Sunday, February 27, 2011

FDH Fantasy Newsletter: Volume IV, Issue VIII

By Rick Morris

For the most part, we keep our fantasy content on our fantasy website and fantasy blog and keep this site for content on all subjects. It allows our readers to find specific content more easily that way. However, it has come to our attention that because our new fantasy sports newsletter is published on the older Blogger platform that our readers may be limited in their ability to subscribe to it. There does not appear to be a way to have content on the FantasyDrafthelp.com blog forwarded to an aggregate news reader -- however, we know that we have that ability here. So we will link to that newsletter each week right here when it is published. Here is this week’s newsletter.

Monday, February 21, 2011

FDH Lounge #136: February 22, 2011

By Rick Morris

THE FDH LOUNGE (Tuesdays, 7-10 PM EST on SportsTalkNetwork.com) always brings the variety, but some weeks more than others. This is one of those weeks.

After The Opening Statements of The FDH Lounge Dignitaries and This Week in The FDH Lounge, we bring a very special guest in-studio: international checkers champion Richard Beckwith. Last October, he fought a great match for the Go As You Please (GAYP) championship of the world. He has won the US championship for that classification previously. He has played all over the world, from Barbados to Beijing and many points in-between. Additionally, he is the player representative for the American Checker Federation and is involved administratively in the world’s top events. In addition to learning about his path as a master of the game, he will also be telling us about the new independent film chronicling the big international tournaments called King Me. The movie is expected to be launched at one of the big international film festivals. We’ll end the segment on a light note as Richard decimates The Lounge’s own Rick Morris in record time in a checkers game in front of the brand-new HD cameras in the Sports Talk Network studios.

From there, we announce the results of The FDH Lounge’s Worst President Ever balloting, our oddly-appropriate salute to President’s Day. Our on-air and off-air show contributors weighed a vast array of criteria and submitted votes that were tallied accordingly. So one day after America salutes Washington and Lincoln, we “recognize” their counterparts.

Slightly into Hour Two, we bring back for his third appearance our pal, Truth in Government activist/leader Joe DioGuardi. He is a former New York congressman (the first practicing CPA to make it to Congress and one of the accountants who participated in the financial rescue of New York City in the mid-1970s) just coming off of a run for the US Senate and with all of the headlines from Madison, Wisconsin to D.C. these days, it’s very timely for him to share his perspectives on how this country has to get a grip on the spiraling national debt problem. He is supremely passionate about this issue, so if you can take the truth about where this country is going, nobody can break it down more clearly than him.

Coming up next, Entertainment Weekly Senior Writer Dave Karger delivers a definitive preview on Sunday night’s Oscars. There are a great many nuances to what might happen at this year’s Academy Awards and Dave will help us cover all of the most important angles. After Dave, we welcome in USA Today TV sports/sports business columnist Michael McCarthy for a look at the potential upcoming labor stoppages in sports and the other top hot-button stories of the day.

Then, THE FANTASY DRAFTHELP.COM INSIDER closes out the show with our final fantasy football notes for 2010.

As always, we urge you to watch the show live (or listen if you’re on dial-up), but if you can’t catch this as it’s happening, you can always catch the FDH archives 24-7 right here or catch us on iTunes. Also, you can sample THE FDH LOUNGE VAULT, a compilation of our best interviews and roundtables, now every weeknight from 6-7 PM, also on SportsTalkNetwork.com.

FDH Fantasy Newsletter: Volume IV, Issue VII

By Rick Morris

For the most part, we keep our fantasy content on our fantasy website and fantasy blog and keep this site for content on all subjects. It allows our readers to find specific content more easily that way. However, it has come to our attention that because our new fantasy sports newsletter is published on the older Blogger platform that our readers may be limited in their ability to subscribe to it. There does not appear to be a way to have content on the FantasyDrafthelp.com blog forwarded to an aggregate news reader -- however, we know that we have that ability here. So we will link to that newsletter each week right here when it is published. Here is this week’s newsletter.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Daytona 500 Surround

By Rick Morris

Welcome to The FDH Lounge and 21st Century Media Alliance coverage today with Daytona 500 Surround, your as-it-happens guide to everything going on with the big race as it happens. As has been the case previously, even when our liveblog is listed as being in “Standby,” it is still being constantly updated. Enjoy!

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

FDH Lounge #135: February 15, 2011

By Rick Morris

THE FDH LOUNGE (Tuesdays, 7-10 PM EST on SportsTalkNetwork.com) brightens up the dark days of winter with another characteristic sterling delivery of variety.

After The Opening Statements of The FDH Lounge Dignitaries and This Week in The FDH Lounge, we check in with one of our favorites that we have highlighted as The FDH Lounge Spotlight Website of the Week: ThisIsWhyYoureFat.com. It had been knocked offline for some time and fortunately, ThisIsWhyYoureHuge.com was able to fill the void, but now the world can enjoy the gross majesty of both sites trying to outdo one another with tasty culinary disgraces.

From there, we nimbly transition into a talk with our pal Russ Cohen of Sportsology and Hockeyology as he delivers a preview of the NHL trade deadline and stretch run of the season.

The top of Hour Two brings us another prominent media figure with, coincidentally, the same surname (the 13th most popular in Ireland and shockingly, not in the top 100 in America), Phillies TV broadcaster Tom McCarthy. The team he covers could be the biggest story of the summer of 2011 as the startling offseason signing of Cliff Lee gives them four potentially legitimate Cy Young candidates and we will dissect how the National League’s best team since the 1990s Atlanta Braves stacks up in pursuit of their fourth consecutive NLCS berth, their third World Series berth in four years and their second world championship in four years.

We then make a seamless segue into our Seventh Inning Slouch segment as we manage to wheel out some of our biggest FDH baseball experts – Original FDH Lounge Dignitaries Nate Noy and Tim Foust, along with an analyst who has talked baseball on-air with FDH for many years in Ken Detwiler – as we take a look at the MLB landscape as pitchers and catchers report. Our biggest focus will be the offseason moves that changed the landscape most significantly since our previous breakdown at the end of last season.

We wrap up as always with THE FANTASY DRAFTHELP.COM INSIDER and our dissection of FANTASY NASCAR DRAFTOLOGY 2011, the only guide you need this year for your fantasy and non-fantasy stock car needs. It includes the results of the mock draft we conducted on last week’s show. We’ll examine the developments at Speedweeks in Daytona as the big race starts the season on Sunday.

As always, we urge you to watch the show live (or listen if you’re on dial-up), but if you can’t catch this as it’s happening, you can always catch the FDH archives 24-7 right here or catch us on iTunes. Also, you can sample THE FDH LOUNGE VAULT, a compilation of our best interviews and roundtables, now every weeknight from 6-7 PM, also on SportsTalkNetwork.com.

Sunday, February 13, 2011

The FDH Lounge crowns the worst president ever

By Rick Morris

We at The FDH Lounge love to take non-traditional angles on different subjects. It’s all about being creative, yo.

Having said that, with President’s Day upcoming here in the US of A, we are conducting a segment on Episode #136 of THE FDH LOUNGE web TV program on SportsTalkNetwork.com Tuesday, February 22 – the day after President’s Day. The subject? Crowning the worst president in American history.

Some of our valued show contributors will be ranking the following nine presidents – and adding one of their own as a “write-in” to complete a list of the ten worst presidents of all time. In alphabetical order, here’s the nine presidents on our ballot with a hit parade of their lowlights (keeping in mind that they can be ranked in any order along with the write-in that each balloter will submit):

James Buchanan – rendered the Civil War inevitable by refusing to act to prevent secession.

George W. Bush – fractured post-9/11 policy consensus with war of choice in Iraq, presided over weakest economic expansion in decades, massive unfunded Medicare expansion, Hurricane Katrina mismanagement, doubling of national debt, worst economic crash since the Great Depression and federal bailouts to combat it.

Jimmy Carter – Iranian hostage crisis, explosion of the “misery index” (unemployment plus inflation), finalizing the Panama Canal giveaway, acceptance of anti-American revolutions in Iran and Nicaragua, lack of concrete moves against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Millard Fillmore – Compromise of 1850 that expanded slavery, the harsh Fugitive Slave Act, started move towards foreign adventurism in Hawaii, endorsed the Know Nothing movement by joining it.

Herbert Hoover – publicly supported Prohibition while secretly imbibing, Smoot-Hawley Tariff that helped bring about the Great Depression, raised other taxes dramatically in early days of Great Depression, started the undermining of the Tenth Amendment with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

Andrew Johnson – impeached for undermining the rationale of the Civil War by cozying up to the Confederacy with the Black Codes.

Richard Nixon – Watergate, wage & price controls, move off of the gold standard that allowed the rampant inflation of the 1970s, first gas crisis of the 1970s.

Franklin Pierce – expanded slavery in the West with the Kansas-Missouri Act, military adventurism to take Cuba from Spain and extend slavery with the Ostend Manifesto.

Warren Harding – presided over almost unprecedented corruption with Teapot Dome.

The link for each prez takes you to Wikipedia for a fuller account of the background of each administration.

The list of nine presidents was compiled by consulting a number of historical sources, including rankings by historians – with the latter factor certainly being suspect in terms of weighing too heavily due to the leftist nature of many professional historians. Additionally, I expect some heat from some of my Republican friends about including George W. Bush on the ballot and leaving off Barack Obama; I can only say that personally, my ballot MAY even have Obama higher on the list as a write-in – stay tuned! But in my capacity as a more or less neutral arbiter in terms of compiling the ballot, placing Obama on the list and/or omitting Bush would have reeked of the kind of partisanship that would have made even Sean Hannity blush.

I look forward to tallying the results as they come in and running through the results with our panel on Tuesday, February 22.

NBA power rankings for mid-February

By Rick Morris

NOTE: Rankings for start of February in parentheses.

TOP TIER

1 San Antonio (1)

SECOND TIER

2 Miami (3)

3 Boston (2)

4 Los Angeles Lakers (6)

5 Chicago (4)

6 Dallas (5)

7 Oklahoma City (7)

8 Atlanta (8)

9 New Orleans (9)

10 Orlando (10)

THIRD TIER

11 Denver (11)

12 Utah (12)

13 Portland (14)

14 Memphis (13)

15 New York (15)

16 Phoenix (17)

17 Philadelphia (16)

18 Houston (18)

19 Indiana (21)

20 Charlotte (19)

21 Golden State (20)

FOURTH TIER

22 Milwaukee (23)

23 Detroit (24)

24 Los Angeles Clippers (22)

FIFTH TIER

25 New Jersey (25)

SIXTH TIER

26 Washington (27)

27 Toronto (26)

28 Minnesota (29)

29 Sacramento (28)

SEVENTH TIER

30 Cleveland (30)

BIGGEST RISERS: none more than three spots

BIGGEST FALLERS: none more than three spots

RANKINGS BY DIVISION – 1 POINT PER RANKING SPOT FOR EACH INDIVIDUAL TEAM, LOWEST SCORE IS BEST

1 Southwest (46)

2 Southeast (66)

3 Northwest (71)

4 Atlantic (84)

5 Pacific (94)

6 Central (99)

RANKINGS BY CONFERENCE

1 West (211)

2 East (249)

NHL power rankings for mid-February

By Rick Morris

NOTE: Rankings from start of February are in parentheses.

TOP TIER

1 Vancouver (1)

2 Philadelphia (2)

3 Tampa Bay (4)

4 Detroit (5)

SECOND TIER

5 Pittsburgh (3)

6 Boston (6)

7 Dallas (7)

8 Washington (8)

9 Nashville (11)

10 Montreal (9)

11 Phoenix (16)

12 San Jose (10)

13 Anaheim (14)

14 Minnesota (13)

15 Los Angeles (15)

16 Calgary (18)

17 Chicago (17)

18 New York Rangers (12)

19 Atlanta (19)

20 Carolina (20)

21 Columbus (22)

22 Buffalo (25)

23 St. Louis (23)

24 Colorado (21)

THIRD TIER

25 Florida (24)

26 Toronto (26)

FOURTH TIER

27 New Jersey (28)

28 New York Islanders (29)

29 Ottawa (27)

30 Edmonton (30)

BIGGEST RISERS: Phoenix (5 spots), Buffalo (3 spots)

BIGGEST FALLERS: New York Rangers (6 spots), Colorado (3 spots)

RANKINGS BY DIVISION – 1 POINT PER RANKING SPOT FOR EACH INDIVIDUAL TEAM, LOWEST SCORE IS BEST

1 Pacific (58)

2 Central (74)

3 Southeast (75)

4 Atlantic (80)

5 Northwest (85)

6 Northeast (93)

RANKINGS BY CONFERENCE

1 West 217

2 East 248

FDH Fantasy Newsletter: Volume IV, Issue VI

By Rick Morris

For the most part, we keep our fantasy content on our fantasy website and fantasy blog and keep this site for content on all subjects. It allows our readers to find specific content more easily that way. However, it has come to our attention that because our new fantasy sports newsletter is published on the older Blogger platform that our readers may be limited in their ability to subscribe to it. There does not appear to be a way to have content on the FantasyDrafthelp.com blog forwarded to an aggregate news reader -- however, we know that we have that ability here. So we will link to that newsletter each week right here when it is published. Here is this week’s newsletter.

Friday, February 11, 2011

Video Clips: Fun Timewasters

By Rick Morris

From time to time, we like to put up some video collections on the site just for general entertainment purposes. Enjoy!

The most memorable sports moments of the 20th century

Bud Light clothing drive

Opie and Anthony discuss the vuvuzela

Mr. Leonard from the Buzzard Morning Zoo at WMMS in Cleveland circa 1985

The outstanding “Sunny” mascot summit between Greenman and the Phillie Phanatic (onetime Lounge guest!)

Mean Gene Okerlund as you’ve NEVER seen him before:

ESPN SportsNation’s Michelle Beadle and Colin Cowherd vs. the Beastie Boys on NBA Jam

Watch some dude get himself fired

One of the greatest comics of all time, Richard Jeni

Charles Manson on The Apprentice???

Fantasy NASCAR Draftology 2011

By Rick Morris

Our big annual draft guide Fantasy NASCAR Draftology 2011 has now been released! The features are truly outstanding, including:

^ The FDH Draft Board, with additional notes from FDH Chief NASCAR Correspondent Mike Ptak

^ Overvalued and Undervalued Drivers of 2011

^ Breakout Drivers of 2011

^ Don’t Be That Guy

^ Suggested League Guidelines

^ 2011 Press Pass Racing Cards Overview

Download it now, enjoy it for the fantasy and non-fantasy content and dominate your league in 2011!

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

FDH Lounge #134: February 8, 2011

By Rick Morris

THE FDH LOUNGE (Tuesdays, 7-10 PM EST on SportsTalkNetwork.com) has another episode coming your way crammed with chracteristic variety the way that nobody else can bring it.

After The Opening Statements of The FDH Lounge Dignitaries and This Week in The FDH Lounge, we revisit the off-the-field aspects of a chaotic Super Bowl week in icy North Dallas before bringing in one of our favorite football analysts, Ken Palmer of Giants Insider and Pigskin Insider for a definitive Super Bowl breakdown.

Coincidentally, our next guest also hails from the New York corridor as we bring on one of sports’ most noted catchphrase artists, Yankee radio play-by-play broadcaster John Sterling. Our next guest makes his return from almost a year ago (Episode #92 on February 24, 2010): one of the world’s foremost iPhone and iPad authorities, Alex Cone. His work in developing mobile apps at CodeFab is very innovative and his status as iPhone Boot Camp instructor speaks to his credentials as nothing else can.

We start Hour Three by following up on our announcement of two weeks ago about our FDH Lounge Ultimate Anthology – that makes available on the STN site and our iTunes page a hugely-expanded collection of our greatest segments – by reprising our conversation with Art Schlichter from Episode #118 last October 6. Now that he is back in the news for an apparent reprise of his gambling addiction and an operation created to facilitate the gambling, it’s worth taking a look back at what he had to say about the lessons learned that he recapped in his book – while he was already apparently off the wagon. As strange as it may sound under the circumstances, we do believe that the interview will show a real sincerity about the evils of addiction and his determination to fight them and help other people fight them.

We wrap up as always with THE FANTASY DRAFTHELP.COM INSIDER and our 2011 NASCAR fantasy mock draft. Our draft guide FANTASY NASCAR DRAFTOLOGY 2011 is coming within the week and in the meantime, we have our rankings online on our fantasy sports blog.

As always, we urge you to watch the show live (or listen if you’re on dial-up), but if you can’t catch this as it’s happening, you can always catch the FDH archives 24-7 right here or catch us on iTunes. Also, you can sample THE FDH LOUNGE VAULT, a compilation of our best interviews and roundtables, now every weeknight from 6-7 PM, also on SportsTalkNetwork.com.

Monday, February 7, 2011

FDH Fantasy Newsletter: Volume IV, Issue V

By Rick Morris

For the most part, we keep our fantasy content on our fantasy website and fantasy blog and keep this site for content on all subjects. It allows our readers to find specific content more easily that way. However, it has come to our attention that because our new fantasy sports newsletter is published on the older Blogger platform that our readers may be limited in their ability to subscribe to it. There does not appear to be a way to have content on the FantasyDrafthelp.com blog forwarded to an aggregate news reader -- however, we know that we have that ability here. So we will link to that newsletter each week right here when it is published. Here is this week’s newsletter.

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Super Bowl Surround

By Rick Morris

The 21st Century Media Alliance presents Super Bowl Surround, with on-the-ground coverage aggregated from a variety of outside media sources via Twitter. Today's presentation marks our 19th effort on the pro side.

PLEASE NOTE: While the Cover It Live software may classify the liveblog as being in "Standby," it is continuously updating from a variety of sources, averaging several entries per minute during the height of the day's action. You need only to click the play button to view the continuous updates and follow what has already been posted at any time. We hope you enjoy.

Super Bowl preview

By Rick Morris

As is tradition for this column, let’s start with some great links to accompany it:

Here is our column with a host of Super Bowl notes and oddities.

Here is the NFL GameCenter link – it will update during the game continuously and it has plenty of statistical and other incredible preview material.

Here’s the NFL’s Super Bowl history sub-site.

Here’s the ESPN Super Bowl blog.

SI’s Don Banks gives five reasons Green Bay will win (from his lips to God’s ears!).

SI’s Jim Trotter gives five reasons Pittsburgh win (BOOOO!).

SI’s Peter King gives an extensive profile of what he says could be the best Super Bowl ever.

Joe Posnanski postulates that the Steelers’ reported transformation into becoming a “passing team” has been overstated.

Football Outsiders gives a very detailed breakdown of the Xs and Os.

NFL Gridiron Gab delivers the five keys to victory for each team.

As tradition dictates, here’s your full list of celebrity picks for the game.

SI’s experts all make their picks.

By now, every major angle relating to the participants has been chewed over extensively in the media. Here are the most interesting ones:

^ The collective history of the two franchises is immense, potentially the greatest such combined amount in the history of the Super Bowl.

^ Dick LeBeau and Dom Capers, perhaps the game’s two finest 3-4 tacticians, are going head-to-head with a multitude of great weapons to turn loose.

^ The media has followed the template of ten years ago, when Ray Lewis’ complicity in the deaths of two young men at the previous year’s Super Bowl but was held up as a model human being once his team made the big game. Big Ben has benefited from similar velvet-glove treatment this week for having “changed.” It’s a sad-but-predictable reflection on today’s major media.

^ Speaking of Ben, he and Aaron Rodgers continue a decent run of top-flight QB matchups in the Super Bowl. The last quarterback not at a consensus upper-tier level coming into the game was Eli Manning three years ago. Roethlisberger can move very close to Hall of Fame status in the minds of many with a third Super Bowl title in his young career.

^ Both teams are dealing with difficult injuries. The Packers’ situation with an incredible NFC-leading 16 players on injured reserve (including star running back Ryan Grant and emerging super-talented tight end Jermichael Finley) is almost unfathomable – think of how much better they should be next season! But when you consider how far they’ve made it without their key contributors, it becomes apparent that the Steelers’ fewer – but more recent – losses may be even more costly. In particular, the loss of young star center Maurkice Pouncey could be devastating. That blow to an already-teetering Pittsburgh offensive line could be fatal.

^ Few if any recent Super Bowls have paired two teams who backed in quite so emphatically on Championship Sunday. It’s unusual to have two teams ending their games with the “sigh of relief” instead of shriek of euphoria.

^ However, notwithstanding the second half of their last game, the Packers are certainly the hot team of the moment, managing to become field-goal favorites despite coming into the playoffs as the #6 seed in the inferior conference. They are favored by many based on having blazed an uphill path to the big game similar to that of the Steelers five years ago and the Giants three years ago.

Speaking of those ’05 Steelers, they had Hines Ward in one WR spot, as did the subsequent Pittsburgh Super Bowl teams, but each of the three has had another man in the key spot across from him stretching the defense. In ’05, it was Antwaan Randle El, in ’08 it was Santonio Holmes and this year it is Mike Wallace. While Wallace emerged as one of the preeminent deep threats in the league this year, teams have worked to mitigate his impact in the playoffs and the superlative Green Bay secondary is going to make that a prime focus again. If Capers draws up even more of his patented blitzes to try to exploit Pouncey’s absence, it would put Wallace in man coverage; however, the flip side of this development would be Roethlisberger’s inability to chuck the ball deep to beat the blitz unless he’s in the shotgun – which he probably won’t be to a great degree.

That brings us to Pittsburgh’s run game, which was key to their win over the Jets in the AFC Championship Game. When Rashard Mendenhall is greatly effective, the Steelers are extraordinarily difficult to beat. The insertion of backup center Doug Legursky is going to be the most important element of the game, because of all the cascading effects that will flow from there.

Pittsburgh wants to control the clock to disrupt the rhythm of the red-hot Green Bay offense, which is all the more lethal on a fast track like the one in the Dallas dome. It’s a concept that has been seen previously in Super Bowls when superior offenses have been thrown out of rhythm – with Buffalo 20 years ago in Super Bowl 25 and St. Louis in Super Bowl 36 serving as excellent examples. And as hot as the Pack has been recently, keep in mind that their offense didn’t put any more points on the board after the initial first two TDs at Soldier Field two weeks ago. With Green Bay having the capacity to deliver both blitz sacks and coverage sacks (the latter due to the awesome secondary, including nickel and dime depth), Pittsburgh won’t need much persuasion to pound the ball as long as they can. Mendenhall will get the ball more than 20 times and his backup, Isaac Redman, may be a factor as well given that he averaged 4.8 YPC this season. It is in large part because of Pittsburgh’s ground capacity that they tallied 34:28 and 34:41 in time of possession in the AFC playoffs.

Given the fact that the Steelers have been almost without peer in recent years in psyching teams out of logical plans of attack, fear of Mendenhall represents the biggest path to blowing this game for Packer coach Mike McCarthy. The Packers put up 32:00, 38:19 and 34:04 in time of possession throughout the NFC playoffs and, given the fact that their run defense is the closest they have to a soft underbelly on that side of the ball, they risk preemptively hobbling their explosive passing game. The team’s Super Bowl berth is all the more incredible for not having adequately addressed the injury loss of Grant after Week 1. Brandon Jackson and John Kuhn floundered, leaving the door open for James Starks to emerge during the playoffs. He put up carry/yard totals of 23-123, 25-66 and 22-74 in the three NFC playoff games.

Even a casual observer can note from those lines that Starks was amazing in his out-of-nowhere performance against Philadelphia and extremely mortal against Atlanta and Chicago. Indeed, the Packers’ potential “choke scenario” may have been previewed at Soldier Field, as McCarthy ordered the team to pound the ball as the offense eventually faltered. Now, his strategy might have had something to do with the abysmal game conditions in Chicago that day and the “painted mud” that covered the field in many spots, but if he orders a similar strategy in the dome in lieu of letting Rodgers pick apart Pittsburgh’s mediocre secondary, he will be making an unforgivable mistake.

Sharp viewers of our web TV program THE FDH LOUNGE (Tuesdays, 7-10 PM EST on SportsTalkNetwork.com) will note that my game pick is going to be different from what I offered on last week’s show. At that time, colored a bit by my long experience as a Steeler-hating pessimist who had seen so many teams fail to attack Pittsburgh in their areas of vulnerability, I forecast a 24-20 Steeler win with Rashard Mendenhall as MVP. I believe that I threw in a mocking impression of Mike McCarthy saying, “We don’t want to score 49 points in only 20 minutes; that would be bad.” Since then, I have come around, with the Pouncey injury serving as the tipping point as I see it. I do not believe that the pass protection or run protection for Pittsburgh will be adequate to the task of imposing their will or disrupting the Green Bay offensive rhythm. While I would not rule out the Steelers coming back in a full-blown shootout against most teams (and indeed, they did prevail 37-36 in just such a game last season), the current state of the Green Bay secondary makes this most unlikely. Besides, as hard as it is to believe, no team has ever overcome a greater deficit in a Super Bowl than the 10-0 hole that Washington climbed out of in Super Bowl 22. Without the vaunted Steeler ground game presenting the potential for Mike McCarthy to psych himself out and keep Rodgers from doing what he clearly can do, riddle the outmatched Steeler secondary by spreading the field, the Packers look to complete their “Brett Who?” campaign and secure the MVP for Rodgers. Green Bay 31, Pittsburgh 20.