The NFL playoffs as a serialized TV drama.
Image by Tom Lynn / Reuters
With Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, and Peyton Manning getting off to unremarkable starts, the first half of the NFL season felt like a long-running hit show that had started to lose energy. But during the second half, those old characters were written right back into the script. The Packers and mustache-baron Aaron Rodgers returned to dominating inferior defenses, i.e. every defense; Tom Brady and the Patriots made no mistakes and lost no games, except for that one where they hosted San Francisco, which was the best episode of the season anyway; Peyton Manning played like the Peyton Manning from the Bible. Meanwhile, a few new characters, the Seahawks and Robert Griffin and Andrew Luck, arrived in a big way. It was all a great prologue for some very special episodes of The NFL Playoffs.
Previously On THE NFL PLAYOFFS
If you're from Washington, D.C., the first week of the NFL playoffs were horrible, just horrible — like, "Drinking yourself to sleep and waking up Monday morning at 10:37 a.m." horrible. Perhaps due to concerns that he'd become overexposed too quickly, Griffin was written out of The Playoffs early and in emphatic fashion — he spent most of the game against the Seahawks limping, then went down in a garish and spectacular heap after a botched snap by his center. While wanting to make room for other characters is a reasonable motivation, I worry that the show's writers may have dismissed RGIII a little too completely — it could be hard for him to stage a convincing comeback next season.
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Elsewhere, the quo was status. Adrian Peterson, unquestionably the season's biggest surprise and most likable character, wasn't enough to overcome the Packers. The Texans, probably the least engaging major subplot — basically the NFL's Kim Bauer Mountain Lion — lived to see another day, which is actually kind of all right, because if they hadn't it would mean we'd have to watch the Bengals, who are football's equivalent of a chalkboard. And the Ravens beat the Colts because the Colts, despite being the one heartwarming element of an otherwise dark and violent narrative, just aren't very good, and if they'd gone on another week it would have been just too implausible.
It was a decent episode overall, but I have higher hopes for this week.
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