Wade Phillips pulls a "Leinart"

Sorry for so much NFL stuff lately. I'm not a recruiting wiz, and this is the only football actually being played. This actually has something to do with college football, and you'll find out why right... now.

Said Matt Leinart following the 2006 Rose Bowl loss to Texas: "I still think we're a better football team. They just made the plays in the end."

Said Wade Phillips following the 2008 Divisional Playoff Game loss to the Giants: "Very disappointing ending to a very good year. After watching the tape, I feel like the best team lost the game, we outplayed them and we lost. Some of that goes to the coach I accept that."

Right, so according to Leinart and Phillips, wins and losses don't dictate how good a team is? If a team can only be the "better team" for 59 minutes, they're not the better team. But that's not even my real point here. I don't know if he was in the same stadium as the Cowboys and Giants. I swear I was watching Fox5 Sunday, because he saw a completely different game. The Cowboys were hardly the better team Sunday, and definately did not "outplay them." If a team outplays the other, then that's called WINNING. However, if you look up that word in the Phillips & Leinart Dictionary, it's spelled "W-H-I-N-I-N-G."

I hate losing, and will be the first to start bitching about what my team did to lose, or the other team did to win. But, I'm never one for moral victories. And in this case, a moral victory should be considered pathetic. In this case, the term moral victory should never even come up. I know, Phillips never said that, but he came accross as if he wanted sympathy for his team (not himself), acting like they should get credit for playing like crap for three hours. The only time a team should be praised for playing a hell of a game, and come up short, is if that team is as pathetic as the Miami Dolphins or the Stanford Cardinal. Oh wait, even Stanford beat USC.

But in Phillips' case, it wasn't even like his team played a better game than the Giants. What I saw from the Giants was a team playing as such, with a heart bigger than their long list of injured players. I saw a Giants team that played as if they wanted to win, and they did just that. What I saw from Dallas was a team that thought they could cruise to a win, because they "should" win that game. I saw a Dallas team that had its players bickering and calling each other out after each play, and a team that felt "well, the other team can't hang on forever, we'll just wait for them to give up." The other team didn't. Unless that other team was Dallas.

I promise I'll have something juicy on college football later today.