Cold, Hard Football Facts.com: The Gridiron Galileo

By Kerry J. Byrne

Cold, Hard Football Facts pigskin Copernicus

The Gridiron Galileo called the Cold, Hard Football Facts takes its dispassionate weekly look at the frigid outer reaches of the pigskin-space continuum through our long, telescopic lens of emotionless reason.

ICY ISSUE: What will happen if the Patriots and Colts both win Sunday and are undefeated heading into their Nov. 4 showdown?

ICIER RESPONSE: The gravitational pull of the black hole of hype they create will be so powerful that it will suck in all other football games, rendering them meaningless in the infinite gridiron cosmos.

Even the NFL Network and NFL.com, official mouthpieces of the NFL which have a vested interest in promoting all the league’s teams, began a full frontal assault of New England-Indy analysis as early as last Monday.

The Big Bang theory of hype dictates that this game would certainly merit has much attention as any regular-season game in history:

The Patriots are the dominant team of the 21st century. The Colts are the defending Super Bowl champs.
Tom Brady and Peyton Manning are the two best quarterbacks of their generation, playing at the peak of their powers.
The last meeting between these two teams was an instant classic, an improbable 38-34 come-from-behind win by Indy at home that sent the Colts to the Super Bowl for first time since Johnny Unitas was still taking snaps back in Baltimore.
The winner of the regular-season series between the two went on to win the Super Bowl in 2001, 2003, 2004 and 2006.
And to punctuate the game historically, if things break right it would be the first meeting ever between undefeated teams with so many wins (8-0 for New England, 7-0 for Indy). The current mark was set way back on Nov. 13, 1921, when the Akron Pros (7-0) battled to a 0-0 tie with the Buffalo All-Americans (6-0). We all remember that one.

But both New England and Indy need to win this Sunday to make their Nov. 4 meeting a true game for the ages. And in an interesting quirk of universal fate, it might not be that easy.

Manning has beaten 30 of the 31 other NFL teams – everyone but Carolina, his opponent on Sunday.

Brady has also beaten 30 of the 31 other NFL teams – everyone but Washington, his opponent on Sunday.

ICY ISSUE: But isn't there life out there in the NFC?

ICIER RESPONSE: Yes. In fact, the week’s most interesting discovery is the existence of a meaningful game in the NFC North, a division that’s been so bad in recent years the Cold, Hard Football Facts have resorted to calling it the Black & Blow Division.

Detroit travels to Chicago Sunday in what is, surprisingly, a pivotal NFC North battle. More interestingly, from a division in recent years that’s been about as thrilling as staring into the eternal void of space, Lions-Bears could be one of the most enjoyable games of the year.

The surprising 4-2 Lions are the most exciting team in football, as evidenced by the average of 9.2 Big Plays in each of their six games this season (as measured by the Cold, Hard Football Facts Big Play Index). The Lions have generated 27 Big Plays, among the tops in the league. But they’ve also allowed 28 Big Plays, again among the league leaders.

No team in the NFL, meanwhile, has allowed more Big Plays than the Bears (32) – hard to believe for a team that’s been typically associated with defense. Basically, the Bears get burned by turnovers, big offensive plays and big special teams plays more often than any other team in football.

And here come the thrill-a-minute Lions.

More importantly, though, is that Detroit-Chicago is a pivotal game in the NFC standings. The Lions are 4-2 and need to keep pace with the NFC North leading Packers (5-1). The Bears represented the NFC in the Super Bowl last season, but stand at just 3-4 entering the halfway point of the season. A loss to the Big Play Lions and Chicago's title defense is all but over.

ICY ISSUE: Couldn’t the Colts and/or Patriots dominate the regular season and still get eclipsed by some undiscovered post-season planet?

ICIER RESPONSE: Yes. Just ask Indy’s 1968 Baltimore forebears.

NFL history is littered with the lifeless detritus of great teams that dominated the regular season but failed to fulfill their destiny. Nobody failed more awesomely than the 1968 Colts.

Sure, the 1968 Colts are etched in gridiron infamy as the NFL team that lost to the AFL Jets in Super Bowl III, in a game that ushered in the true modern era of pro football. Many consider it the greatest upset in pro football history.

It was a great upset, but not because the NFL was superior to the AFL. (It wasn’t). It was a great upset because the 1968 Colts remain, to this day, one of the single most dominant teams in the history of pro football.

They went 13-1 and outscored their opponents by a Super Bowl Era-record 18.4 PPG (28.7 to 10.3). To put that into perspective, the 1968 Colts were better than the 1985 Bears on both offense and defense (28.5 to 12.4).

But the Colts blew the most dominant single season in modern history by sorta kinda stumbling in that game against the Jets. They committed five turnovers and put just seven points on the board against a team that went just 11-3 in a supposedly inferior league.

The lesson for the Colts and Patriots? Today's lords of the universe sometimes end up as tiny little pigskin Plutos, forgotten out there on the outer edges of football history.