With the Conference Championships over and a week of pointless bullshit until the Big Game (well, the Pro Bowl, but who cares, honestly) we’ll give an abbreviated recap this week of everything that happened last week and then next week we’ll get to talking about what’s about to go down in Miami.  That’s the plan, anyway.

And so, on to last week’s action…

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New Orleans made it to the Super Bowl!

We’ve discussed the plight of New Orleans before* on this website , how magical of a place it seemed before Katrina thoroughly destroyed so much of it. In the wake of the storm, New Orleans owner Tom Benson considered moving the team, what with his building destroyed and the town a disaster area, but his decision to keep a beloved team in a rabid football city (Satire contributor Todd Lazarski assures me that Saints’ fans are die-hards, regardless of how good the team has ever been) has done as much as sports can possibly do (not too terribly much, but something) to revive the city and give it something to believe in.

In the four years since Katrina, the Saints have played in two Conference Championship games, will play in a Super Bowl, and put together a combined record of 38-26 (.5625 winning percentage); over the previous four years, they went 27-37 (.422). Much of that success has to do with the hiring of head coach Sean Payton and the signing of quarterback Drew Brees. What’s more, both men claim that wasn’t an accident. Both felt like they belonged in New Orleans, like they were called to the situation by something beyond money and opportunity, like they felt they were the perfect guys to make a difference for a town in desperate need of something positive on which to focus.

Which leads us to this Super Bowl, the culmination of the Saints-as-Civic-Leaders storyline. Bourbon Street was dead silent during the NFC Championship Game and explosively jubilant in the moments following the Saints overtime victory. For the next week and a half, New Orleans is a center of the media universe for a reason other than Katrina, for reasons beyond sympathy and commiseration. Katrina questions will be asked, sure, but the more important questions will be along the lines of: How does it feel to root for the first Super Bowl team in the history of the franchise? How does it feel to have found a reason to believe in a football team? How about being one game away from the first NFL title in franchise history, and to have to go through Archie’s boy to do it?

These questions mean nothing, ultimately, and will be non-issues as soon as next week’s game is over. But until then, that’s all anyway from New Orleans will want to talk about.

Can you blame them?

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As for the Archie Manning/Peyton Manning root-for-your-old-franchise-or-root-for-your-son “question,” did anyone honestly think Archie would choose the Saints over Peyton? Seriously? What kind of a father would root against his son in the NFL Championship Game?

It should be obvious by now that Archie Manning was a good father, he had to have been to raise two Super Bowl MVP starting quarterback sons who appear to be well-adjusted and decent men, ones who have handled themselves almost like robots since being taken with the top picks in drafts seven years apart. Furthermore, the Saints are a team that by the end of his career stuck Archie with the tag “best quarterback to never make the playoffs.” His Saints teams never had a winning record (he won 1978 Offensive Player of the Year on a 7-9 club), he finished his career with almost fifty more interceptions than touchdowns, and he finished with a career winning percentage of 26.3%.

Archie still does radio broadcasts for the Saints, makes his home in New Orleans, and pitches products for businesses throughout southeastern Louisiana, but after being picked second in the 1971 draft by the fledgling Saints franchise on the heels of a successful career at Ole Miss that led to his being named SEC Quarterback of the Quarter Century (1950-75) and his number being adopted as the speed limit on his former campus (that would be eighteen miles an hour), Archie Manning became a joke in the pros. A pity case. Legend has it that Rams defensive end Jack Youngblood would take it easy on Manning during games because he was so poorly protected.

And he’s backing these guys over his own flesh and blood? But more importantly than that question…

Who gives a shit? It’s a human-interest story, and journalists have a lot of copy space to fill over two weeks, but this one’s done. Sorry guys. Move on.  Please. I certainly will, and were it not for the obligatory shots of the Manning’s luxury box during the Big Game, this whole deal wouldn’t affect any of us whatsoever once the game starts.

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Brett Favre’s season finally came to a close against New Orleans, and hopefully for the final time. His performance in what was an ugly, poorly-officiated slugfest said everything you needed to know about the man at this stage of his career. The perfect microcosm of why Brad Childress took a chance on Favre, and why everyone else knew (we just knew!) the Vikings would end up just a wee bit short of a title.

Brett Favre completed 61% of his passes and threw for over three hundred yards in the biggest game of the season for his team. He and Adrian Peterson teamed up to provide the Vikings with a one-two punch on offense that the Saints had a lot of trouble stopping. Unfortunately for the Vikings, Favre threw those two killer interceptions and Peterson fumbled three times. Every time their offense really got cooking, one of the two of them (or Percy Harvin, or Bernard Berrian) coughed up the ball to the frisky, turnover-forcing Saints’ defense.  Because of those interceptions, Favre ended the game with a 70 quarterback rating. His rating for the entirety of the regular season was 107.2. To recap, then, in the most important game of the season Brett Favre had a quarterback rating 37 points lower than his season average.

Furthermore, though Favre wasn’t sacked, he was dropped on his ass with extreme prejudice six times in the game, including a couple of illegal or borderline-illegal hits. Favre popped back up after each one, limped to the huddle or to the sidelines, got his wits about him, and prepared to do battle again. He manned-up, but he is a forty year old man, who, by the end of the game, after so many hits, looked closer to sixty or seventy.  And I’m trying to say the Saints played dirty: rather, they realized that one way to stop the Vikings was to hit Favre as often as possible, as hard as possible.

This last point, to me, explains the interception at the end of regulation. He could have dumped it off to Berrian, who was open in the flat, but if you know anything about Favre you know that in that moment such a play would have been too lacking in drama. He could have scurried for six or eight yards and got his team back into field goal range, but the Saints had been teeing off on him for most of the second half and he didn’t want to get hit again. No matter what anyone says, with the hits he’d taken in the game to that point he knew (or thought he knew) that he didn’t have it in him to get down quick enough to guarantee he would not be hit again.

When Sidney Rice flashed open across the middle, then, it never popped into Favre’s head, “Wait a second: this is the most difficult throw for an NFL quarterback to make. Maybe I should just run for it.” Instead, he said to himself, “I’m Brett Favre!” and let her rip. We know how that ended up working out for him.

Much the way we knew Peyton Manning would destroy the overmatched Jets, we knew Favre would do something to screw his team out of a Super Bowl berth. The interception at the end of regulation against the Saints, according to Sports Illustrated, makes that a bad interception as Favre’s last throw in each of the last three years: the overtime interception against the Giants in the ’07 NFC title game with Green Bay, a late-fourth quarter interception with a playoff spot on the line for the Jets in ’08, and a pick with his team on the edge of field goal range with less than twenty seconds left in this NFC title game as a Viking. More importantly, in each instance he looked his age and worse: like a frozen statue in the bitter cold at Lambeau, with torn muscles in his arm but refusing to come out of the game in New York, and like a scared old man who didn’t want to get beat on anymore last week.

It is time for old Brett to hang it up, for real this time. His commitment to another title is noble. It also might get him killed. He seems to be coming around on this way of thinking, saying it’d be very difficult for him to imagine coming back next year, the fresh disappointment of his latest big game failure too great. We’ve been waiting for about six years now for him to retire to that mythical tractor in Mississippi. Hopefully, officially, he gets the idea this time.

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A brief, final note on the Jets:

Last week we wondered when the Jets would stop lucking out with missed field goals and shaky quarterbacks in these playoffs. We got our answer in the AFC Championship: Jets kicker Jay Feely missed two kicks when the game was still within reach, and Peyton Manning exploded for 377 points, three touchdowns, and a 123.6 passer rating.

The Colts just had too many weapons. With over 270 of Manning’s yards going to Austin Collie and Pierre Garcon, there was nothing the Jets could do to stop the Colts once they got rolling. Sure, Darelle Revis “shut down” Reggie Wayne (three catches, 55 yards), but Manning found the weakness in the secondary and exploited it like a stage father would an adorable young son.

Credit must be given where it is due, to a Jets team that represented itself well in these playoffs and steamrolled over two division winners for the pleasure of being eviscerated by Peyton Manning.

But I, for one, am ecstatic that we can stop talking about them.

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That’s going to do it for this week. Join us back in this space next week as we discuss anything funny/stupid that happened over the Pro Bowl and during Media Day, breakdown the big match-up, and give you our final, iron-clad Super Bowl prediction, as well as maybe a few other predictions, but those just for fun.

Stay cool, everybody, and for God’s sake, avoid the Pro Bowl at all costs.