Deceiving Blowouts

It's hard for a football game to be more one-sided than Super Bowl XLVIII. The Seahawks dominated from the first play from scrimmage and at no point did Broncos fans witness anything to get excited about. Denver's only reprieve from humiliation was as meaningless third quarter touchdown that ended the shutout. It's rare to see a wire-to-wire thrashing of this magnitude; rare to the point I do not believe it proved the Seahawks are the better team.

The rules of the NFL playoffs are simple: win every game and you're the champion. The Seahawks claimed their title with such emphasis there is no disputing their champion status. Their claim to "The Best Team in the NFL" title, however, is something we will never truly know. It's difficult to determine the best team by looking at individual games, especially when one of the games is such a significant deviation from the expect outcome that you wonder if what you saw was a macabre figment of your imagination.

We all know that the better team does not always win in sports. This is why the NCAA Tournament is so fun and the core of Kurt Russell's inspirational speech in Miracle. Nobody will argue that the Arizona Cardinals are better than Seattle because they won at CenturyLink Field in Week 16. Similarity, it's hard to argue Seattle is not better than Denver after last Sunday, but are they really 35 points better? Considering nobody 35 points better than anybody in the NFL, the answer is no. So what is there to make of Seattle's 43-8 win?

Sometimes athletes perform poorly. Very, very poorly. Patrick Roy was one of the best goalies in NHL history, yet he surrendered 6 goals before being pulled in Game 7 of the 2002 Western Conference Finals at Detroit. Last year's NL Cy Young Winner, Clayton Kershaw, surrendered seven earned runs in four innings in the deciding game of 2013 NLCS at St. Louis. Each player has such a comprehensive track record of greatness that their respective shellackings are indicative of nothing other than them having a bad day against good opposition. The same can be said about teams.

The 1999 Miami Dolphins were pretty good. They won the Wild Card, their first playoff game, and then lost to the Jacksonville Jaguars 62-7 in the Divisional Round. In 2003 the Marquette Golden Eagles, led by future NBA Hall of Famer Dwyane Wade, lost in the Final Four to Kansas 94-61. (It was 59-30 at halftime.) Both the Dolphins and Golden Eagles losses were that nightmarish anomaly that happens when peak performance meets poopy performance, and that's about it.

The 2013 Seahawks do deserve credit for being a buzzsaw. The 49ers were hopelessly over-matched in their first meeting with Seattle, losing 29-3. However, a regression towards the mean occurred as the 49ers emerged victorious in their subsequent game and nearly won the rubber match in the playoffs. Unfortunately the Broncos will not have the opportunity to prove the Super Bowl was a fluke. The next best thing for them to do is to burn the game film and pretend like it never happened. Getting 111,500,000 more people to forget might be a bit more challenging.