Al Michaels On Felger & Mazz: No Way To Predict Patriots-Ravens
Legendary broadcaster Al Michaels will have the television play-by-play call for this weekend's divisional round matchup between the Patriots and Ravens, and he took some time to talk with Felger & Massarotti in advance of the game.
Before getting to this particular game, Felger & Mazz had a bit of a bone to pick with Mr. Michaels. You might remember during the Sunday night game against Cincinnati earlier this year, Michaels and his partner Cris Collinsworth spent much of the broadcast laughing at those in the media who had made sweeping statements about the Patriots, the most ludicrous of which was "Tom Brady is done and it's time to move on to Jimmy Garoppolo."
Michaels said his 50 years covering sports gave him the insight that things weren't quite so bad for Brady and the Patriots.
"I've been doing this a long, long time and I've done a lot of different sports -- I've seen some overreactions to things," Michaels calmly explained. "And all I could think about is once in a while a team is going to play a really horrible game. A really good team was going to play a really terrible game, and that was the game that the Patriots played against Kansas City. But I didn't see that as the forerunner to anything. I'll never forget the Super Bowl year the 49ers had in 1994, when they went on to beat San Diego, they won the Super Bowl for the fifth time at that particular point. And they had lost a game in the middle of the season to Philadelphia in Candlestick Park by a score of 40-8. And everybody was going crazy: 'Oh, Steve Young is finished! This team is terrible! We told you George Seifert's not a good coach!'
"Well, it was always an aberration. It doesn't matter what it is. ... Every once in a while, you have this crazy thing that happens in the middle of the season, and that's the way I really looked at that Kansas City-New England game. It was a great night for Kansas City, they did everything right, the crowd's going crazy, the Patriots probably said, 'OK, it's probably time to just fly home and get ready for the rest of the year. And you know what happened from that point on, they went on a seven-game winning streak."
As for his perspective, Michaels reiterated, "I guess maybe it's just a case of being around long enough."
"Of course Tom Brady's not going to play until he's 73 years old. But he still looks pretty good to me," Michaels continued. "I mean, all of a sudden just because he doesn't have a not particularly good month, does that mean that Garoppolo gets to start in Week 5? I just didn't see it that way. I just think that things need to be tempered a little bit. Everybody is looking for a story, everybody wants to say they're on the inside. All I know is how this is played out. The Patriots, according to some, were a mess, and the next thing you know they go from 2-2 to 9-2."
Moving on to this particular game, Michaels said the fact that the Ravens have beaten the Patriots in the playoffs in recent years won't mean much, because so many of the players involved in those prior meetings are no longer on the respective teams.
"To me, there is a commonality, but then again a lot of it to me is aberrational. It's kind of a random deal," Michaels said. "And frankly, guys, this is why we love sports. We can mull this over all week, we can look at it from 18 gazillion angles, we can talk about all of the double A gap blitzes and setting the edges that we want to, but then all of a sudden as my old broadcast partner John Madden used to say, 'You know what? A game breaks out.' And that's why we love it, because we don't know what's going to happen in the game."
The conversation went on to compare the national perspective on the Patriots compared to the Ravens, and then Felger couldn't help but ask Michaels about his Miracle On Ice call from Lake Placid in the 1980 Olympics. Listen below -- and try not to get chills during the famous call!
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