Gut-check game a fat Pat will win

IN ONLY SEVEN of the first 45 Super Bowls was a defensive player chosen as the game's most valuable player. In a quarterback-centric sport, an enterprise where every rule change in anyone's memory has been designed to inflate the scoreboard totals, this does not exactly qualify as a surprise. The Big Supe is America's greatest sales vehicle, and offense sells.

To draw a defensive player in some kind of an MVP pool at a party is to set your money on fire most years. (The fairest pools would only contain the names of starting quarterbacks, running backs, wide receivers, and tight ends, everybody else on each team's offense as a single entry and each team's entire defense as a single entry. Anyway.)

This year, though, is different - not because either the Giants or the Patriots have a great and smothering defense, because they don't. It is just that the Patriots have this guy who seems ready to conjure the perfect storm for the Giants, this mountain of a defensive tackle - 6-2 and 325 pounds (ahem) - who loves nothing more than surprising people.

Or, as when he was asked this week about the thing he does that surprises people the most, Vince Wilfork said, "Probably dunk a basketball. People look at me and are like, 'He's a butterball, he can't.' "

He can.

And the Giants can't block him.

Somebody has to be the worst team ever to win the Super Bowl, and maybe it will be the Giants. At this point, who knows? If they do win, it will be a badge of honor that they will wear proudly, and maybe forever. Because they are just not very good. They didn't run the ball all year and their defense was inconsistent all year and the only reason they are bunking in Indianapolis this week is because quarterback Eli Manning had a tremendous season (and the San Francisco 49ers can't catch punts).

Manning got killed against the 49ers, repeatedly flattened, hit 20 times overall. The pressure came from everywhere, but especially from up the middle. Manning's survival skills, not screwing up in the face of that onslaught, won the game - but it was an onslaught and there was no denying it.

As Giants guard Chris Snee said this week in Indianapolis, "Yeah, it was tough, something we weren't proud of."

And this: "The trenches are important every game. Honestly, we feel that is where games are won or lost. Although, if you look at last week's game, Eli got hit quite a bit, so people might call me a liar on that part."

And Wilfork is better than anyone they have seen. He was the difference in the AFC Championship Game against the Baltimore Ravens. He is a 30-year-old guy who almost never leaves the field - very unusual for someone his size (a lot bigger than 325 pounds) playing at his position - and who gets stronger as the game goes on. His mastery in the fourth quarter against the Ravens, in run situations and passing situations, completely altered the calculus of that game.

There is every reason to believe it will happen again. It has not taken much to discourage the Giants' running game this season, and Wilfork will do that. In pass-rushing situations, he will be disruptive enough that the Patriots will be able to blitz less often than might otherwise be required, which will help their coverage, which is where they need the help.

In his eighth season, the four-time Pro Bowler seems to have grabbed onto this opportunity in a way that few are capable. He won a Super Bowl as a rookie against the Eagles at the end of the 2004 season, a puppy on a great defense. He lost to the Giants in 2007. Now, he is a man in full, a veteran in his prime, the leader of a defense that was statistically lousy this season but that has always been better than its yardage totals, a defense that has emerged in the postseason because Wilfork has dominated against both the Broncos and the Ravens.

"All of my life I've been competitive," Wilfork said during one media session in Indianapolis. "I always want to be in the middle of everything. If it's going wrong, it's going wrong, but if it's going right, it's going right and I want to be in the middle.

"All of my life, I've thought that I'm a leader, and I think leaders have to take control at some point and show the will to do whatever it takes to turn things around, whether it's bad or positive. At a young age, I always had that fight, but it's a good fight."

Sunday, it will be a winning fight.

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