(As an update: I was wrong. The Eagles not only played very well but they made the big play with a few minutes to go. I over-emphasized the perspective I was familiar with and under-emphasized the other perspective. The point of the exercise was to alleviate anxiety and avoid thinking about a football game. That worked: small moments of anxiety, a re-evaluation at halftime that the Eagles were playing very well and the Patriots defense very bad, a re-evaluation when the Eagles continued to play well, but continued confidence in the outcome until Brady was strip-sacked. I also realized while watching that I much prefer the athleticism in soccer to football. I still think these were pre-scuses, but that this was an occasion where they ended up not being necessary!)
This story exemplifies what I call ‘pre-scuses’, meaning excuses offered before the fact to justify why you lost. In this story, the Patriots are portrayed as capable of anything, including bringing a murderer into the NFL just because they will do anything to win. A Philadelphia sports radio host has been on air and giving interviews in which he claims the Patriots did all sorts of new cheating – stuff never alleged by anyone. Why do they do this? Because they are justifying their loss in advance. They are preparing themselves and their audiences to lose. I note a few other examples involving Eagles players. In one, the player talks about how it’s not about the Patriots but about them. In another, the player talks about how the organizational expectation is that they’ll be in the Super Bowl. The first really means ‘if we play well’, which is a way of signaling he fears they won’t play well. It’s a form of false bravado, a show put on to hide the fear. By contrast, the Patriots ‘spray the perfume’, meaning they talk about how good the opponent is, because their mindset is they expect the absolute best game from the opponent and they still intend to win. The second is an obvious absurdity: they’ve now been to 1 Super Bowl in almost a decade and a half. But it also shows a form of false bravado because it downplays all the vagaries that go into getting to a Super Bowl. The Patriots, by contrast, know this and acknowledge it: they’ve been to 7 straight AFC Championship Games but this is their 4th Super Bowl of those, meaning they’ve lost 3 of those games! The bravado is in the statement of expectations: it’s puffery.
In my opinion, the Eagles had their big moment in the NFC Championship Game, just as the Vikings had their moment a week earlier. The Vikings only won their big game because of an astoundingly stupid play – plus what looked like a bad defensive call – which made their victory as close to a miracle as it gets in football. They had nothing left against the Eagles: getting to the NFC Championship was their big moment. The Eagles, by contrast, having lost their star QB seized the opportunity to show they could win without him. They’d beaten an underperforming Falcons team the week before and rode the home field advantage as a ‘we’ll show you’ game. Getting to the Super Bowl was their big moment.
I note the Eagles statistics show a huge home field skew: they played much better at home, especially defensively, so they put that mojo to work in the NFC Championship. The Super Bowl is an oddity: not a home game but also not a road game. A road game can motivate: shut up the opposing fans. But a Super Bowl is a more literally a ‘stage’ where you perform. That’s more complicated.
jomi: playing with perception 