As it turned out, the front-running Niners would be odd men out, losing the NFC title game to the Giants while the Bills blasted through an outmatched AFC. The Giants won the Super Bowl 20-19 on Scott Norwood’s missed FG.

New England QB Tom Brady (4 INT) and Jacksonville QB David Garrard (1 INT) have thrown a combined five picks this season.

 

Three have come against Indy’s No. 1 ranked pass defense (based upon Defensive Passer Rating, a Cold, Hard Football Facts Quality Stat).

 

The Colts are still a threat to make – and win – the Super Bowl. And if they do so, it will in all likelihood come when their No. 1 pass defense finds a way to slow down the NFL’s No. 1 passing attack on a wintry day in New England.

 

Sound familiar, anyone?

 

When you ask the Merril Hoge’s of the world to analyze football, they tell you game in and game out that “Team X must establish the run” or, conversely, “Team Y must stop the run.”

 

In fact, we don’t even know why ESPN pays Hoge, an ex-NFL running back, to analyze games. They could just run an animated video of him saying those two sentences over and over and run it for every game and they’d have a pretty fair facsimile of the repetitive analysis provided by the real Hoge.

 

But you know what the Cold, Hard Football Facts say: “establishing” and “stopping” the run are nothing more than clichés with little objective evidence to support the theories.

 

We have a more recent example in the 2007 Vikings.

As noted elsewhere today, if stopping the run and establishing the run were the keys to victory, then Minnesota would be the greatest juggernaut in history.

 

Instead, the Vikings are a 6-6 team fighting for the last playoff spot in the NFC.

We don't want to undersell what Adrian Peterson is doing this year. While there's a chance that he winds up more George Rogers (1,647 yards as a rookie, 7,176 for his career), he's certainly well ahead of the pace most of the game's all-time greats enjoyed.

 

Peterson is on pace for 1,596 yards and a 6.51-yard-per-carry average that is unheard of. He's also got 10 rushing TDs.

 

Here's how that stacks up with the rookie years of the NFL's top 10 alltime rushing leaders:

Speaking of running the ball, is there any reason why Nebraska didn’t put the full-court press on Navy coach Paul Johnson before hiring LSU assistant Bo Pelini as its new head coach?

 

Johnson has turned the academy into a consistent bowl team – and he’s done it on the strength of an option ground game that was the best rushing attack in football. Navy this year led the entire nation with 351.5 rushing YPG and 51 rushing TDs on its way to an 8-4 record and a bowl meeting vs. Utah on Dec. 20. The Midshipmen were also fourth in the nation with 5.65 YPA on the ground.

 

If Johnson can put together that kind of offense at the Naval Academy, imagine what he might have been able to do with Nebraska’s traditional running talent and its unbelievable state-wide feeder program which – if the Gridiron Gods have any sympathy – Bill Callahan didn’t utterly destroy with his utterly failed attempt to institute the pass-happy West Coast offense.

 

Nebraska football fans love the option attack. It’s the foundation of football across the state. Nebraska has the talent to run that type of attack. It’s the offense that led the team to its dynastic runs in the 1970s, 1970s and 1990s. And college football is sorely missing a premier program that features this "old-school" style offense that died out only the past few years.

 

As Navy has proven, it can still be incredibly effective.

 

And with seemingly every major program in the country bent on running a pro-style offense (and every program forced to defend a pro-style offense) you figure that an option attack would have great success – Navy’s certainly has, as evidenced by the program’s 43-19 record since 2002.

 

Alas, Pelini, a defensive coordinator, is on his way to Nebraska. The program's once-proud "Blackshirts" defense certainly needs help after the worst defensive season in school history.

 

But we'll continue to wonder what the Cornhuskers might do with a return to the option offense, the traditional source of its powerhouse programs.

 

 

To get back to the topic of running the ball, it’s time to posit a theory as to why the NCAA was so bereft of dominant powers this year. One theory is this:

 

 

The rise in parity in major college football is often attributed to the decreased number of scholarships each team is allowed. It’s certainly played a role: years ago, top powers could hoard talent on their sidelines, and keep it away from second-rate programs.

 

But there is still a major difference in the talent pool that ends up at a school like, say, Michigan and the talent that ends up at a place like Illinois or, of course, at Division 1AA teams like Appalachian State.

 

Years ago, dominant powers with superior size, speed and talent simply imposed their will upon less talented teams the easiest way possible: by shoving the ball down their throats and running the ball 70, 80 or 90 percent of the time.

 

But these days almost everybody in college football is running a pro-style passing attack, to the point that it has taken much of the allure out of the college game. It was great back in the 1980s, when less talented programs began to realize that they could use an aggressive passing game as a great equalizer against more talented teams not used to handling thhat type of attack.

 

It's not so great today, when bigger, faster stronger teams opt to forego a dominant running game simple to prove they can run pro-style offenses. A lot of things can go wrong when guys without pro talent are tying to run a pro style offense. There's not too much that can go wrong when a team is simply crushing its opponents in the trenches.

 

Again, this is a theory. It's not a Cold, Hard Football Fact.

 

But if you ask us, you might see a return to something akin to a traditional college football heirarchy if more talented college football teams did what more talented college football teams have always done: pound their less talented opponents into submission in the trenches and on the ground.

 

Nobody takes more pleasure in tooling on the Cardinals than the CHFF crew. But maybe it’s time we start taking them a little more seriously.

 

One reason we pegged – mistakenly – Green Bay to beat Dallas Thursday night was the superior performances against Quality Teams of the Packers.

 

No stat or indicator is perfect. But if you roll the dice with the Quality Wins Quotient faithfully, you’ll be rolling in so much cash you could insulate your walls with it. Simply note our amazing 25-8 record picking playoff winners – using NO OTHER factors but our Quality Wins Quotion.

 

And if you flout the Quality Wins Quotient – well, as we’ve found the few times we’ve done it ourselves, you almost always get burned.

 

For example, in our Friday Beer Run picks this week, Arizona had a clear advantage against Quality Teams over Cleveland. Yet we ignored that advantage, saying we just don’t believe it this time and that we’re going to pick Cleveland.

 

Well, believe it: a week after losing in humiliating fashion to the 49ers, the Cardinals shocked the Browns at home. Arizona remains tied with Dallas for an NFC best 3-1 mark vs. Quality Opponents.