Media Coverage of the Implications of a Very Close Football Game

"Any print columnist who writes that the Saints' victory will forever change New Orleans should be shot. Even the bloggers will do better." - Buzz Bissinger

Yes we will, I think. Totally agree with Wojo about the implications of the game for the city of New Orleans. It's a wonderful story. Certainly everyone at my party was cheering for the Saints, and word from the game is that 75% of the crowd there was cheering for them too. I think we all feel good for the city - a championship is a wonderful pick me up in a very difficult time of rebuilding.

Wojo decided to leave media coverage of the game to another time, and I've decided that time is now. This game has provided an interesting window into where we're at now in how we view major sporting events. On the one hand, there was the instant overreaction - Brees is the best quarterback in football now! Manning is a choker! But there was also a very quick backlash against the standard overreaction. The arguments are one's everybody's heard - Manning played well, made one bad throw (and it may not even have been - Wayne slipped coming out of the break), and shouldn't be punished because his defense couldn't stop the Saints in the second half. This has turned out to be the dominant way to view the game - not the choker/hero theme. Now, part of this is the bias in my selection of reading on football - Football Outsiders is my main source of football analysis, and they are among the most reasoned writers on the sport. They abhor the standard insipid football discussion. But it wasn't just them. Even Bill Simmons, popularizer of the term "Manning Face" wrote a surprisingly reasoned column (even if he did let his readers make the dumb arguments for him at the end of it). In searching for Manning "choker" stories, I found plenty of people saying that we shouldn't jump to conclusions based on one game.

This is a terrific moment. Smart, reasonable writers don't have quite the pull of newspaper columnists, but their power, relative to "bloggers" (and in that group, I'd include writers with mainly an internet presence, like the Football Outsiders guys, Will Leitch, and even Simmons) is decreasing. And thankfully, that may mean a world where excellent players don't get labeled "chokers" because they lose in big games for reasons beyond their control. Heck, people might some day understand the concept of small sample sizes and the non-existence of clutch. But at least for now Manning's legacy is safe.