A Matter of Interpretation

Sports pundits do it all the time. They interpret the game. They tell you how the game went. How the winning team won. How the losing team lost. But the tale of the tape comes from the final results. The same events are interpreted one way if there's a win, and another way if there's a loss.

Last week, for instance, Eli Manning was brilliant. No interceptions. But we only remember it that way because the Giants won. To be fair, they should have won. With the Giants kicker missing two field goals, they relied on a Favre turnover in overtime and a suddenly steady kicker to win by a field goal. If Favre goes on a drive to win in OT, how brilliant is Eli? Instead, it's how much did the kicker choke.

This week, Tom Brady had a drive in the fourth quarter that might have lead his team to victory. Had that been the final score, people would have said that Brady does what he does best. He wills his team to win. He scores when he has to score. Even if the score would have been 14-10, they would have called this Patriots team the best ever, and that drive would have shown how Brady and Patriots simply find a way. This was how they mostly played in the playoffs. Not dominating football, but finding a way to win.

Instead, it was Eli Manning making that final drive, and while Brady's drive was important, in the end it was Brady's last minute (last 30 seconds, really) hail Mary that mattered most (and Moss had the ball in his hands, if only for a brief instant). He almost made it happen again.

But the penultimate drive? Irrelevant. Brady wasn't himself. He was a choker. His team couldn't produce the offense they had all season.

The funny thing? Both statements are true. Brady did not have a good game, partly because the Giants did. But had his last scoring drive been the last drive, then he would have come back, willed his team to win.

Those same events take a different look when viewed through the lens of a loss.

And that's how sportswriters think, or frankly, don't think.