By Tom James
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — A classic National Football League championship game matchup.
By all indications, that’s what Super Bowl XLIV promises to be as the top two seeds from the 2009 season — the New Orleans Saints and Indianapolis Colts — face off this evening (6 p.m., CBS Sports) at Sun Life Stadium.
Two of the top quarterbacks in the game, New Orleans’ Drew Brees and Indianapolis’ Peyton Manning, will be spotlighted. Two of the NFL’s premier passing attacks will be on display. And two of the league’s undersized and underrated defenses will have an opportunity to prove any and all doubters wrong.
But it doesn’t quite end there. Super Bowl XLIV will also allow two of the NFL’s lesser-known head coaches — Sean Payton and Jim Caldwell — to show why they should be considered among the league’s best at what they do.
The path that the two teams took to tonight’s game are remarkably similar. New Orleans started the season with a 13-0 record and then lost their last three. Indianapolis, meanwhile, was 14-0 before dropping their final two regular season games.
Both were dominant in winning home postseason games just to get to this point. The Saints knocked off Arizona and Minnesota while the Colts registered victories over Baltimore and the New York Jets.
And both have had season-defining decisions in Miami this year. Indianapolis rallied for a 27-23 nationally televised victory over the Dolphins in the season’s second week with 14 fourth-quarter points. What made the Indianapolis win even more unbelievable was that the Colts had the possession of the football for a little less than 15 minutes in the entire game.
In late October, meanwhile, the Saints posted a 46-34 win over Miami with a comeback of their own. New Orleans trailed 34-24 late in the third quarter but scored 22 fourth-quarter points to put away the Dolphins.
“As the season goes on you find yourself playing with leads, playing with deficits, and certainly in that game we fell behind, didn’t play too well early and Miami did a great job. We kind of hung in there in the second half and made a few plays, got some turnovers and capitalized on them, and that ended up really making the difference and giving us a chance to win,” Payton recalled late last week.
“All those things, I think, build confidence and you hope to draw on those things in the postseason. Certainly that was a handful, one of a handful of games where we fell behind and battled back and were able to overcome some early mistakes.”
Caldwell has said that the Sept. 21 win over Miami set the tone for the way the Colts would play and find ways to win games over the course of the season.
Indianapolis had a league-leading seven fourth-quarter comebacks in 2009.
“I think we often preach about winning the ball game and winning it by, really, any means necessary. Sometimes it takes great effort out of your special teams. Sometimes it’s your defense stepping up and stealing a ballgame. Or sometimes it just takes your offense only getting the ball a very limited amount of time and being very, very efficient with your opportunities,” Caldwell said recently.
“That [Miami] game, in a sense, was a great one for us because of the fact that we had to come down to an area where the humidity was up a bit in comparison to what it was at home,” Caldwell said. “We were supposedly not going to do very well in that ballgame because of the problems we would face battling a very, very fine Dolphins team. And our team found a way. They fight through adversity. And I think, more so than anything else, that game really gave us a little boost early in the season. It really gave us a sense that there’s not a whole lot that can stop us if we play well.”
The weather is expected to be good for this South Florida Super Bowl — clear skies with a high in the mid 60s at game time.
