Don’t Let the Pretty Name Fool You: Drew Brees was Colts’ Poison

He has a name sent by the heavens to us cranky, weathered writers. It’s a Hollywood name—even laced with a bit of Native American in its sound.

The Drew Breeses of the world don’t come down the pike too often. The name is the anti-Dick Butkus: melodic, modern, All-American.

He could only be a quarterback—or maybe a fleet-footed wide receiver. Someone named Drew Brees doesn’t work in the trenches. That’s reserved for the Otis Sistrunks and Verlon Biggses and Vern den Herders. Don’t fret if you don’t recall those dudes—I promise that they existed, and they were no Drew Brees types—in looks or in name appeal.

It was Drew vs. Peyton in yesterday’s Super Bowl. One was looking for a piece of greatness; the other was trying to cement his.

The New Orleans Saints are “champions of the pro football world!”—as was famously shouted by NBC’s Curt Gowdy after the New York Jets stunned the mighty Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. They earned every bit of their 31-17 win over the Indianapolis version of the Colts.

The Saints are champs for many reasons, not the least of which is the way they demonstrated the best way to stop Colts QB Manning: don’t let him touch the football.

As Manning fidgeted and looked at the scoreboard and made faces and paced and fidgeted some more, Brees and the Saints dominated possession in the second quarter. At one point, the Saints had run off 20 plays from scrimmage to the Colts’ mere three. It was keep away of the highest order. Dean Smith and his four-corner offense in college basketball had nothing on Brees and the Saints in the second quarter yesterday.

It was a double-edged sword the Colts were battling, for while Manning was being kept on the sidelines, Brees was on the field. And that was poison for the Colts.

Brees filleted the Colts. He carved them like a surgeon. He didn’t let a pedestrian running game stop him. He threw 39 passes, completed 32 of them. Two went for touchdowns, and the completions traversed 288 yards. He was snazzier with the blade than a Japanese steak house chef.

Brees was the game’s MVP—as if.

Eight guys, no less, were recipients of Brees passes for the Saints. Drew was an equal opportunity employer.

The Colts have Peyton, but the Saints have Payton.

How about coach Sean Payton and his onside kick to start the second half? It was as if he was trying to make up for the ill-advised fourth-and-goal running play that went nowhere late in the second quarter.

“No—really—I can coach!” Payton seemed to be saying as he stunned the Colts, hundreds of millions of TV viewers, and his own team by ordering the daring onside kick that precipitated a scrum that was better than anything rugby can dish out.

The Saints were awarded the football after the bodies were unpiled, and Brees got his scalpel out again. Moments later, the Saints were in the end zone and had a 13-10 lead.

Manning was good, but not as good as Brees. Peyton was 31-for-45 for 333 yards and a touchdown (and an interception). Not shabby. But “not shabby” isn’t going to get it done when your counterpart is unconscious.

A Manning finally lost a Super Bowl.

Suddenly, the question isn’t “How many more can that family win?”

It’s, “How in the world can you stop Drew Brees from winning more?’

Drew Brees. It sounds pretty but is drenched with toxin.

Forty Years Ago, AFL Showed the NFL Who the REAL Fools Were

The words stuck in the craw of the proud, fiercely loyal American Football League players and coaches like a popcorn kernel under the furthest molar.

“I think the Kansas City Chiefs are a tough football team,” Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi said in the afterglow of his team’s 35-10 win over them in Super Bowl I.

So far, so good. Then Vince laid down the hammer.

“But I don’t think the Chiefs compare to the teams in the NFL. There—I said it. That’s what you wanted me to say, right?”

The NFL beat writers, and commissioner Pete Rozelle, who had just presented Lombardi with the trophy that would later bear the coach’s name, roared with laughter.

Zing!

Edwin Pope of the Miami Herald ran back to the Chiefs’ locker room. He went straight for coach Hank Stram.

“Henry! Henry!” Pope screamed, according to his account given to the NFL Network. “Did you hear what Lombardi said about the AFL?”

Pope told Stram about Lombardi’s zinger. What Stram said in reply isn’t fit for this column. It isn’t even fit for a John Edwards biography.

A year later, Lombardi’s Packers again dominated, this time destroying the 13-1 Oakland Raiders in Super Bowl II. Lombardi didn’t need to talk after that one.

After the first two Super Bowls—they were more popularly known as the AFL-NFL Championship Games back then—the nickname of the AFL’s founding fathers seemed to fit them like a glove.

“The Foolish Club,” they called them—eight men who dared to place pro football franchises in cities like Houston and Buffalo (BUFFALO!), and in the backyards of already existing NFL organizations in Los Angeles and New York.

The Packers won the first two championships played between the two leagues by an aggregate score of 68-24.

Foolish, indeed!

Lenny Dawson quarterbacked the Chiefs on that day in January, 1967 in the Los Angeles Coliseum, when the Packers ran away from the Chiefs in the game’s second half. And he was in the stands in the Orange Bowl in Miami two years later, biting almost clear through his tongue.

On the field, Joe Namath and the New York Jets were running roughshod over the venerable Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. It wasn’t even close—much worse than the 16-7 final score indicated.

Dawson was sitting among a group of NFL loyalists. As the game went on, and as the Jets’ destiny was evident, it was all he could do to contain his glee. Dawson was an NFL castoff, foundering with the Pittsburgh Steelers when Stram plucked him off the scrap heap.

“Hank Stram saved my pro career,” Dawson has said.

So while the Jets were humiliating the Colts, Dawson bided his time.

Finally, he could contain himself no longer.

Sometime in the fourth quarter, Dawson stood up, proudly, among the NFL folks.

“Well, well,” he crowed, “what do you think of the American Football League NOW?”

Ah, but it was a fluke. A blind squirrel finding a nut. The Colts were overconfident. If the two teams played again, the Jets would surely go down.

Dawson and his AFL brethren had to hear that for a year.

Such was the stage when Dawson, in uniform now, and the Chiefs made it back to the Big One—Super Bowl IV in New Orleans to face the Minnesota Vikings in January 1970—40 years ago and some change.

The Vikings, like the Colts before them, seemed unstoppable. They breezed through the NFL with a 12-2 record, then demolished the Cleveland Browns in the NFL Championship Game, 27-7.

Despite the Jets’ victory one year prior, the Chiefs were still “just” an AFL team. They had no chance against the mighty Vikings.

What is it they say about the fate of those who forget history?

As Stram—now famously miked up for NFL Films—hooted and hollered on the sidelines, the quarterback he rescued from the NFL’s trash bin and his 10 offensive teammates razzle-dazzled and powered their way around and through the vaunted Vikings defense.

The Chiefs won, 23-7.

Who was foolish now?

Al Davis was the AFL’s last commissioner. And he was smelling blood. The two leagues had already announced a merger, partly designed to put an end to the talent war that was escalating faster than anything the United States and the Russians were engaged in at the time.

But after the AFL won the IIIrd and IVth Super Bowls, Davis, who was opposed to the merger to begin with—a merger that was agreed to behind his back—snarled.

“Davis thought the AFL had its boot on the NFL’s throat,” Scotty Stirling, a Raiders executive at the time, recalled to the NFL Network. “And he didn’t want to let up. He thought the AFL could have brought the NFL to its knees.”

But the merger was already a done deal, and the two leagues joined forces for the 1970 season. The 10 AFL teams, plus the NFL’s Colts, Steelers, and Browns, formed the American Football Conference.

Two years later, some NFL people were still showing themselves to be slow learners.

The Miami Dolphins, born in 1966 to the AFL, finished the first 14-0 season in history. They advanced to Super Bowl VI with a 16-0 record. Their opponents were the NFL-rich Washington Redskins.

On the cab ride to the stadium, radio host Larry King rode with bookmaker Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder. King noted that The Greek had instilled the 11-3 Redskins as a three-point favorite over the undefeated Dolphins.

How could that be, King, a Dolphins fan and ever inquisitive, wanted to know.

“You’re still the AFL,” Snyder told him.

The Dolphins won. Easily. Then they won the next year, too—also easily.

To this day, you won’t find a group of workers more respectful of their roots than the American Football League players and coaches. Even after years of playing in the NFL, those whose pro football careers began in the AFL will always consider themselves “AFL guys.”

Forty years ago, in New Orleans, the AFL squared the Super Bowl series with the NFL at two wins apiece. And, as Davis says, they might have kept it up, had the merger not been in place.

The fools rushed in, after all.

Kaline Has Work Cut Out for Him with Rookie Jackson

If Austin Jackson was coming to town to learn the guitar, you’d send for Eric Clapton. If you needed to teach him baking, you’d put out an APB on Betty Crocker. If he needed a quick primer on parting seas, you’d check Moses’ calendar.

But Jackson needs to learn center field, and quick—so the Tigers will be calling for Al Kaline.

It’s an annual rite of spring in Lakeland, FL—Hall of Famer Kaline, under the Florida sun, learning young Tigers outfielders how to get the best jump off the bat, where to go once the ball comes their way, and—perhaps most famously—how to catch and throw in the most fluid motion possible.

Kaline’s been traipsing down to Lakeland with the rest of the team since 1975, his first year in retirement. His charge has been to do his best to keep the young fly chasers from turning into butchers.

Kaline becomes even more important this spring for two reasons: rookie Jackson just might be designated as the Tigers’ starting center fielder as a true freshman; and the team no longer has Andy Van Slyke on board to coach the outfielders on a day-to-day basis during the season. Van Slyke resigned after last season, and let no one dismiss the work he did with Curtis Granderson, especially, in Andy’s four years as a Tigers coach.

Jackson is about to get a crash course on how to play the outfield—specifically, the vast center field at Comerica Park—from perhaps the most qualified man alive.

No. 6 has been teaching Tigers outfielders in spring training since 1975

Van Slyke had his guru, too. He told me a few years ago that Bill Virdon, the old Pirates center fielder and former manager who was no slouch as an outfielder, worked with Van Slyke when Andy was with the Pirates. Virdon helped turn Van Slyke into one of the best outfielders of his time.

But Andy’s off to other pursuits, so Kaline will have to take the lead. What a shame.

We have no idea, really, how this kid Jackson, acquired from the Yankees organization in the Granderson trade of December, is going to manage the Grand Canyon-esque outfield of CoPa. It can be unforgiving terrain.

And there won’t be much help, it doesn’t look like, coming from the corner outfielders. There’s Magglio Ordonez in right, mainly because the rules dictate the Tigers play someone in right field. And there’s either Carlos Guillen or Ryan Raburn or the flavor of the day in left, which might be good news only if you’re an opposing right-handed pull hitter.

That leaves Jackson to patrol more ground than a park ranger.

Center field in Detroit was a battle of attrition for the entire 20th century, and it’s not getting any easier in the 21st.

When the team played in Navin Field/Briggs Stadium/Tiger Stadium, center field meant 44o feet straightaway and gaps that had to be covered in matters of seconds, with as fast as the ball got out there in that hitter-friendly ballpark.

You had to be part outfielder and part track and fielder. On any given batted ball, you might be asked to run a country mile or dart into left or right center with the quickness of a jackrabbit. It was baseball meets the Summer Olympics. Half the time, the Tigers needed Kaline. The other half, they needed Michael Johnson.

It took a man to play center field at Tiger Stadium. In Comerica Park, it really takes two men.

You think Tiger Stadium’s outfield was vast? CoPa’s lawn extends as far as the eye can see, and continues even beyond that. If a ball is hit into the gaps, the great outfielders get on their horse. The smart ones call for a cab.

Young Jackson isn’t going to get much help from Ordonez in right or (fill in the blank) in left. If the Tigers sign Johnny Damon, that won’t help either. Now, if they could play a fourth outfielder, like in softball, then maybe we wouldn’t have to worry so much.

Enter Kaline, who started as a center fielder until someone found out that Al had a howitzer for an arm and, as you know, cannons are best reserved for right field.

We don’t know if Jackson is up to the task. Perhaps Kaline doesn’t even know—at least not until he gets his meat hooks into the kid. And even then it will be in the hands of God, eventually.

But in spring training, at least, the Tigers will have Jackson in the care of the next best thing.