V's Rabbit Hole

  I expected this. That doesn't make it any easier. It's the day after the Super Bowl, and I've never felt this way before. The team I liked all season – maybe my actual favorite team all my life – made it to and lost the Super Bowl in dramatic fashion. Heartbreaking fashion, you might say. Because I feel heartbroken. I am typically a pretty guarded person who has lived a pretty emotionally-guarded life. I haven't experienced a lot of things that “normal” people experience. There has been a lot of disappointment, but not like yesterday. Not like last night. I, like every Bengals fan who only started checking in on the team after their last Super Bowl appearance, have never experienced a Super Bowl loss. Not as a fan. No team I've actually liked , rooted on and cheered for all season, has made it to a Super Bowl. The Chiefs are my Number 2 team, have been for years, but I've never actually sat on the edge of my seat during any of their games, never put my emot...

  Alright. It's Super Bowl week, and I haven't had much to say in a while – so I went looking through some of my notes for something I felt like I had to say. And I found a little gem that seems prescient of Sunday's game: What is more valuable to a team: an elite corps of weapons or an elite offensive line? Let's start with the Rams, because we all know the Bengals made it to the Super Bowl with an historically bad offensive line, right? And yet, according to this article from PFF , the Bengals were 20 th this season and the Rams were 7 th . Nowhere near as bad, evidently, as the Dolphins (32 nd ) and Panthers (31 st ). Meta-data mining this article for a moment, I'm surprised by how the Playoff teams cluster within the top-ten of each half of the rankings. But I'm not really talking about the way the offensive lines performed; not conceptually. I'm talking about how the teams are built. So let's take a look at the Rams. From Left Tackle to Right...