Titan Sized’s Take on Super Bowl XLIII

First off, we’d like to send our condolences to the Adams family after the passing of Nancy Adams last night, in Houston. Mrs. Adams was the wife of Bud for 62 years, and listed as co-owner and vice chairman to the board of the Titans.

Last night’s game offered about all anyone could want from a Super Bowl (besides a Steeler’s loss)…

• With Hines Ward banged up on Sunday, the Steelers needed someone to step up in the passing game. Santonio Holmes delivered in a big way. The third year receiver picked a great time to have his first 100 yard game of the season, and 73 of his 131 receiving yards came on the game’s winning drive. Of course the drive was capped off with maybe the most impressive catch in Super Bowl history. Infuriating.
• I don’t know what it is about Ben Roethlisberger that consistently makes me think he’s not as good as he is. Maybe it’s because for most of the season he was competing with Kyle Orton, JaMarcus Russell, Kerry Collins and Joe Flacco for the coveted 24# highest rated QB in the NFL. His numbers weren’t helped much by him getting the crap kicked out of him every game because of Pittsburgh’s JV O-Line, but he had a few stretches this year that would have gotten a lot of guys benched. With that said, he got the job done last night, and all of this year’s playoff games for that matter. You watch him scramble sometimes and wonder how he wasn’t tackled four times before throwing an ugly ball that’s good for a 30 yard completion. It looks lucky every time, but I guess I’ve seen him do it enough to think that maybe he does know what he’s doing. At least a little bit.
• Kurt Warner’s 64 yard touchdown pass to Larry Fitzgerald was a beautiful thing to watch. Usually I think of a 50+ yard passing play as being a perfectly timed “bomb” caught at the goal line, or something like that. This pass was better though. After a very slow first half, Fitzgerald was finally getting into the action, and I’m guessing that Pittsburgh was aware of this. Pittsburgh’s in the dime, Fitzgerald runs an inside route and manages to get complete separation within 6 yards of the line of scrimmage while making Pittsburgh’s safeties look very, very slow. Fitzgerald is as entertaining a receiver to watch as anyone I can remember and Warner is still as good as anyone in the league at throwing the ball to the exact spot it needs to be.
• Ken Wisenhunt used his challenges very nicely. They were probably no-brainers, but the first one reversed a Roethlisberger TD rush on the first drive of the game, and the second one overturned what had been called a Warner fumble. Speaking of Warner fumbles, I think that the officials made the right call on Warner’s fumble with :05 left on the clock, but I was kind of amazed that the booth didn’t review the play. Not the way to end a fantastic Super Bowl.
• Arizona’s defense was very solid for most of the game, especially in a couple of key goal line situations in the beginning of both halves, but they made Roethlisberger look like a hero the last drive of the game. There were also a few Big Ben passes that could/should have been Cardinals’ interceptions. Besides the missed opportunities, though, limiting the Steelers to 297 total yards, 58 rushing yards and 20 offensive points kept them in the game.
• As The Tennessean’s Jim Wyatt has pointed out already, former TSU star Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie had a rough time last night trying to cover Super Bowl MVP Santonio Holmes. He also had a costly facmeask penalty and dropped a pretty easy interception that would have been a red zone turnover. And it sounds like he felt pretty bad about it all. He’s still just a baby though, and has shown great promise at times this season. You will hear his name again down the road.
• We here at TitanSized would just like to send a little shout out the the troops overseas that stayed up late (2AM in Iraq at kickoff) to watch the Super Bowl. I hope you savored every last sip of suds that you were allowed.

Like we said a few days ago, we are working on our first mock draft of the off-season, so look for that here soon. We’ll also be closely following the Haynesworth situation (let us know what you think in our poll section), the search for a new defensive coordinator, off-season free agency and draft needs. If there is anything else you’d like to talk about (Titans related or not), drop us a line at titansized@gmail.com and we’ll discuss. Also, if you want to sign up to receive all of the latest updates from Titan Sized, you can do so by subscribing to our blog in the top right hand corner. And while we’re getting all of this shameless self-promotion out of the way, make sure you check us out on MySpace so that we can be even better virtual friends than we already are now.

Lastly, we are proud to present “Drunk History Vol. 2″… (Slightly NSFW)