Dante's Inferno

The New England Patriots are Super Bowl bound.

On an evening when the Patriots were facing the league's seventh ranked rushing attack, being led by uber-back-up Michael Turner, it was the Patriots running game that ran roughshod. The Chargers rushed for 104 yards.

The much maligned Laurence Maroney rushed for 122, and the team for 149. In the second half, after Tom Brady struggled, the Pats turned to a short passing game featuring Kevin Faulk and their running game. Over 100 of Maroney's yards came in the second half.

In essence, they put the game in the hands of Dante Scarnecchia's boys. The 38-year offensive line coach, and assistant head coach is the team's longest tenured coach, and has cobbled together lines that got the team to the Super Bowl with street free-agents, and no-names like Russ Hochstein and Brandon Gorin.

His offensive line took over the game, mauling the vaunted Chargers defensive line. Stephen Neal and Logan Mankins absolutely manhandled defenders at the point of attack, the Seans were effectively eliminated by Matt Light and Nick Kazcur while Dan Koppen neutralized the big body in the middle.

This game was won in the trenches.

And Maroney didn't waste the gift, punishing any defender daring to make a tackle - once knocking one five yards down field and out of bounds.

Welcome to Dante's Inferno. It won't get any easier for whoever the opponent is in Arizona.

Oh...and by the way....

Eat it Mercury.

Weekend observations

Mister Freeze...

I love games played in the snow. I loved 'em when I played in high school. I loved 'em when I coached. I love watching them.

I have an appreciation for the difficulty that's added by playing on a slick, hard field - when the cold hurts your hands, and the idea of hitting one's opponent can become distasteful, because it inflicts as much pain on the tackler as the tackled. The game becomes a contest of wills.

That game in Green Bay was a thing of beauty. After a shaky start, putting the ball on the ground twice, undrafted free-agent running back Ryan Grant imposed his will on the Seahawks, accounting for close to half of the Pack's 408 total yards (201).

As much as Brett Favre's arm got the Pack to the game, Grant's legs were responsible for getting them through the game.

Punched in the Mouth

The Jaguars were the team that was supposed to give the Patriots fits.

Their top ranked (AFC) running game was supposed to keep Tom Brady on the sideline, and take advantage of the Patriots AARP members manning the linebacker position. They were supposed to stuff the run, take away Randy Moss and make the Patriots win with Wes Welker, Donte Stallworth, and Ben Watson.

Instead, Laurence Maroney became the Beast from the AFC East, rushing for more yardage (122) than the entire Jaguars team combined (80) and more combined yardage (162) than the Chargers' one-two punch of Maurice Jones-Drew and Fred Taylor combined (129).

Even as a Pats fan, had anyone told me that Maroney would have almost as much yardage on the ground as the Jags backs had combined, I would have scoffed. Hell...combined yardage for the Pats runners v. the Jags? 207 to 129. And that was the place on offense that the Jags were supposed to have a distinct advantage.

I guess as the saying goes, on any given Sunday...

Upset Sunday...

I'm not going to dwell on the early game. The Colts played poorly on defense, struggling to beat a Chargers team that was lining up players by the end of the game that make one think more of a fourth pre-season game than of a playoff game. And the Chargers won in spite of some mind-numbingly, bone-jarringly stupid play calling on offense.

Even with the win, that game gave me no confidence that Norv Turner can bring this team a championship. The only reason they got out of Indy alive is that the Chargers defense was playing out of their collective minds down the stretch.

Texas Toast (or, The Mouths that Roared)...

Does anyone out there remember the "I love you, man," Bud Light commercials? Is it just me, or is that how Terrell Owens seemed in his postgame press conference? I can just hear Tony Romo right now..."No TO, you can't have any of my Bud Light...now go eat your popcorn."

Sincerity is not that man's forte. His defense of Tony Romo, while accurate (the Giants in the second half were beating the daylights out of Romo because the line just couldn't stop wave after wave of blue-jersied defenders), just came off as disingenuous.

And of course, the Dallas receivers just can't put their money where their exceedingly large mouths are...

Take, for instance, this tidbit from the postgame of their October match-up with the Patriots -

"If they make it to Arizona, we will see them again. Seriously, I'm not backing down from that statement," receiver Patrick Crayton said Monday, a day after a 48-27 loss to the Patriots.
Terrell Owens wasn't in the locker room Monday, but said after the game, "We'll see them down the road."

I guess they'll be in the stands?

Or how about TO's line that he'd be playing at a high level in this past Sunday's game during his interview with Deion Sanders? Four catches for 49 yards and one touchdown. During the regular season he averaged 5.4 catches per game for 90.3 yards per game. I wonder how TO defines a "high level."

Texas Toast, part II...

Well, it already appears that Roger Clemens and his handlers are backing off providing any actual denials under oath. According to reports, the Rocket and his legal team won't commit to providing congress with a deposition before the hearing, with his lawyer, Rusty Hardin, claiming that it could interfere with civil case.

The implication here is that testifying under oath to congress wouldn't, or at least, that's what Hardin would have you believe. Hardin from the AP report -

"There has been absolutely no change in Roger's willingness and indeed desire to testify under oath before Congress in a public hearing at a date of the Oversight Committee's choosing," Hardin said in a statement. "Any suggestion that he or we are having any second thoughts about that is absolutely false. All other pre-appearance issues and scheduling we will discuss privately with the committee and do not think it is appropriate to discuss those matters publicly."

A deposition is testimony, under oath (which is why it's admissible as evidence in a court case). As such, what's the issue?

According to legal experts on ESPN, and cited in other reports, a deposition would give the Committee the opportunity to investigate Clemens' defense, and to prepare specific questions in order to discredit Clemens' defense, or to formulate specific questions to ask McNamee, who appears willing to tell the Committee everything.

Hardin can spin this anyway he likes, but it's just one more chink in Clemens' so called defense.

A Different Beast

Since 2001 the Patriots are a league best 40-8 in post-Thanksgiving games.

Those teams of past years were built to grind games out and run out the clock with tight leads in the fourth quarter with the likes of Antowain Smith and Corey Dillon. They had a punishing defense which got harder to penetrate the closer an opponent came to the goal-line. While the defense punished, an underrated offensive line mauled.

Brady hit the pass plays that were needed to win, and Adam Vinatieri could always be relied on to get the big kick as the weather worsened.

The team was built for the elements - to excell in the harsh winters. There was little finesse in the sledgehammer that Belichick and Pioli built. The team wasn't built for prolific records, it was built to win championships.

Then, last year the season died in a dome on a dropped pass that would have iced the game. Reche Caldwell.

And Pioli and Belichick gave the team a face-lift on offense and created a different sort of beast to play on the new turf in Gillette.

Belichick said that the Pats hadn't done anything different this off-season, but that wasn't really true. He and his right hand (personnel) man assembled on offense that is decidedly un-Belichick-ian.

Suddenly an outdoor stadium is fielding a very dome-like offense. It is a team built for an aerial assault unlike any previously seen in the NFL - Brady is outing the lie to the statement that Manning is the best quarterback in the league, the Greatest Show on Turf now sounds like it violated truth in advertising laws, and Randy Moss is reminding everyone why he was once considered the best young receiver in the league.

Through ten games that Pats have scored 411 points. In 1998, the Vikings led by Moss, Chris Carter and Daunte Culpepper scored a record 556 points. If the Patriots keep up their average of 41.1 per game, they will shatter the existing record, finishing with 658 points scored. Moss already has 16 touchdown receptions on the season. The record held by Jerry Rice is 22 - Moss, if this pace keeps up, will likely break that in the 14th game of the season, and should finish with between 25 and 26 touchdowns on the season.

Brady is on pace for 4895 yards (second only to Dan Marino's 5084 in 1984 - and don't think that if Brady is within 150 yards of that record in the third quarter of the Giants game that Belichick wouldn't keep him in) and 61 touchdowns. Manning finished his best season with 49. In addition to that, Brady is currently on pace to tie Drew Bledsoe for the franchise record for completions in a season with 400 (1994), and annihilate the league record for completion percentage in a season (held by Cincinnati's Ken Anderson - 70.55, 1982) at 73.9.

But all of this is contingent on one thing - can the team keep the pace up?

As previously noted, this offense is built like it was made to play in a dome, rather than in Foxboro, and the weather begins to turn nasty after Thanksgiving in the greater Northeast and four of the Pats remaining six games are at the Razor. The other two are in the Meadowlands against the Giants and in Baltimore. They host the Eagles, Jets, Steelers, and Dolphins.

Of their remaining schedule, only the Giants and Steelers have winning records. Both have solid running games, as do the Dolphins - important in the sleet and snow that comes down in these areas in December.

Watching the team one thing is obvious. None of the teams remaining on the schedule match up well with the Patriots rapid-fire attack. The Steelers have been awful on the road, dropping games to mediocre or substandard teams like the Jets, Broncos, and Cardinals. Baltimore has no offense, the Giants pass defense couldn't keep up with Dallas - it's unlikely to keep up with the Pats. The Eagles, Jets, and the Dolphins are just shadows of their former selves.

The Patriots could stumble - it has been a common occurrence for teams that have seemed invincible this late in the season, but I think it's unlikely.

No. If anything is going to be a problem for the Patriots, it's not going to be the opponent on the other side-line. It's going to be the elements. How does the deep passing attack adjust to the snow and wind of Gillette and Giants Stadiums? Can Wes Welker get in and out of his low, sharp cuts on a wet and icy field?

If the elements are too much to overcome for the passing attack, does Belichick forgo a number of the aerial records, and begin pounding the ball with Laurence Maroney, Heath Evans, and Kyle Eckel? Does this become the fight at the end of Rocky II with Mickey yelling at Rocky to switch back to southpaw?