“At least Romo has the decency to date blonde bimbos and then lose games. All Brady does is win. Everything. All day long. ”

~ Piers Marchant

By Scott Garson  |  Send to Friend

Piers: Scott, I must tell you I've never rooted harder for the Giants in my life. I actually clapped when they beat the stinking Cowboys. Does this make me rotten and dirty?

Scott: This surprises me, P. Why? Because I was actually thinking the exact opposite. I was thinking, maybe the Cowboys have had to lose for so long now that I am allowed to feel their pain.

Piers: Get out! The Cowboys feel pain? I mean, beyond T.O.'s piteous sobbing.

Scott: I feel it! I feel you, T.O.!

Piers: What do you mean, exactly. You feel sympathy for Romo? Bad for poor Jerry Jones?

Scott: No. The Giants were the better-looking team yesterday. The better-looking defense, particularly. What happened to Dallas? For the better part of the last month, they looked like a team that couldn't quite blink themselves awake, a team on Prozac.

Piers: So how is Eli suddenly looking so competent?

Scott: Eli Manning. A man hounded and humiliated by my Vikings in his own stadium hardly a month ago. Now he's the last Manning standing. Get it? The last Manning standing?

Piers: That's sweet. You should write for a living.

Scott: I know it's a cliché, but I think the Giants have just come together at the right moment. They're not doing anything especially flashy. Giving their quarterback enough time to make plays. Not giving the other quarterback the same courtesy. They're going to get killed, by the way, at Lambeau next week.

Piers: Is that a fact?

Scott: Mmm hmm. Favre is the Manning of Destiny.

Piers: So, let's move on to the other Sunday game. Whom can we pin that loss on? You could make a case for Peyton, sure, but he just seemed snakebit. That one-handed interception by Eric Weddle near the goal line yesterday? Just outrageous.

Scott: Ah. Now there was a game, Colts/Chargers. Best game of the weekend, obviously. Will it surprise you that I have a number of very pithy observations to make?

Piers: Um, not at all?

Scott: First, let's look at what Chargers center Nick Hardwick had to say afterwards. "It's hard when you've already got one Super Bowl -- to want it. We wanted it." Isn't that pretty much how things looked, P? I mean, the Colts have a great team, and they made some great plays; at the same time -- and let me stress this -- they did NOT look like a team that could even give the Patriots a whisper of a match in Foxboro. The dropped passes. The penalties. And then Tony Dungy. I think he was thinking about ice cream, or something. In the fourth quarter, I think he was thinking, Will I have a double dip strawberry waffle cone? I do love strawberry. But I also love apricot. Perhaps the meeting that needs to take place in my mouth is an apricot-strawberry meeting.

Piers: Actually, I agree with you. Just watching Manning's face (the real one, not the one on every goddamn commercial), he didn't seem all that terribly concerned about losing the game, had a kind of 'Well, dang' look on his face. He was pissed about that Weddle interception though.

Scott: Ask me what I meant, and you'll get more pithiness.

Piers: Okay, I'll bite. What the hell does ice cream have to do with it?

Scott: Dungy doesn't take the field goal with over two minutes left in the fourth quarter. Why on earth not? What are you saying to your team, if you act like that's your last chance? (And of course, the Colts D does step and get a three and out anyway. How different would the last drive have been if the Colts hadn't had to score a touchdown?) Even worse, though -- if possible -- was Dungy's failure to do what he needed to do when Rivers, who'd been making unbelievable plays, went down. When you've got Billy Volek in there -- and I mean no disrespect -- you can't let him score on you with low-risk, game-control type plays. You've got to pressure, make him make the big play.....

Piers: It does seem incredible that the Colts lost to a team missing its top THREE offensive components.

Let's jump again, though, to Saturday's games. Let's get the dullest one out of the way first. Favre, blablabla, snow blablabla, Ryan Grant blablabla. Do the Packers (whom you have beating the Giants) have any chance against the Pats?

Scott: Against the Pats? You're not even going to consider the poor Bolts' chances in New England this weekend?

Piers: Please. No team was happier than NE with this weekend's outcomes: The two teams with enough offense to keep up with them just got booted.

Scott: Well, let's look at it, P. The optimist -- the person who sensibly loathes Yoda Belichick and his Ken Doll plaything -- would say that the Chargers look more like the kind of team that might give New England trouble. They're playing pissed off. They clearly feel they have something to prove. And they seem to feel they can prove it. Also, of course, there's the revenge factor. After what happened last year in San Diego, what a sweet defeat New England's would be for the Chargers to taste. Delectable. Strawberry and apricot.

Piers: Quite, but you have to be able to outscore NE and I don't think Rivers is capable of going toe to toe against Brady. Especially with Gates hurt.

Scott: Well, that's the rub. The optimist always has nice thoughts to think. But nice thoughts are the end of it, I'm afraid. The Bolts are banged up, as you say. And most damaging: the pass defense. They didn't look to me yesterday like a team that can do what would need to be done to stop Brady: beat the shit out of him, that is.

Piers: Are you tired as I am of hearing how unbelievably unworldly godlike Tom Brady is? I mean, it's like he's taunting the entire human race: I have three championships, I've just had the best year for a QB in history, I actually threw a perfect game (the one missed pass was right in my slot receiver's breadbasket, the other should have been pass interference), and I date supermodels exclusively.

Scott: And I cast off supermodels that dare have my baby.

Piers: At least Romo has the decency to date blonde bimbos and then lose games. All Brady does is win. Everything. All day long. AND the fucker has the stones to play it like he's "just one of the guys" with his teammates. He's like every Tom Cruise character in a movie.

Scott: Then at night he goes into the cave with Yoda Belichick and gives a whispered Brady-love play-by-play.

Piers: Yes. Brass tacks: Does anyone stop them at this point?

Scott: Tune in next week, people. We'll devote our muddled thinking to that question.

Piers Marchant and Scott Garson are two old comrades from long-suffering sports towns who do their damndest to aggravate one another in the name of cyber-journalism.