by Mike Tanier

Updated: January 10, 2008, 9:59 PM EST 515 comments

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Brett Favre received just one vote in the MVP balloting, but it didn't bother him. After all, he didn't do any advertising or campaigning in Iowa or New Hampshire. The Patriots swept the awards, of course, with Tom Brady earning the MVP nod and Bill Belichick named Coach of the Year. They hope to maintain momentum until Oscar season; Matt Estrella is up for Best Cinematography.

In Indy, special-team gunner Darrell Reid upstaged Peyton Manning and company by becoming an Internet superstar. Thanks to his pulverizing tackle on Chris Henry in Week 17, friends who didn't notice his contributions to such poorly publicized events as Super Bowl XLI could download Reid and watch him loosen Henry's fillings again and again. "Yeah, it's kind of like, finally, my big break," Reid told the Indy Star. "Everybody's on the YouTube thing these days." Next up for Reid: treadmill dancing and a guest appearance on "Chad Vader: Dayshift Manager."

And in Dallas, a fearful Jerry Jones prepared for a Dolphin raid on his front office. With scouting director Jeff Ireland already packing pastel bags, Jones locked offensive coordinator Jason Garrett in a Parcells-proof bunker. Offensive assistant Tony Sparano spoke to the Dolphins about their head coaching vacancy, but no one knows how the interview went: Bill Parcells entered the room and the screen went blank, leaving the rest to our imaginations. When asked how he will handle all of the potential defections, Jones laughed maniacally and said, "Let them all go. Soon my Jones Clones will be complete!"

Jones may not need clones, Ireland, Sporano or Garrett to beat the Giants. He just needs a good copy machine.

Seahawks at Packers (Saturday, 4:30 p.m. ET, FOX)

The date was January 4, 2004. The place was Lambeau Field. The temperature at kickoff was a balmy 20 degrees, but winds of 14 miles per hour made it feel like a Pasternak novel.

The Seahawks and Packers battled back-and-forth for 60 teeth-chattering minutes. Brett Favre and Matt Hasselbeck, two West Coast-offense black belts, engineered drive after drive. Shaun Alexander and Ahman Green traded one-yard touchdown plunges. Ryan Longwell's 47-yard field goal fell short at the end of regulation, leaving the score knotted at 27. The Seahawks won the toss to start overtime. "We want the ball and we're going to score!" exclaimed an over-confident Hasselbeck.

Hey, at least he didn't say he wanted to kick to the clock.

After the two teams traded punts, Hasselbeck got the ball back on the Packers' 34-yard line and completed a few short passes. But on third-and-11, his pass to Alex Bannister was picked off by Al Harris, who raced 52 yards for a touchdown. Harris, "his long dreadlocks flapping outside his helmet in the frigid wind," according to the AP account of the game, ran right past Mike Holmgren on the way to the end zone. "I'm dying inside," Holmgren said afterward. "It hurts bad to lose this game."

Four years later, Holmgren is more philosophical about his encounters with the team he helped build into a champion in the 1990s. "It's a special place to everyone that loves football," he said of Titletown USA after his Seahawks beat the Redskins on Saturday night. "And we have our work cut out for us." Holmgren is 1-3 in Lambeau homecoming games, and this is the strongest Packers team he has dealt with since the day he resigned. To make matters worse, the Seahawks don't look ready to pull off many road upsets.

Don't let Saturday's 35-14 win against the Redskins fool you. The Seahawks crawled out to a 13-0 lead, but gave up two touchdowns early in the fourth quarter and needed a late comeback to win. They were fortunate to face an injury-riddled team with a 36-year-old scarecrow at quarterback, a sack of flour at right tackle, and a backup defensive end playing tight end. The Seahawks offense allowed the Redskins to hang around, and their secondary made some big mistakes when the pass rush wasn't harassing Todd Collins. The Seahawks must play better on both sides of the ball on Sunday, but the offense in particular must step up. Hasselbeck (nursing a hip injury) cannot afford to keep overthrowing open receivers. Alexander can't treat every tackler like an impenetrable block of granite.

Expect an atypically low-scoring game. Patrick Kerney and Julian Peterson won't have the same success against Favre as they did against Collins, but they'll get some pressure and force some vintage Favre miscues. Hasselbeck may find some open receivers, but he'll face constant pressure from the Packers' front seven, and Alexander's indifferent running style will leave the team in lots of third-and-long situations. Saturday's highs are supposed to be in the low 20s — both in points and degrees Fahrenheit.

Take the Packers, the better team with better balance, better health, and the home field advantage. They won't need Harris heroics or Hasselbeck histronics to advance to the NFC championship game.

Jaguars at Patriots (Saturday, 8 p.m. ET, CBS)

Jacksonville residents are more likely to root for a hurricane to reach the Florida panhandle than for the Tennessee Titans.

Jaguars defensive lineman Derek Landri won't find it easy to get to Tom Brady. (Jim McIsaac / Getty Images)

But on Sunday, Jaguars fans nationwide became Titans fans. If the Titans had beaten the Chargers — if they somehow punched the ball in the end zone, completed a few more passes, or made another field goal or two — then the Jaguars would be in Indy, facing a familiar foe against whom they have a puncher's chance. Unfortunately, the Titans offense flatlined, forcing the Jaguars to face the Patriots, a.k.a. Rambo, the Alien, and the Predator rolled into one.

The Jaguars are impressive. Maurice Jones-Drew, whose thighs appear to be thicker than his waist, conjures memories of the young Emmitt Smith. Jack Del Rio and his coaching staff silenced some doubters this year, and when they called "Gun Trips Left QB 40 Base" — a fancy term for "David Garrard runs like heck" — against the Steelers, it was the perfect decision for a fourth-and-short conversion that sparked a gutsy last-minute comeback. "When the call came in, I said [to himself], 'Perfect call,'" Garrard said. "I wasn't going to get stopped." The Jaguars are hard-hitting and fundamentally sound. They could beat the Packers, throw a scare into the Cowboys, and brawl the Colts to a 12-round decision.

But there is no way in heaven or earth that they will beat the Patriots.

Saturday's close victory revealed a few of the Jaguars' weaknesses. Their front four isn't what it used to be. Grady Jackson, Rob Meier and Derek Landri filled in well for injured starters Marcus Stroud and John Henderson, but Landri is a rookie and Jackson weighs about 400 pounds and devolved into flubber in the second half. The Jaguars netted some coverage sacks while Ben Roethlisberger waited for engraved invitations to throw the ball, but they didn't generate much real pressure, particularly in the second half. Offensively, the Steelers showed that Garrard will make some bad decisions in the pocket, and they proved once again that there is nothing scary about the Jaguars receiving corps.

These are minor flaws, but they will prove fatal against the Patriots. The Jaguars scored a touchdown after a long kickoff return, but the Patriots (seventh in the league in special teams DVOA) don't allow many of those. They scored seven more on an interception return, but Tom Brady is rarely intercepted. The Jaguars gave up a few long pass plays during the Steelers' comeback, including the 37-yard touchdown to Santonio Holmes. The Patriots, as you know, scored a few long touchdowns this year. Henderson may be back, but linebacker Mike Peterson is doubtful, and the Jaguars can't expect the Foxboro weather to serve as a 12th man on pass defense: temperatures at kickoff will be mild.

The Patriots are the best team in the NFL. The Jaguars match up better against them than most teams, but no team matches up well against them. We're picking the Patriots to win this week, and next week, and two weeks after that, with all due respect to their current and future opponents.

Spread-conscious readers may be eyeing up those 11 points. They're enticing, and the Jaguars may cover. But upset seekers must look elsewhere.

Chargers-Colts (Sunday, 1 p.m. ET, CBS)

When the Chargers beat the Colts 23-21 in Week 9, it wasn't the strangest game in NFL history. It wasn't even the strangest game of the year: Browns-Ravens in Week 11 takes those honors. But it was one weird, wacky game.

Peyton Manning won't be as bad Sunday as he was in Indy's regular-season loss to the Chargers, will he? (Andy Lyons / Getty Images)

The Chargers were coming off a 35-17 blowout loss to a Vikings team no one took seriously. They were 4-4 and poised to fade from the public spotlight. The Colts were coming off a battle-to-the-gun loss to their archrivals. They looked like the second-best team in the NFL. We smelled Colts blowout.

Then Peyton Manning started throwing interceptions, a half dozen in all, three of them to second-year cornerback Antonio Cromartie. The Colts allowed two kick return touchdowns and spotted the Chargers a 23-0 lead. Manning rebooted his brain, threw two touchdown passes, and cut the lead to 23-15. Early in the fourth quarter, Philip Rivers — who had already thrown two picks and completed just 13 passes all game — lost the handle after a sack, and Gary Brackett's touchdown recovery cut the score to 23-21. But the Colts couldn't convert the two-pointer, and Manning threw his final pick during their last-gasp drive. Along the way, there were other events that just aren't supposed to happen, like two missed Adam Vinatieri field goals.

It wasn't a typical game between two perennial playoff teams, but the win gave the Chargers a much-needed confidence boost. Two weeks later, they embarked on the winning streak that continued into Sunday, when they shook off a first half of offensive ennui and slugged out a 17-6 win against the Titans. The Colts took the uncharacteristically sloppy loss in stride and started a six-game winning streak of their own.

Neither team really wants to revisit the game tape from Week 9 — Cromartie and kick returner Darren Sproles are the only guys who look good — but those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, and neither team will look as bad on Sunday as they looked in early November.

The Colts are healthier now than they were in Week 9. They played that game without tight end Dallas Clark, left tackle Tony Ugoh and receiver Anthony Gonzalez. Ugoh's absence made life easy for the Chargers pass rush. With Clark and Gonzalez out (Marvin Harrison, of course, was also unavailable), Manning was forced to throw to Craphonso Thorpe and Aaron Moorehead. No wonder his performance was so craphonsy. The Colts' special teams units also improved late in the year — see Reid, Darrell — and while they're still weak, they won't spot opponents 14 points anymore.

The Chargers have also improved. Defensively, they are almost as good as they were during their 14-2 season in 2006. Offensively, they are less predictable and LaDainian Tomlinson-dependent than they were in the first half of the year. But like the Week 9 Colts, they may be missing an important weapon on Sunday if Antonio Gates can't bounce back from a toe injury. We caught a glimpse of the old Chargers offense in the first half against the Titans on Sunday — Tomlinson stuffed by hordes of single-minded defenders, Rivers stumbling around in the pocket — but Norv Turner made some adjustments at halftime that allowed Rivers to complete a few passes to guys not named Gates. Turner won the second playoff game of his career, and the Chargers won their first in over a decade, but they better restock the offensive bag of tricks this week.

So while both teams have improved over the last two months, we are left with the reality that a) the Colts have improved more and b) they were the better team in the first place. They have a great defense, which is ranked third in the league in DVOA, and their eighth-ranked run defense (led by Player of the Year Bob Sanders) can contain Tomlinson as well now as it did in Week 9. They've had a week to rest while the Chargers butted heads with the stubborn Titans. And they have a quarterback whose receivers are back and whose "interception against the Chargers" quota is full until the year 2011.

Giants at Cowboys (Sunday, 4:30 p.m. ET, FOX)

It's hard to beat a team three times in a row.

Say two teams so evenly matched that each had a 50-50 chance of winning faced off three times. The odds of one team winning three straight times is 12.5 percent, or 7-to-1. Based on those odds, the Giants seem like a five-star lock.

Of course, there's some fuzzy math at work here. The odds of winning three straight may be 7-to-1, but the odds of winning a third game once you already won two are 50 percent, or 1-to-1. And that assumes that both teams are evenly matched. The Cowboys are significantly better than the Giants, and they're at home on Sunday. Change the odds a bit, and it's easy to give the Cowboys 3-to-1 or 4-to-1 odds of winning three straight, and those odds are essentially meaningless now that the Cowboys have already done two-thirds of the dirty work.

But enough of all this math geekery. The "three times" axiom isn't about statistical principles; it's about the difficulty of coming up with new game plans after the first two work, and the challenge of exploiting an opponent's weaknesses when they know where you plan to strike. Game-planning for a hat trick is no doubt difficult, but plenty of teams have pulled off the trifecta: Since 1970, teams that swept an opponent in the regular season are 11-6 in the postseason against that same opponent.

The first two meetings proved how well the Cowboys match up against the Giants. Tony Romo and the Cowboys line can stop and/or avoid the Giants pass rush. Terrell Owens (he'll play, trust us) and the Cowboys receivers cannot be single-covered by the Giants defensive backs, limiting the amount of blitzes Giants coordinator Steve Spagnuolo can call. The Cowboys ripped off 76 points and 801 offensive yards in the first two games, and they'll pile up at least 31 more on Sunday. Eli Manning is playing the best football of his career, but he's not ready to win a shootout against an offense this good, with Jeremy Shockey hurt, on the road.

For the Giants to win, the Cowboys have to beat themselves, which is certainly possible. Wade Philips' team was flat, particularly on offense, in its last three games, scoring just 32 points and losing to two divisional opponents. "The glow formerly attached to the Cowboys has dimmed. Those days of wine and roses are mere memory. The vision of a Super Bowl-bound future, a local and national certainty not so long ago, is blurred around the edges," wrote Frank Luksa in the Dallas Morning News after the Cowboys shrugged through a 27-6 loss to the Redskins two weeks ago. The Cowboys had little to play for in the final weeks, but their lack of passion and execution was cause for legitimate concern. Wade Philips' laid-back style may have spread to the field in those last near-meaningless games. If he doesn't get the hot poker out for Sunday, the Cowboys might get ambushed.

Still, we've seen all of this before: a great team that goes stale down the stretch, a good team that wins a playoff game and goes to the next round on a perceived hot streak. There's a reason the great team had the luxury to phone in their last games and take a week off: They're great. There are some cautionary tales (the 1996 Broncos), but most teams of the Cowboys' caliber answer the alarm in the playoffs and swat aside the opponents they are supposed to beat, no matter how many times they faced them in the regular season. Take the Cowboys and lay the points.

Yes, we picked chalk this week: four home favorites. And they said this job would be difficult.