SEATTLE — On the other side of the country, a football team from Indiana will show off, one more time, the allegedly tried-and-true method for turning your fortunes around in the NFL. The Indianapolis Colts will take the field in Foxborough, Mass., 60 minutes from winning a berth in the Super Bowl.
And they will be there for one reason.
The same reason they’ve been in the exact same spot so often across the last decade-and-a-half, and more.
Once, it was Peyton Manning, arriving at the top of the draft after some months of hysterical-when-you-look-back-on-it drama involving him and Ryan Leaf. We will eternally debate just how great Manning is (and was), but what is undeniable is that he made the Colts annual players for the championship, winning one eight years ago, turning a franchise that had lost its way after abandoning Baltimore into a perennial power.
Now, it is Andrew Luck, arriving in the wake of a lost season when Manning’s neck turned to Maypo, another Round 1-Pick 1 who not only has lived up to his predraft hype but has delivered an early career you can match up against any other early career you would care to ponder.
Yes, that’s one way to do it.
On this side of the country (and on the other side of the field in Foxborough, too) we are reminded there is another way, too. You know the old saying, “You’d rather be lucky than good” — or the more relevant take on that saying, “You’d rather be lucky than bad”?
Maybe it isn’t all luck that Tom Brady went from 199th pick to legend. Maybe it isn’t all luck that the Packers — who already had Brett Favre readying for his Canton bust in the back-end of his prime — were the beneficiaries of whatever angst was attached to Aaron Rodgers slipping from No. 1 (where the 49ers instead selected Alex Smith) and No. 24 (where the Packers couldn’t wait to call his name).
And maybe it isn’t all luck that the Seahawks wound up picking a franchise quarterback in Russell Wilson with the 12th pick of the third round of the 2012 draft (75th overall) after they already believed they had gotten their hands on their quarterback of the future, signing Favre’s backup Matt Flynn.
But at the very least, it was great good fortune for all three.
And so Sunday afternoon, in the noisy parlor of CenturyLink Field, the Packers and the Seahawks will vie for the other bid in Super Bowl XLIX. And it’s funny: In the same way that we always make too big a deal about whether a great player is a first-ballot Hall of Famer before that argument melts away — in the end, nobody cares when you were voted in, only that you were voted in — there is always such a clamor about where a quarterback winds up on draft day.
You would think we would have learned from 1983, and Dan Marino’s famous tumble, and realize:
That’s all trivia in the end.
But we don’t learn. And so there was much angst attached to the Jets winning two late-season games, forfeiting whatever chance they had to lose their way into the No. 1 pick overall and have clear say whether they wanted to draft a quarterback with that pick — even as the words “JaMarcus Russell” serve as a warning shot to all GMs everywhere, a reminder that you don’t always pick Peyton Manning or Andrew Luck in that slot.
Maybe it’s harder this way — you do have to scout more than the obvious top candidates, you do have to hope, occasionally, that a Marino or a Rodgers starts a gravity-drop in your direction, you do have to hope some alpha dogs like Brady and Wilson are so offended by the numbers attached to their names — 199, 75 — that they commit the whole of their careers to making the people and circumstances responsible for those numbers pay.
But when you’re playing on the penultimate Sunday of the year, 60 minutes to the Super Bowl, nobody much cares where you were picked. They care about where you are now. For the Packers and the Seahawks — and, yes, the Patriots — that place is on the field, with the five Super Bowl rings between them taking their chances. That’s a good place to be. That’s the best place to be.