It is natural to spend the morning after the Super Bowl heaping praise and scorn on the players from the night before. Whether it is Mario Manningham’s twisting, falling sideline reception of a perfect Eli Manning pass late in the game, or the missed block that led to a safety and the YES bet covering on the ‘Will there be a score in the first 6:30’ in the first quarter (Ummm, not that I was so un-invested in this game I cared more about wagers than I did about the outcome), the plays that defined the Super Bowl will be nearly as omnipresent today as MIA’s middle finger.

But in reality this game was not won on the field. It was won in drab gray offices at each team’s headquarters.

Eli Manning won the least deserving MVP award since…well, the last time he won (you shouldn’t win an award for 1 single pass, yet Eli has now done it twice). The true MVPs of this game weren’t wearing should pads.

GM Jerry Reese, the man who drafted and signed the players for the Giants is the MVP.

The 2011 NFL season should go down in history, not for the play of great players, but for the work of great GMs and personnel men.

The Colts lost a single player and won 8 fewer games. That is not a freak injury, that is a systemic failure – a front office that has so failed at their jobs repeatedly that there is no talent beyond the player under center.  

The Packers turned in an all-time great regular season built on a foundation of players that weren’t even members of the team that lost the 2007 NFC Championship game.

And last night the Patriots demonstrated what years of missing on impact skill players can do. After Randy Moss left last season, the talent at wide receiver has become so thin that the Patriots had 2 tight ends and an undrafted 5’6” running back on the field for the final hail mary. Yes, they are 2 good, freakishly talented tight ends but they aren’t going to out-run and out-leap faster, nimbler defensive backs.

The Patriots run game was non-existent as usual. Danny Woodhead may be scrappy with a slightly obvious reason for being popular with Patriots fans (Tyler Hansbrough effect) but he isn’t talented enough to be on the field for a final drive at the end of the Super Bowl. He just isn’t.

His presence isn’t an ode to Bill Belichick’s genius at finding talent. It is the bright, shining CITGO sign of the Patriots failure to find skilled players.

The Giants, on the other hand, have General Manager Jerry Reese consistently finding talent as players move on in what is now a transitory league.

Plaxico Burress goes to jail and Amani Toomer leaves? In steps Hakeem Nicks and Mario Manningham. Nicks gets hurt? Welcome Victor Cruz.

Michael Strahan retires and Osi Umenyiora loses effectiveness? Step up Justin Tuck and Jason Pierre Paul.

Antonio Pierce retires? Welcome Chase Blackburn.

Credit is due Belichick, the coach, for augmenting his offensive system to work with the skill on hand. Evolving from a Welker-Moss centric downfield-underneath offensive system to 2 tight end sets and making another Super Bowl appearance is an astounding job of coaching. Flexibility and adaptability are probably the 2 least appreciated values in the NFL.

But that adaptability was born of necessity due to the failures of Belichick the GM.

Where the Giants won because a new generation stepped up when needed, the Patriots lost because the players that won those Super Bowls – Teddy Bruschi, Rodney Harrison, Richard Seymour, Troy Brown, Corey Dillon – are gone and Belichick’s penchant for hoarding draft picks has left the team bereft of talent outside of the tight end position.

And the next team that wins a Super Bowl with their best talent at tight end will be the first.

Several years ago I remember reading an article about March Madness that discussed yet another early round flame-out by Duke. The writer (it might have been Bill Simmons, but I’m not sure), noted the number of unathletic (i.e. white) players on Duke and said something to the effect that ‘Coach K has gotten so cocky, it is like he is trying to win with a degree of difficulty’. SIDEBAR: Journalism majors: is it plagiarism if you sort of, kind of give credit to someone that might have written something you don’t quite remember exactly? Is that plagiarism? I recognize it is totally lazy, which I am fine with, but don’t want to plagiarize. Now, it seems like Bill Belichick is taking a page out of the Coach K handbook. And not the page that tells you how to insert rand r’s and z’ into your last name. In the current NFL free agent speed dating session, the Patriots have signed up the two biggest wildcards not names T.O. or Favre. Albert Haynesworth went from all Pro, to all nightmare in his time with the Redskins. Will he clean up his act and play harder for Belichick than he ever did for Shanahan? Will he make it through the season without an arrest? Will he actually finish his fitness test before beginning to whine about playing time? Following up Haynesworth, Belichick then went out and signed self-promoting genius, occasional pass-receiving Chad Ochocinco. If he was able to keep his mouth shut and fingers out of Twitter for longer than 14 seconds, he would be the ideal Patriot signing – veteran from a bad team looking for one last chance at a Super Bowl run before the game completely passes him by. But, his inability to keep quiet is anathema to the silent and deceptive Patriots – who have listed Tom Brady as questionable with a sore shoulder for about 6 years. Can Belichick motivate Haynesworth as well as appease the glory hog that is named Ochocinco – but at the same time? He seems to think so. But only because the unique arrogance that is bread by success. He has done it before, so why shouldn’t he do it again? Corey Dillon and Randy Moss were other malcontent players that arrived in Foxbrough with reputations longer than their career stats. Both immediately accepted the ‘Patriots Way’, shut up and fit in. One got a ring out of it and the other got an NFL record and was the key cog in the highest scoring offense in history. Much like Haynesworth and Ochocinco, Dillon and Moss arrived from 2 of the most dysfunctional teams in the league – Dillon also from Cincinnati (which sums up the Bengals pretty well – they have been dysfunctional long enough to have 2 separate generations of players flee to the warmth of Belichick’s discarded hoodie sleeves) and Moss from Oakland. Belichick’s core value is that the team is bigger than the individual and that when players arrive, their needs take a backseat to the needs of the team. For veterans in search of Super Bowl that is easy to do. As long as they are successful. When success begins to falter, the grand-standers and whiners come right back to their old ways (see: Moss, Randy, 2010). With the Jets on the rise, the Steelers rolling right along and the Ravens improving, the AFC is no longer the 2 horse race it used to be. The Patriots have shown significant question marks in their recent playoff failures and little has been done to address them. And I don’t think anyone sees either signing as the move that puts them over the top. If the Patriots start slow or the Jets start fast, it won’t take long for the new joiners to forget their Three Musketeer-esque motto and go on a media rampage. Coach K learned that after years of success, he couldn’t coach just any group of outside shooters to consistent success. So will the Haynesworth, Ochocinco experiments work? Paradoxically, only if the Patriots were good enough to win without them.

It was 1:15 AM Monday morning and I was standing on the casino floor at Mandalay Bay. My blackjack table had just been closed on me and I still held a number of chips. I faced a decision. Do I push my luck? I was up on the night but had given back some of my stack in the last few hands. Do I go find a new table and see if I can grow my remaining stack or do I call it a night and head off to get a few hours sleep before my way-too-early alarm clock for my way-too-early flight?

As I placed my remaining chips in my pocket and debated where to go and what to do, I felt a slip of paper in my pocket. It was betting slip from the sportsbook earlier in the evening. At halftime of the Colts / Pats game I had taken the under on the number of points scored in the second half. The line was set at 24.5 points.

As you now know. After Bill Belichick decided to for it on 4^th down, the Colts subsequently scored the game winning touchdown – which ended up being the 28^th point of the game.

When I pulled out my now worthless betting sheet, I looked at the note I had written on it earlier. ‘WTF Belichick?’

At that point my decision was pretty easy. I went up and went to bed. Sometimes you have to know when to not push your luck.

As you doubtlessly heard re-hashed countless times over the last couple of days, Belichick’s decision to go for it on 4^th down from his own 28-yard line possibly cost his team the game but what you haven’t heard is that it definitely cost Turner, Shadow and I around $200.

When it became clear that the Pats were going to go for it on that fourth, a murmur of shock and excitement swept through the entire Mandalay sportsbook, like I would imagine happened last spring at the end of the Super Bowl. No one present could believe what they were seeing and with an even 50/50 split between Colt and Pats fans (or more accurately people with money on the Colts and Pats) there was both cheers and boos when the play was ruled to come up short.

Even before the Colts inevitably scored, Belichick was being ridiculed (or as he quickly became known “f’ing Bill Belichick”) for the call. I tried to come up with a defense for him, though my heart wasn’t in it: he recognized even a punt would most likely lead to a Colt touchdown so he wanted them to score quickly so Brady would have time to retaliate. Of course, that became moot when the combination of Pats defense and Peyton Manning stall tactics lead to a score with less than 20 seconds left.

This has been analyzed to death at this point, so I don’t need to go into it any more, other than to point out the one thing that hasn’t been discussed much.

Did the Patriots actually gain that first down? Yes, Faulk juggled the ball, but only once before trapping it against his chest. By the best available views it appears to me that Faulk controlled the ball well on the other side of the 30-yard line before getting pushed back past the 30.

As you may notice in the replays the guy that actually made the call that he was juggling was the side judge directly behind him. Apparently, the side judge has x-ray vision because he was able to see through Faulk’s back and see that he was still juggling the ball as he was pushed back a yard and a half from where he initially touched the ball.

Which begs the obvious question – why is the guy with X-ray vision only a side judge?

Why didn’t any of the other refs point out the fact that Faulk only juggled the ball once? Did no other ref have a view of the play better than a guy directly behind the receiver?

If you ask me, the ref did not make the right call and the Colts probably would have scored regardless.  But that doesn’t mean to say Belichick made the right decision in going for it. As anyone who has played blackjack knows you don’t always win when you follow the rules but you almost never win ignoring the rules.

Sometimes it is best to not press your luck.