The Unofficial National Holiday

The biggest single day of sports is the first Sunday in February every year. For a weekend stretch of sports, nothing beats the opening rounds of the NCAA tournament, but the Super Bowl in and of itself is the biggest game all year.

I've put off thoughts about the game to come until just about the last possible minute. If you go by my original prediction, I only got 3 of 11 winners right. On a week by week basis I did much better; I correctly picked 6 of the 10 games correctly. It only makes sense that I predict the Super Bowl.

I foresee this as an offensive battle of epic proportions between two elite quarterbacks. Tom Brady is finally back on the biggest stage where he has excelled throughout his career. He will be somewhat limited offensively with Gronkowski recovering from an ankle sprain, but he still has Welker and Hernandez. Meanwhile Eli Manning has vaulted himself into elite status (while not on the same plane as Brady, but still elite) by making his teammates better. He has excellent receivers in Nicks, Cruz, and Manningham.

The other reason this will be a shootout? The Giants defense is ranked 27th, the Patriots 31st. Personally, I hate those numbers as the main statistic when it comes to measuring defense, so based on scoring allowed, the Patriots were 15th (21.4 PPGA) and the Giants 25th (25 PPGA). Still not great, so it strengthens the argument that we're going to see a shootout.

The toughest part? Predicting the score. I scoured the archives of Facebook to try to find my prediction for Super Bowl XLIII, only to be shot down by lack of status updates from back that far. But I have friends who are witnesses to the fact that I correctly predicted Steelers 27, Cardinals 23 and who will gladly back me up in this claim if asked. (And I'm also pretty sure there's audio evidence from the WONC archives I could dig up too... but I digress.) I did it once, so there's no chance in hell that I'll ever correctly predict the score again. But that won't stop me from predicting.

It'll be a high scoring game, and turnovers/sacks will have an impact, but it also seems like whoever has the ball last will win the game. My official prediction is Giants 34, Patriots 28. I figure New England will score a lot and can come up with some big plays to hold the Giants to field goals, but Eli is deadly late in ball games. Then again, so is Brady, but this game just has a similar feel to Super Bowl XLII... you know, except this year it's the Patriots everyone is doubting, myself included.

Whatever your plans are for the big game, enjoy yourselves, have fun, and be safe. And start crafting proposals for Super Bowl Monday becoming a new national holiday. You know, because no one will want to do anything the day after the big game.