As we watched Curtis Painter and company almost literally give the Colts' perfect season away, we were reminded of the futility of playoff performance narratives.
That is to say that most explanations of why a team succeeded or failed in the playoffs is ridiculous, filled with hindsight-laden explanations that don't hold up. They're excuses that get applied upon failure and ignored upon success. The 2008 Steelers used their experience from the 2005 run to calm their nerves late and beat the Cardinals, but the 2006 Colts and the 2007 Giants had no more than a small handful of players that had ever participated in a Super Bowl.
Some narratives are created to explain variance. When a 14-win team loses in the second round of the playoffs after a bye, no matter what happened in the game itself, it was because they're rusty. Never mind that a team of that caliber loses to a 10-win team a fair amount of the time in the regular season. If they win, rusty doesn't come up. Teams that lose after a couple of playoff games on the road were too exhausted physically and emotionally, but when those same teams win and head onto the Super Bowl, they managed to remain healthy and happy.
What recent results have showed, though, is that the idea of momentum -- of teams "peaking at the right time" -- is a crock. The last three years provide enough fodder to kill the idea. The 2006 Colts went 2-3 in December, losing by 27 to the Jaguars and by three to a 6-10 Texans team before narrowly beating a 6-10 Dolphins team to finish the year. They went and won four straight games en route to the Super Bowl.
In 2007, the Giants supposedly picked up momentum when they played the undefeated Patriots to an extremely close game, losing by three before starting off their hot streak. That's reasonable, but it was preceded by a 3-3 stretch that saw the team lose to the Vikings by 27, the Redskins by 12, and narrowly pull out victories over mediocre teams in Detroit (six points), Chicago (five points), and Philadelphia (three points). The idea that the Giants' win over the Patriots had given them momentum didn't come until they actually made it to the Super Bowl, and their "momentum" consisted of one game.
Last year's Cardinals took the cake, though. After virtually locking up the NFC West with a 7-3 start, Arizona took the rest of the season off. Finishing 2-4, the Cardinals lost to the Giants by eight and the Eagles -- the same team they'd beat in the NFC Championship Game -- by 28. It got worse in December. Playing two playoff-caliber teams, the Cardinals lost by 21 to the Vikings and the Patriots by 40. The idea that they had momentum is absurd; time will not produce a better example of a team limping into the playoffs for decades.
Of course, the flip side of the "momentum" idea is fallacious, too; there are plenty of examples of teams sweeping December after an uneven first three months, only to disappear in the playoffs. The 2007 Redskins won their final four games after burying Sean Taylor, pushing them into the playoffs after a 5-7 start, but got annihilated in Seattle when Todd Collins started throwing interceptions. Last year's Chargers went 4-0 in December to sneak into the playoffs, and beat the Colts with a great performance at home in the Wild Card round, but were summarily dispatched in Pittsburgh a week later. The Falcons finished 5-1, winning their final three, and lost to the Cardinals in the Wild Card round. The Dolphins did them one better -- going 5-0 to end the year, and 9-1 overall -- and got stomped, 27-9, by the Ravens in the Wild Card round. These are the most recent of many such examples in the past.
The point of all this is that what happened in December doesn't mean squat once the playoffs roll around. Each year, fans and media alike try and parse meaning out of small samples and natural variance. How many people get excited for the first preseason game of the year? By the time Week 1 of the regular season rolls around, only a month later, the preseason's been totally forgotten about. While the Colts lost their chance at an undefeated season, their decision to rest their stars won't have any effect on when they're "peaking" or their momentum heading into the playoffs.
Bottom line: Teams win in the playoffs because they play well and breaks go their way, the same way they do in the regular season. And if teams really can peak, the right time to peak isn't the end of December. It's the end of January.
