:  The guy that deserves more credit than anyone for Denver’s championship is general manager John Elway.  Two years ago when Denver got crushed 43-8 and watched it’s own MVP quarterback get humiliated by a top-ranked defense, Elway could have responded one of two ways.  He could have chosen to pour his resources into the offensive side of the ball believing that the offense, after getting completely dominated by Seattle, needed significant help if it was to have any chance to compete against elite defenses.  Instead Elway decided to go the other way and take a page out of the Seahawks playbook, and allocated his resources to his defense.  Elway wisely determined that his offense, led by a rapidly aging Peyton Manning, had limited room for improvement, and that it was his defense that had the most potential to develop into a dominant unit.  With that in mind, he signed Pro Bowlers DeMarcus Ware, Aqib Talib and T.J. Ward and drafted cornerback Bradley Roby and defensive end Shane Ray in the first round.  
 
What emerged was a retooled unit with the front-to-back speed and athleticism ideal for stopping the highly efficient modern day passing attacks of the NFL.  The end result: just two short years after getting destroyed in the Super Bowl, Denver returned to the big game with their own number one defense, and just like Seattle did to them, they unleashed that defense on an unsuspecting and overmatched MVP quarterback.
 
-Fool’s Gold:  As far as quality is concerned, Super Bowl 50 wasn’t what the NFL had in mind for the golden anniversary of their cultural phenomenon.  I will never complain about a game being a low scoring defensive struggle, in fact I prefer it, but there is a difference between low scoring and low quality.  Multiple bad throws, dropped passes, poor decisions (what exactly was Carolina doing on that punt return?) and a staggering 18 penalties, had fans scrambling for their calendars to make sure it was February and they were, in fact, watching the Super Bowl and not a late August preseason game.
 
-National Anthem:  Lady Gaga is an odd bird but she absolutely crushed it.
 
Gaga added a second “home of the brave” to her rendition of the anthem making the total singing time 2:21.  Why is that relevant?  One prop bet had the under/over at 2:20.  
 
-It’s Deja Vu All Over Again:  Another problem with Super Bowl 50 was the rhythm of the game.  Sunday’s game was almost a mirror image of the game against New England, with Denver securing an early lead and effectively allowing Manning to take a metaphoric knee the entire second half.  In the Super Bowl, after the Broncos built a 10-0 lead, they had just 128 yards of total offense over the final 3+ quarters.  In fact, their 194 yards of offense for the game was the worst output for a champion in Super Bowl history.  Now let’s play the “what-if” game.  What if the officials don’t blow the replay of Jerricho Cotchery’s 24-yard first quarter catch (I give up trying to figure out what the hell a catch is in the NFL)?  Then Denver’s defense doesn’t score their touchdown and instead it is Carolina leading at halftime.  As a result Denver is forced to take the handcuffs off their squishy-armed quarterback and take some chances on offense.  That not only might have led to a far more interesting game, it also might have led to a different outcome.
 
-What, No Dabbing?:  As if Cam Newton’s play didn’t make him look bad enough, he followed it up with a brief and childish postgame press conference where he sat, cloaked in a hoodie, and petulantly grunted out mumbled answers before exiting after just a three minutes.  When later asked about this he responded with this lame and unoriginal quote, “Show me a good loser and I gonna show you a loser.”  So I guess Tom Brady, Russell Wilson, Magic Johnson, Wayne Gretzky, Larry Bird, and Derek Jeter are losers because I don’t remember any of them acting like that after losing a championship.
 
-”If every Instinct you have is Wrong, then the Opposite would have to be Right”:  I am convinced the NFL didn’t even review that first quarter catch by Cotchery.  The referee went under the hood, played a game of Candy Crush, then just waited to hear what Mike Carey said and went the other way.
 
-The Revenant:  When Manning was benched injured week 10 against the Kansas City Chiefs after going 5-20 with 4 interceptions and posting a very Blutowski-ish 0.0 QB rating, was there anybody that thought he would end this year starting, and winning another Super Bowl?  Most of us thought Manning had thrown his final pass that day against Kansas City.  I bet even Ashley “HGH” Manning had her doubts.  Love or hate Manning, this year has to rank as one of the most remarkable in-season comebacks in sports history.
 
-”Just when I thought I was Out, They Pull me Back In”:  Unfortunately Manning’s rise from the canvas will not only reignite the “Who’s better, Manning or Brady?” debate, but it will give new life to the Manning media fan club, that so desperately wants to place him ahead of Brady.  Washington Post columnist Neil Greenberg was first out of the gate, declaring in his Monday column that we can now annoint Manning the best QB ever.  I thought we officially retired all of this last year when Brady won his fourth Super Bowl.  I could write a 50-page doctoral thesis on why Brady is better than Manning but for the sake of expediency let’s just focus on the Super Bowl and both QBs’ championship postseasons:
  1. Manning’s Super Bowl passer rating: 77.4.  Brady’s Super Bowl passer rating: 93.
  2. Manning’s passer rating in his Super Bowl wins: 72.3.  Brady’s passer rating in his Super Bowl wins:  100.3.
  3. Manning’s passer rating in the two postseasons he won a championship: 72.4.  Brady’s passer rating in the four postseasons he won a championship: 92.4.
The two Seattle Super Bowls are most telling.  Rarely in sports do the circumstances align where we get an opportunity to make such a close apples-to-apples comparison.  In 2013 Manning shattered the single-season record for passing touchdowns (55) and won the NFL MVP en route to his third Super Bowl appearance.  In that Super Bowl he faced the number one ranked Seattle Seahawks defense who promptly destroyed Manning, forcing him into 3 turnovers and holding him to 8 garbage-time points.  It was one of the worst beatdowns in Super Bowl history, 43-8.
 
One year later, on the same championship stage, against virtually the exact same top-rated Seattle defense, Brady completed 74% of his passes and threw for four touchdowns, leading New England to a 28-24 come-from-behind victory.  In the final 12 minutes of the game Brady completed 13 of 15, for 124 yards and two touchdowns, on the way to his third Super Bowl MVP.  Same opponent, wildly different result.
 
Are we actually still having this debate?
 
-Things I did not to expect to see on Super Bowl Sunday:
  1. Stephen Curry wearing a Carolina Panthers jersey and pounding an enormous drum as the Panthers ran on the field.
  2. David Letterman looking like a cross between a homeless person and a deranged Santa Claus.  Didn’t he retire just last year?  That has to be the fastest growing beard in facial hair history.
 
-”Vegas, baby, Vegas”:  We should have known Denver would play well when it was revealed mid-week that 71% of the bets had come in on Carolina and Vegas needed Denver to cover in order to avoid losing money.  In the 50 year history of the Super Bowl Vegas has reportedly only lost money twice:  The 49ers 49-23 rout of San Diego in Super Bowl XXIX and the Giants 17-14 upset win over the Patriots in Super Bowl XLII.

Enjoy your “Budweiser” Peyton.