This week’s Monday Morning Hangover was pieced together following a long night of Harpoon IPA and tears after watching an NFC championship game & “Old Yeller” double bill.

 

We were so young and vain three weeks ago, walking into the postseason party like we were walking aboard a yacht – our Quality Stats strategically dipped below one eye, and our schnapps was apricot.

 

Then the Giants blew up our Quality Stats this postseason like Brandon Jacobs taking out a blitzing linebacker.

 

Our Quality Wins Quotient, for example, is just 5-5 identifying playoff winners this year – but the Giants are single-handedly responsible for three of those losses, with three wins against postseason opponents who boasted better marks against Quality Teams.

 

Our published picks, meanwhile, are 6-4, or 6-1 in games not involving the Giants.

 

The Quality Wins Quotient is now 30-13 picking playoff winners since we introduced before the 2004 playoffs. And seven of those 13 losses are the result of two historic teams – the 2005 Steelers and 2007 Giants, each of whom reached the Super Bowl by winning three straight playoff road games.

 

We never saw those two teams coming. But hell, nobody did.

 

If you measure teams by average ranking in our Quality Stats (the comparative list is found here), the better team is 7-3 this year – the Giants singularly responsible for all three losses.

 

Big Blue entered the playoffs with a pathetic 1-5 record vs. Quality Teams and an average rank of 16.4 in our Quality Stats – both marks the lowest among postseason contenders.

 

Yet here they are, NFC champions and poised to capture the greatest Quality Win in history if they can knock off the 18-0 Patriots in Super Bowl XLII.

 

Nothing inspires the passions of the pigksin public quite like the images of the "frozen tundra of Lambeau Field."

 

The words alone are spoken as if they're enough to crush the will of even the heartiest opponent, as if walking into Lambeau on a chilly December and January day (or evening) is the NFL equivalent of the Bataan Death March. Surely, no team can emerge with a victory from the frozen tundra of Lambeau field.

 

And for decades, no team could. The Packers won every postseason game at Lambeau from 1936 to 2001 (13-0), including a victory in the greatest game ever, the one that secured the icy imagery in our mind.

 

But since then, there haven't been many leaps at Lambeau: the Packers are just 2-3 in their last five home playoff games, with losses to the Falcons in 2002, the Vikings in 2004 and the Giants yesterday. The two wins over the past five home playoff games have come against Seattle, a.k.a. not the Road Warriors.

 

Lambeau Field is certainly one of the NFL's great arenas and a wonderful place to watch football. But it's clearly not much of a homefield advantage in the playoffs anymore. And it's officially time to stop treating "the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field" as if it's something special.

 

Tom Brady is fresh off one of the worst playoff games of his career. He tossed three picks in a 21-12 win over San Diego in the AFC championship game Sunday, on a day when the defense and the ground game carried the team when it needed them most.

 

Perhaps Brady’s performance was just an anomaly. After all, he’s thrown three picks in a playoff game just twice in his career. And both three-pick postseason performances came against the same team, just over a year apart. The Chargers have picked off everybody over that period – 38 INTs dating back to their divisional-round loss to the Patriots in the 2006 playoffs, including 14 picks of Brady and Peyton Manning, the two passers universally proclaimed the best in the league.

 

And the two worst passer ratings of Brady’s playoff career also both came against San Diego – 57.6 in last year’s divisional playoffs, 66.4 in Sunday’s AFC title game.

 

Regardless of its status as an anomaly, we do know this: Brady has now started 16 postseason games, the equivalent of a full season of work against Quality Competition.

 

The record is simply phenomenal, even with a pair of dogs tossed into the mix. Eleven of those 16 postseason opponents won 12 or more games in the regular season. Their combined record is 195-61 (.762). Brady’s Patriots are 14-2 in those 16 games.

 

His cumulative stat line looks like this:

 

 

Given the quality of the competition and the weather (nearly half of those 16 games were played in considerably wintry conditions, such as snow or wind chills that hovered around 0) it’s a fairly impressive collection of numbers.

 

If you’re wondering how those numbers compare to other great postseason passers, here’s a look at how Brady stacks up against perhaps the greatest himself, Joe Montana, through his first 16 playoff games.

 

We find that Montana put up better numbers – especially with his gaudy 7.9 YPA – while Brady faced tougher competition.

 

Seven of Montana’s first 16 playoff opponents won 12 or more games in the regular season. Their combined record was 177-78 (.694). Montana’s 49ers were 12-4 in those 16 games.

 

His cumulative stat line looks like this:

 

It’s hard to bitch about Brady’s performance when you consider that the victory over San Diego was the 100th of his career, against just 26 losses, a .794 win percentage.

 

As the NFL Network noted Sunday, he’s the fastest quarterback to 100 victories in a landslide, getting there 20 games faster than Montana (who, lest we forget, played for a pretty fair country coach himself).

 

And as we noted before the game Sunday, New England’s 100 victories since Brady took command of the offense in 2001 is simply unbelievable when you consider that the franchise won just 98 games in the 14 seasons from 1987 to 2000.

 

As every football fan this side of the Atlantic knows by now, the Giants have won 10 straight road games this year. It’s such an impressive feat that everyone is reporting it as “historic” and a “record.”

 

It’s certainly impressive. But it’s a record only for road wins in a single season. It’s far short of the 19 straight (18 in the regular season) road games thhe 49ers won from 1988 to 1990.

 

• Teams with better record vs. Quality Teams: 30-13 (.698)
• Vegas favorites: 29-14 (.674)
• Teams with better overall record: 26-17 (.605)
• Home teams: 23-17 (.575)