Chaotic Not Random's fearless Super Bowl prediction: Patriots 8, Panthers 4. I settled on this score after spending the entire day crunching reams of stats, scouring rosters and injury reports, watching game film and charting plays, and running endless game simulations on a Cray supercomputer, and I say the Patriots win 8-4 because:

• I really like safeties. Don't you? Aren't they fun? The quarterback takes the ball on his own 2, drops back into his own end zone, and nobody's open, and then some pass rusher breaks through and levels him, and here comes the ref making that funny Pope's-hat signal over his head, and they put two points on the board. And the best part is that the team that got scored on now has to kick off to the team that scored. The kicker doesn't even get to kick off of a tee -- he has to do some emasculated free-kick thing that automatically gives up great field possession. Scoring a safety means that the offense has been completely dominated and humiliated, like the Nazis getting pushed back to Berlin. Safeties are awesome. If I ever become commissioner of the National Football League, my first act will be to make safeties worth 17 points.
  
• Predicting exact final scores is a complete waste of time.

ATTENTION NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE AND NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION: Have you noticed what a tidy affair these NFL playoffs have been? From start to finish, the NFL playoffs will only take about a month, and will have featured eleven monster games between the twelve best teams in the league. Because only the best teams make the playoffs, the NFL regular season has great importance, with good teams fighting for playoff spots down to the final week. And each one of those teams has a chance to win the Super Bowl -- the worst teams to make the NFL postseason finished 10-6.

Compare this to the Bataan Death Marches that are the NBA and NHL playoffs. The 16 playoff teams in each league can play up to 105 games over two stultifying months to crown a champion. The NBA only has 29 teams, and the NHL only 30 teams, guaranteeing that mediocre and sometimes even sub-.500 teams will play in the postseason. (If the Stanley Cup playoffs started right now, they would include the 18-16-11 Rangers. If the NBA playoffs started right now, they would include the 18-22 Sixers.) By setting their playoff standards so low, the NBA and NHL render their regular seasons irrelevant -- the best teams clinch playoff qualification with weeks to go and spend the rest of the season in a desultory tussle for home court advantage, while the only teams actually fighting to make the playoffs have no chance to win the title anyway. The first rounds of these bloated playoffs are nearly unwatchable. Anyone looking forward to a best-of-7 series between the 31-11 Pacers and the 20-23 Celtics? I didn't think so.

The postseason of any sport should be like reading the final chapter of a good book. In the NBA and NHL, it's like slogging through Ulysses after you just read Finnegan's Wake*. Let's cut these playoffs down to eight teams apiece, please.


*Joycean scholars may substitute in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

+posted by Lawrence @ 1/19/2004 10:20:00 PM