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MIAMI -- Darren Sharper played in the Super Bowl as a rookie in 1997 -- “and I figured I would be back many, many times,” he said.

“Many” turned out to be once and it came 13 seasons later. But finally, the former Green Bay and Minnesota safety can call himself a Super Bowl champion after New Orleans’ 31-17 victory Sunday night over Indianapolis.

“It feels great,” Sharper said. “This is what all the work is for, to get to this point. This is why you hang around for 13 years after making it to this game as a rookie, to win this game. I’m going to make sure I enjoy this.”

Sharper’s contract expires after this season, but at 34, he appears to have every intention of playing in 2010. All he would say about his future is this: “I don’t think I have another 13 years left in me.”

I have a feeling he has at least one more.

MIAMI -- Of this, there was little doubt: New Orleans brought a smart and fast defense to Miami. Here was the problem as Super Bowl XLIV approached: Indianapolis quarterback Peyton Manning was smarter and faster.

(That’s what a few of us thought, anyway.)

And so it was fascinating to watch Sunday night’s game turn when a 23-year-old Saints cornerback outsmarted Manning late in the fourth quarter. Tracy Porter said he knew “immediately” that the Colts were running one of their “bread and butter” 3rd-down plays with 3 minutes, 24 seconds left in the game. Porter stepped in front of receiver Reggie Wayne, intercepted Manning’s pass and returned it 74 yards for a touchdown. The play accounted for the final margin of the Saints’ 31-17 victory.

“I saw it over and over on film the past two weeks,” Porter said. “On third down, the route they ran there was always big for them to convert third downs on. Through numerous amounts of film study we’ve done all week, when the route came, it felt like I was watching it on film. When I saw the ball coming, I knew I was going to be in the end zone.”

The play capped another high-risk, high-reward performance by the Saints defense, one in which they gave up 432 yards but only one score after the first quarter. Defensive coordinator Gregg Williams mixed versions of the 4-3 and 3-4 in a calculating way that I’ll detail in a bit

Before examining Williams’ successful game plan, however, let’s take a closer look at the play that won New Orleans its first championship. Remember, Wayne would have had an easy first down at the Saints’ 26-yard line in a one-score game had Porter not made the interception.

If anything, Saints players and coaches seemed surprised at how predictable the Colts were on the crucial play. Manning and offensive coordinator Tom Moore are known for prescient late-game play calling, but multiple Saints defenders identified the route tree before the snap.

“I can tell now that Tracy pays attention in the film room,” safety Darren Sharper said. “Because he read that play well and trusted his instincts.”

Before the snap, Porter noticed receiver Austin Collie as the outside receiver and Wayne in the slot position. “We knew Collie wasn’t normally a guy they liked in that spot,” Porter said.

In previous instances of that formation, Porter said, Collie had gone into late motion and run the slot position’s route. The slot man, in turn, ran what’s known as a “stick route” -- essentially a 6-yard pattern designed to reach the yardage “stick” and convert a first down.

On cue, Wayne ran that route. He had no chance to make the catch.

“It was just a great play by Porter,” Manning said. “That’s all I can really say about it.”

Indeed, everything about the Saints’ defense on that play suggested a stick route would work. Williams blitzed all three linebackers, leaving open the underneath for what should have been an easy conversion. Who would expect a young cornerback, even one who intercepted Minnesota’s Brett Favre late in the fourth quarter in the NFC Championship Game, to take the risk of jumping a route? Had he missed the ball or guessed wrong, Wayne might have scored.

If you watched the Saints’ defense all year, however, it probably wasn’t a surprise. New Orleans ranked second in the NFL with 39 takeaways, a number you don’t normally achieve if you simply sit back in coverage. Williams, in fact, said he has encouraged his players “to be aggressive, to take chances and to jump routes from the first day I got here.”

Williams added: “If you’re afraid to jump routes, if you’re not willing to play aggressively that way, you’re not going to make it.”

Williams took his own calculated risk Sunday, holding back his trademark blitz packages until the fourth quarter. He employed a 3-4 defense in the first quarter, switched to a 4-3 scheme in the second quarter and then mixed those two fronts with a 3-3 nickel scheme.

“Peyton Manning is too smart to just do the same thing the entire game,” Williams said. “We knew we needed a first half game plan and a second half game plan. And if we could split it between quarters, we would do that too. If you keep doing the same thing against him, he’ll pick you apart.

“But we also said this: If we got to a close game at the end of the Super Bowl, we were going to be who we are. And that’s a pressure defense.”

The blitz didn’t get to Manning on the Porter play. “We had it blocked up fine,” Colts center Jeff Saturday said.

But to me, the triple-linebacker blitz was the reason Manning was so quick to throw in Wayne’s direction -- and play right into Porter’s hands.

“He’s so smart that he’ll figure you out if you stay stagnant as a defense,” Sharper said. “We showed something in the first half and then did something different in the second. That’s what we practiced for the past two weeks. I think by the fourth quarter, we did confuse him a little.”

Ultimately, the Saints did what they had done to Arizona and Minnesota in previous weeks -- limit scoring through turnovers despite giving up massive yardage totals. The Cardinals rolled up 359 yards but only 14 points thanks to a pair of turnovers. The Vikings scored 28 points but committed five turnovers amid their 475-yard effort.

“Everybody wanted to predict and say this and say that,” Sharper said. “But we took it personally that everyone believed Peyton was going to dice us up and that it was going to be a scoring fest. To hold an offense like that to 17 points is a testament to our team.”

And, as much as anything, its intelligence. The Saints outsmarted Peyton Manning. Who would have predicted that?

MIAMI -- Just took a walk around the perimeter of Sun Life Stadium. The weather is beautiful but right now it’s pretty windy. Forecasts called for gusts of up to 20 miles per hour, and I can tell you first-hand it’s awfully gusty right now.

Who do you think has the kicking advantage in a windy situation? New Orleans’ Garrett Hartley or Indianapolis’ Matt Stover? Discuss.

MIAMI -- As you can see from the award-winning photograph in the post below, we ESPN.com bloggers arrived at Sun Life Stadium with a few minutes to spare before Super Bowl XLIV. The primary purpose of posting the shot is to rub it in for those of you who are snowbound or otherwise stuck in weather that is at least somewhat less ideal than what we’ve got here. (Sunny skies and temperatures in the mid-60’s.)

A few words about the plan for today. I’ll pop on the blog as warranted during the afternoon, and then at 5:30 p.m. ET I’ll be moving over to our NFL Nation Live in-game chat thingee. Please join me there.

I’m expecting to write a New Orleans-themed post after the game, which will naturally show up here on the NFC North blog.

Starting Monday we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming.

MIAMI -- Assuming you plan to devote all of Sunday to watching television -- what else is there to do before the Super Bowl? -- make sure you catch ESPN’s "Sunday NFL Countdown."

Part of the program will include the first-ever airing of Vince Lombardi’s pregame speech to the Packers before Super Bowl II. Should be pretty cool. Countdown starts at 10 a.m. ET.

I’ll back with you a bit later Saturday. I’m heading up to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., for the announcement of the 2010 class of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- Regular readers know I rarely make predictions on this blog. Usually they correspond with direct assignment, and let’s just say I’m not often the most prescient in the group.

But here’s one exception: I joined my ESPN.com colleagues in making a call on Super Bowl XLIV. I’m going with Indianapolis. My explanation, such as it is, can be found on our predictions page.

Feel free to let me know what you think.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- Man, I love Twitter.

I was sitting vacantly in the Super Bowl media center when Minnesota left tackle Bryant McKinnie tweeted that he was walking in the door. I hopped up and ran into him signing posters over on radio row.


We talked for about five minutes about his dismissal from the Pro Bowl, his combination of regret and defiance and his relative lack of sympathy for the players left to cover for him in the game.

Below is most of our Q&A. I’ll follow up with a few comments at the bottom.

Tell us what happened.

Bryant McKinnie: I understand I missed it. But they tried to make it seem like it was because you were at the club and you couldn’t get up. No. I had called [agent Drew Rosenhaus] and told Drew I wanted to withdraw.

I had taken a cortisone shot in my foot the week before the game. When you take that shot, it numbs whatever. You don’t feel like you’re hurt anymore. It was the New Orleans game. You feel like you’re good on Wednesday.

Yes, I did go out. I can go out and still get up the next morning. But my body started feeling a certain way. So I called Drew and I said, ‘I don’t think I’m going to be able to play anymore because my body was hurting.’

I was trying to push myself to play. It was my first Pro Bowl, it was in Miami, so I got to come back and play at home. He got in touch with the trainer. The trainer ended up calling me at 6:30 on Friday.

I told him over the phone my problems. He said, ‘Could you come see me in person?’ I said I was 30 minutes away because I was down at the beach. He said he going to dinner at 7 and could I meet him at 9:30. I said yeah. We were going to meet at 9:30. Then he called me and said, ‘I’m running late. I’m going to give you another time to meet.’

So me, in my mind, I already had talked to him, there’s no need to go to practice. There’s no reason to go to anything else.

What about the other days? Why didn’t you go to practice or meetings on those days?

BM: I had gotten sick. I was in the hotel. So he gave me medicine for that.

The league knew that’s why you didn’t show up?

BM: The trainer came to my room. That was Wednesday.

Given that, do you wish you had done anything differently during the week?

BM: Probably better communication to follow up with trainers and everything, or just withdrew earlier. But I don’t feel like it needed that much attention on it.

Do you think people will be quicker to assume the worst because of your history?

BM: But there wasn’t anything bad behind it. I just feel that they made it more than it really was. It wasn’t like I got locked up somewhere and couldn’t play in the game because I was in jail. That’s how they made it seem. I just didn’t know that it was going to be that serious.

Do you see where people might note that there were only two tackles left after you and that they had to play the entire game?

BM: Anyone who watched the game would know it wasn’t like they were going that hard. If you watched the game, they were stopping in front of the quarterback. I’m like, OK….

Have you heard from Brad Childress yet?

BM: No, not yet. Kevin Warren [a Vikings vice president], I talked to him. He was like, ‘Get off Twitter for a minute.' Because I was going in there and kind of responding to people. He was like, ‘Just don’t.’

People saw you tweeting about going to clubs and probably made a judgment.

BM: I’m off at the end of the day. I had a long season. It was a pretty decent season. You know what I mean? It’s all alright.

A few thoughts from me:

• I appreciated McKinnie standing there and speaking to me, especially after what I wrote Saturday. (I’m guessing he hasn’t read it.) Nothing he said Thursday will change my original reaction. He would have had to be awfully sick during the week to make only one day of meetings and practices. Neither are taxing. And he absolutely erred by not addressing his foot injury earlier.
• By “they,” I believe McKinnie was referring to the media and not the NFL.
• This question will have to remain unanswered: Why was McKinnie too sick and injured to practice and play, but healthy enough to go out each night in Miami? At the end of the day, those two facts can’t be reconciled. I’ll leave it up to you to decide.
• I don’t think many of his fellow Pro Bowlers are going to appreciate McKinnie’s indifference to the players he left to cover for him. I agree the game wasn’t taxing on a relative level, but that’s not the point. The less taxing the game, the more egregious it was that he considered himself too injured to play.

MIAMI -- I was at a friend’s house and I walked past a mirror. The person I saw, I didn’t recognize. Dark eyes. Looking bad. I realized I had to do something different. Everybody has their moment when they say, "Man, I have to do something different."

For Anthony Hargrove, that moment came on April 4, 2008. A promising but troubled defensive end in St. Louis and Buffalo from 2004-07, he had been suspended from the NFL for multiple violations of its substance abuse program. It was time to get help.

What happened between that moment and today is one of the most compelling storylines of Super Bowl XLIV. Hargrove is now an important part of the New Orleans Saints, the only team willing to sign him last summer. He's a havoc-wreaking defensive tackle and a 300-pound cover man on special teams. He has spoken openly and eloquently about his journey, and so it seems appropriate to let him tell most of this story himself.

When you have the kinds of problems I did, you feel like you’re locked in a closet. You’re hoping someone will come by and let you out. Finally, somebody did.

Hargrove lost his mother to AIDS at age 9 and spent his childhood bouncing between family members and foster care. He believes God compelled him to see the ravages of drugs and alcohol when he looked in the mirror on that day almost two years ago. It directed him toward the Miami-based Transitions Recovery center for what turned out to be 10 months of rehabilitation.

When you go through a period like that in treatment, you see so much. I saw a lot of different things. I saw death. I saw people just giving up on life.

So you switch. You turn over. You say to yourself, I don’t want to get to that point where I just give up on life, or I just throw in my cards and say, "I’m done with this." I’m always telling people, we can always do stuff with time. It’s not over until we see 0:00 on the clock.

He watched the Super Bowl last year from Transitions.

It’s quieter, I can tell you that. It’s a lot quieter to watch a Super Bowl from rehab.

It was hard to watch the game because I wanted to be there. I was coming in and out of the room, doing laundry and whatever else. I really didn’t want to watch it because I hadn’t played that season. You get caught up thinking about all the stuff I did wrong to keep me out of the game.

While that game was going on, it was a reminder of all the stuff I did wrong to keep me out of the season and a reminder that I might not get back to it.

Days later, he met with NFL officials about reinstatement. His indefinite suspension was lifted after one year.

But now the hard part: How to convince a team to sign him? Playmaking defensive linemen are rare and valuable commodities. But who would want a player that two organizations already had given up on?

(Read full post)

MIAMI -- How many football lives does Darren Sharper have?

We’ve counted him out at least twice before. There was his departure from Green Bay after the 2004 season, one spurred because the Packers thought he was in marked decline. The next season, Sharper was an All-Pro in Minnesota.

After last season, the Vikings thought he couldn’t help them anymore, and like the Packers, they let him depart via free agency. After two months on the market, New Orleans signed him to a one-year deal worth about $1.5 million.

In 2009, he was an All-Pro once again.

Sharper’s career renaissance with the Saints has been a testament to conditioning, motivation and smart instincts. More than anything, however, it provided a template for how to use, waste and misjudge the specific skills of a player.

In 2004, the Packers blamed a lack of speed -- rather than a knee injury -- on Sharper’s decline in play. From 2006-08, the Vikings squeezed him into a Cover 2 scheme that minimized his playmaking abilities.

In his All-Pro years of 2005 and 2009, however, Sharper played in less rigid schemes that emphasized player flexibility. In those two years alone, he intercepted 18 passes and returned five for touchdowns. During the three years in between? Nine interceptions and one touchdown.

Many followers of the NFC North seem astounded by Sharper’s production this season in New Orleans, where he is one of the primary reasons the Saints will appear in Super Bowl XLIV. To me, it’s pretty simple. He could have been doing this all along -- in the right scheme.

“Playing in the style I played in Minnesota, I was kind of a protector,” Sharper said. “I was the guy that kept everything in front of us and tired to prevent the big play. In [the Saints] defense, I’m allowed to be a playmaker and trust my instincts and attack the football. It’s two different worlds, from where I was last year and where I am this year. That’s the biggest difference.”

(Read full post)

MIAMI -- There’s been plenty of discussion about Minnesota’s penalty for 12 men on the field near the end of regulation in the NFC Championship Game. But the intrigue extended to the next play, where New Orleans cornerback Tracy Porter's interception ended the Vikings’ chance of breaking the tie before overtime.

The interception came only after a last-second adjustment by the Saints defense. Hall of Fame safety Rod Woodson -- appearing Tuesday at Super Bowl media day as part of the NFL Network contingent -- picked it up right away.

“If you go back and look at that play, you see [Saints linebacker Jonathan] Vilma make a check to bring Porter to the other side,” Woodson said. “And what happens? Porter gets the pick.”

Indeed, the Saints changed from a man-to-man to a cover-2 look that proved advantageous on the play. Coach Brad Childress said last month that Favre’s first read was receiver Bernard Berrian, but the coverage dictated he move to his third read, which was Rice.

Woodson made the observation as a way to illustrate how Saints defensive coordinator Gregg Williams has empowered his players to make on-field adjustments.

“That’s the sign of a great defensive coordinator,” Woodson said. “He’s not going to limit what his players can do. He allows his players to make plays for him.”

MIAMI -- I’m working backwards on this one, but that’s why they call me the greatest investigative reporter of at least the past five minutes.

I was standing in the media scrum around New Orleans safety Darren Sharper when he was asked about Indianapolis tight end Dallas Clark. At the end of his answer, Sharper said: “He’s a guy you have to watch out for. He’s Peyton’s -- I should say, Eli’s -- go-to.”

Eli?

Based on the Pro Bowl ratings Sunday night, I was one of the few people not watching the ESPN broadcast. So I missed Colts quarterback Peyton Manning refer to “Jamie Sharper” during a halftime interview. (Jamie is Darren’s older brother, the former Seattle and Houston linebacker.)

A mistake? Obviously Sharper -- Darren -- didn’t think so. He went out of his way to mention Eli and was smirking as he said it.

I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a war of words. Let’s just consider it two crusty veteran players engaging in some early-week mind games.

MIAMI -- South Florida’s all-day downpour forced a schedule shuffle that left me away from the blog when Chicago announced the hiring of Mike Martz as its new offensive coordinator. All was not lost, however; I got some good interviews done after New Orleans’ practice for upcoming posts on former Green Bay/Minnesota safety Darren Sharper and Saints defensive tackle Anthony Hargrove (I’ll explain later).

As for Martz, I laid out my argument last month for why I thought he was the best the Bears could do under their unique circumstances. To be clear, Martz’s detractors make some legitimate points, and I thought former St. Louis receiver Ricky Proehl articulated one of them well in this interview over at ESPN Chicago.

Proehl said Martz’s “ego got in the way” during the latter stages of his tenure as the Rams’ head coach and said some of his game plans included 200-plus plays.

“Did we need all those plays?” Proehl said. “No. … I think we got too cute, too fancy and over time it ended up being our demise.”

The good news is that Martz won’t have time to install 200 plays during his first season with the Bears. That only happens after years of continuity. But I believe Martz has a much better chance of making an instant impact than a first-time NFL coordinator, one who would probably take a more deliberate approach to installing an offense.

Of everything Martz said during a teleconference Monday, here’s what seemed most important to me (via Sean Jensen of the Chicago Sun-Times): “We will be hitting on all cylinders on opening day. I can promise you that.”

Bears coach Lovie Smith can afford nothing short of that if he wants to continue in his job beyond the 2010 season, and I am certain that’s the primary reason Martz was his choice. The Bears are in survival mode. They couldn’t afford to take a risk with this hire. As contrary as it sounds given Martz’s well-chronicled history of personal entanglements and overly sophisticated game plans, he was their safest choice.

MIAMI -- Chicago linebacker Hunter Hillenmeyer is among another group of active NFL players who have agreed to donate their brains to concussion research upon their deaths.

Here’s the full report from the Associated Press. Hillenmeyer has had a vested interested in concussions since suffering one in the season opener against Green Bay in 2006. At the time, he said: “I’ve got my mom and girlfriend sending me 50 articles off the Internet about all the long-term effects of concussions. But that’s not something that I’m thinking about. I know the doctors wouldn’t let me play if they thought there was any greater risk of me getting another one than with anybody else out there.”

Other players who recently joined Hillenmeyer include Zach Thomas and Kyle Turley.