NFL – Ultimate Super Bowl Road Warriors

ROAD WARRIORS AND THE SUPER BOWL

You battle it out all season so you can have the opportunity to host playoff games. Obviously it is important for teams to play their most critical games at home, and that has proven to be a formula for success, at least in the won-lost category. If a team has been lucky enough to get to the championship round in its conference playoffs, they advance to the Super Bowl 67% of the time, and are a 58% proposition to cover.

In the NFL, it is considered pointspread "death" to play on the road three weeks in a row. So imagine doing that against the best teams available in order to get to a Super Bowl.

If the New York Jets go on to win the Super Bowl, it will complete and incredible odyssey that is pretty rare in the NFL. In fact, since the merger took effect in 1970, there have been only two "wild card" teams who have won exclusively away from home en route to capturing the Lombardi Trophy, and in each case those teams won three legitimate road games.

The 1975 Dallas Cowboys came into the playoffs as a wild card, and defeated the Vikings at Bloomington, then the Rams at Los Angeles, before losing to the Pittsburgh Steelers in Super Bowl X. Ten years later the New England Patriots became the only third place team to make it to the Super Bowl, beating the Jets, Raiders and Dolphins on the road along the way before getting starched by the Chicago Bears 46-10 in Super Bowl XX.

Those were cases were the teams almost finished the job. It was not until the 2005 Pittsburgh Steelers, quarterbacked by Ben Roethlisberger, that a team made it from the wild card ranks and won three straight road games in the playoffs AND traveled the Super Bowl and won it. Pittsburgh didn’t leave a lot of room for doubt either, scoring wins at Cincinnati by 14 points and at Denver by 17, sandwiched around the dramatic 21-18 win over the Colts at the RCA Dome.

In that game, they beat back a furious Indianapolis rally, with some anxious moments at the end, sweating out a missed Mike Vanderjagt field goal attempt with 18 seconds to go. They went on to beat Seattle 21-10 in Super Bowl XL at Ford Field in Detroit. Along the way the Steelers beat three coaches who had or would win a Super Bowl – Tony Dungy, Mike Shanahan and Mike Holmgren.

For my money, however, the all-time road warriors to go all the way were the New York Giants of 2007, who finished second in the NFC East and were just coming off that thrilling loss to the New England Patriots to end the regular season.

As the Giants embarked upon their playoff journey, what a lot of people had discounted was that they had won and covered their last six road games. With mental toughness like that, they were absolutely not intimidated in traveling to beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the wild card round, then the NFC East champion Dallas Cowboys in the divisional round. The road to the Super Bowl led through the Green Bay Packers which was a win in overtime in one of the coldest games in NFL history – and as it turned out, the last game Brett Favre would play for the Packers. On top of that, the Giants beat the undefeated Patriots in the rematch at University of Phoenix Stadium. At the end, the Giants had won and covered nine straight games as the visiting team.

The Jets, who finished the year at 9-7 and may not have gotten to the post-season had the Bengals and Colts not rolled over for them to close the regular season, have now scored wins at Cincinnati and at San Diego, breaking up the Chargers’ eleven-game winning streak. They will now have to go to Indianapolis and play a team that had a legitimate chance to go undefeated. if they get through all that, it’s on to Miami, which has been enemy territory for this team in the past. If this "team of destiny" survives through all that and wins the Big Game, Rex Ryan’s statements – that his team should be the one favored to win it all – should go down in history right alongside Joe Namath’s "guarantee" if that happens. I’ll tell you one thing – such a trek might make for the most spectacular "road warrior" run of them all!

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