Afternoon Baseball

My life is terribly mundane, and baseball is hibernating, so my mind wandered to football. Mainly, to see the previously undefeated Indianapolis Colts start what everyone figured would be their cakewalk through the AFC playoffs. Home-field advantage was finally theirs -- including a domed Super Bowl -- and no trip to snowy Foxboro would derail them this time. The Broncos even defeated the Patriots on Saturday, and everyone knew that the Broncos could beat anyone in the NFL, save for the Colts.
What does that say about their ability to win big games, by the way?

But, everyone forgot that the Steelers are quite the team themselves. Yes, they've lost about six or so AFC championship games under Bill Cowher, but they often make it that far. Furthermore, they've also had the Colts' number. And really, has Peyton Manning ever showed, still, that he can do it when it counts? The Manning face that ESPN.com's Bill Simmons so often talks about was not transferred to his brother Eli this year -- it merely was copied from the original masterpiece.
Marvin Harrison? A year older and more and more the Art Monk or Cris Carter of wide recievers -- numbers of an all-time great, game impact of a mere mortal. The Edge? No doubts on him, actually. Just that the Colts don't make him the centerpiece. He's irrelevent in many ways to the outcome of the game.

Yet, today, the Colts showed heart. Down 21-3, they never gave up. And through a terrible call by the official, a successful Manning drive, and then an absurdly fortunate fumble by the best-ever active RB, Jerome Bettis (after Manning reverted to panic mode and was sacked on 4th down inside his own 5-yard-line), they drove down the field.

They were confident, poised, ready to shake the shackles of playoff defeats of years past. Defeats that date back to before Tony Dungy (and for Dungy, to his days with the Bucs, the defensive version of the 2000s Colts), humilations -- disembowlings, if you will -- to the Jets, Patriots and others. Manning was ready to march his team forward to the AFC Championship and take on a terrified Broncos team.

But, alas, they forgot, and maybe we did too, that the current run of Colts' futility in the big spots, the run of close-but-not-close-enough-to-say-no-cigar, began in 2000, when Mike Vanderjagt missed a field goal (49 yds., no gimme, but he had hit 54 of 56 leading up to that, and made the Colts waive a penalty to attempt it).
Vanderjagt, the "drunken idiot," as Peyton called him in the most brave moment of his playing career, is the catalyst for this failure. Not directly, but cosmically. And he completed the circle today -- wide right again.

Team chemistry and karma are often overrated. But the reason they can't be completely discounted is because it is human beings playing the game. They have psyches, and they are affected by their surroundings, their pasts, their thoughts, and their emotions. Why does Florida State miss a big field goal virtually every year? Why did the Bills never win a Super Bowl -- or even compete the last three years? Why did the Brooklyn Dodgers lose so many times to the Yankees, and why did they win in 1955? Why did Boston have so many playoff failures, but find the magic in 2004? There are statistical and analytical explanations that answer nearly all the questions. But then, we also must look at the game behind the game.
The Colts are still hamstrung by their karma -- or at least Vanderjagt is. Not that Manning was Joe Montana out there, of course. Vanderjagt suffers from the pitfalls of his profession on this one. Does that pressure get to him in those situations? Or maybe he was just unfortunate enough to miss two kicks at bad times by coincidence. In that case, he just dropped the ball. What's worse -- key-moment incompetence or being a mental headcase? You decide.
And as the Eagles found out this year, you only get so many chances to screw up.