Nfl Survivors Seem To Thrive On Degradation

Let’s see. According to my handy postseason eye chart and mix-and-match, Green Bay is the Pack. New England is the Pats. Jacksonville is the Jags. That makes Carolina the what, the Pants?

Strange bunch still standing for the semifinals of the NFL’s grunt and grope. These guys are unfamiliar outside their own car pools, especially the Jags and the Pants, the Zeppo and Gummo of the group.

Are we really ready for a Super Bowl between franchises that have been around half as long as Dave Wannstedt? Justice has to be giggling behind a fake nose and mustache.

Figuring Foxboro as the home of the Patriots, these teams come from places so small they have to share the village idiot.

The last time the Packers were the pedigree of the playoffs, cheese was a health food and Vince Lombardi did not have the Super Bowl trophy named after him.

And New England? Didn’t the Bears leave that franchise for dead way down yonder in New Orleans? Who would have believed it would get another life before Mike Ditka?

This is not a Final Four as much as a Fuzzy Four, including Green Bay, which may have been expected to be in this position, but only as chumps for either Dallas or San Francisco.

Both Packers cornerback Leroy Butler and running back Edgar Bennett were saying after the mud wallow against the 49ers that the Packers would get no respect until they beat both the Cowboys and the 49ers and went to the Super Bowl.

Now the Packers have to beat the team that beat the Cowboys - meaning Carolina, not the justice system - and that is an expectation, not a vindication.

Respect is a big deal among all of these teams, and preoccupation with it is a sure sign of self-doubt and insignificance.

“We’re into degradation,” said Jacksonville defensive tackle John Jurkovic. “We play better when we are degraded.”

Don’t all teams? This is the playoffs for it. This group is a Rodney Dangerfield routine.

I tell ya, the Patriots moan about being the fourth sport in New England, but they’re the fifth. They always forget to count clamming.

The order might change, but always the Celtics, Red Sox and Bruins will come in front of football. The Patriots will have to win the Super Bowl just to get Boston’s mind off the defection of Roger Clemens.

This is a team so far out of the main NFL stream that the architect of its resurrection, Bill Parcells, shops himself around while drawing up game plans. When even the coach thinks he’s slumming, it should be a little hard for fans to warm to the team’s success.

Carolina has a similar problem, representing a vague geography and placed somewhere in the affections of their fans behind college basketball and stock car racing, no matter the national favor of ridding the playoffs of the Cowboys.

Jacksonville (Jags’nville?) is the most paranoid of the lot, a team still capable of being inspired by newspaper gags. The victory over Denver was also over the local sports columnist, who greeted them with an understandable curiosity about just exactly what carnival gave them a day pass.

No less than the Jags’ coach, Tom Coughlin, called the piece a “flagrant violation of respect,” though he did not give the appropriate hand signals for the penalty.

This is a very rigid man, by the way, whose recent reading material has been the autobiography of Colin Powell, Machiavelli and the little books of golf guru Harvey Penick.

“There is a lot about life in what he writes,” Coughlin said, meaning Penick, not the sports columnist.

I guess.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Bernie Lincicome Chicago Tribune