The Giants decisively outplayed the Patriots in the first half. Bill Belichick displayed Andy Reid-ian clock management skills toward the end. His team doesn’t bother covering tight ends. The Pats defensive line was on rollerskates. Yet here we are with the Gritriots winning on the strength of a late gritdown from Danny Woodhead.

So now that the Patriots have survived that early onslaught, predictable game patterns dictate that New England has the edge to run away with it, even though Gronkowski has his requisite single catch for today. Still praying that the Giants pull this out for the usual reasons, but also because Simmons will never stop complaining about that Brady safety.

[gif via jose3030]

The Super Bowl, you guys. It came after all. You feared you’d never get to see commercials with chimps dressed as stewardesses headbutting random men in the dick to sell car insurance. Now you will! Plus Twitter gets to explode by the end of the first quarter. Maybe the whole Internet, too, because the game is being streamed online for the first time. The American dream is still alive. Take that, terrorist commie invading alien clown frauds.

We survived two weeks of Gronkowski ankle updates, Bill Simmons bitching in advance about the Giants faking injuries to slow the Greatriots offense, profiles of Belichick’s shadowy inner circle and examinations of whether another Super Bowl ring will push Brady or Eli into the list of greatest living presidents. Also, fans sublimated their big game anticipation into concentrated stupid thing energy.

And what Super Bowl run-up could be complete without BULLETIN BOARD MATERIAL OF ANCIENT MAYAN DOOM. It looked bleak for morons bleating about superstition until this morning when Chris Canty tweeted a prediction that the Giants would win 28-17. Finally, someone to blame when the karma gods invoke their new age wrath on the Giants.

Hope you didn’t bet the over on the prop bet for shots of Peyton Manning during the game, because from the looks of ESPN’s pregame coverage, Ol’ Battleship is taking in Super Bowl XLII.2 from his Gatorade Is It In You™ NeckAIDS Fallout Bunker deep beneath the city.

So let’s do this. The official KSK position is that this Super Bowl matchup is only worthwhile if the Patriots lose, but it can be a closely contested game, preferably with a huge momentum-swinging play that makes Simmons issue poorly veiled complaints for the next decade. And while this Brady Photoshop is admirable, I can’t support the underlying sentiment or bad comic book movies.

By the way, for this live blog, we’re introducing commenter achievements and badges. Rolling out two today: one for any signed-in reader who comments on a live blog and another for any who share via Facebook or Twitter. Peter King says many movie buffs won’t know the “Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges!” came from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but then they aren’t real movie fans.

There are some alterations afoot with the KSK commenting system and live blogs. As is this is a fairly cut-and-dry housecleaning post devoid of dick jokes and full of scary change, we’ll leave all the sordid details after the jump.

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Here’s your tortured Peter King lede for the NFC Championship Game:

“It’s going to be a blood bath,” Giants defensive tackle Chris Canty said this week of the NFC Championship Game.

Right sentiment, wrong adjective. “Mud.” Mud bath.

Lofty set-up, wrong grammatical device. Bloodbath is a noun; it’s not an adjective. “If I may say so, you look positively bloodbath today.” “Why thank you, what a bloodbathy thing to say.” As adjectives used to describe the NFC Title Game, we underestimate mud bath.

When the Giants and 49ers get together in the postseason, great things happen. Joe Montana gets destroyed. Roger Craig fumbles with a chance to ice the NFC Championship. People named Trey Junkin botch snaps on potential go-ahead field goals. And the refs ignore brazen pass interference on said botched field goal attempt turned desperation pass. More of that, please.

I’ll take an exciting game regardless of the outcome, but I am inclined to say I’d prefer the Giants win only because the idea of Eli having more rings than Peyton is delightful. Also, it’s been annoying to watch San Francisco fans first be like…

Then be all…

Ha ha, shredding. Oh dearie, those skateboard jokes. So rad.

The “Joe Flacco feeling unappreciated for being mediocre” meme got major traction this week, helped along by Ed Reed telling the media that Flacco doesn’t do good quarterback stuff. This led to more passive-aggression and surly woes-are-me by the Ravens quarterback.

“I like his style. I mean, kind of. Even though I bet he wouldn’t even notice if I did like him. Whatever. Screw that guy. I don’t care.” – Jay Cutler

Flacco got somewhat of a pass for doing nothing besides convert two-yard scoring drives against the Texans because Houston’s defense is good (elite QBs shouldn’t be expected to excel against GOOD defenses) but now Big Bert has put a huge target on himself. The Ravens have to win and Flacco has to appear impressive in the process or else more Dilfer LOLs at his expense. Easterbrook says the only thing worse than a look-at-me glory boy is a wannabe look-at-me glory boy.

You might have heard that the last time a playoff game was hosted at Lambeau Field, Eli Manning and the Giants won to advance to Super Bowl XLII. Well I’m here to tell you that was an elaborately constructed fiction fobbed off on the masses to sell Citizen Eco-Drive watches and Oreo cookies. It was actually Brett Favre who went on to defeat the then-unbeaten Patriots. Yeah, the shocking revelation still isn’t enough to make me tolerate Brittfar or even not wish gruesome tractor accident-related death on him, but at least now you know the truth.

The Ravens beat the Texans in Baltimore by two scores back in October, and that was before T.J. Yates Time was dumped on the world. Plus there’s the tidbit that Bawlmer is 18-1 in its last 19 home games, so an NFL playoffs still seeking its first road team victory appears bound to stay chalktastic. Unless Joe Flacco wings multiple pick-sixes and Ray Rice goes down on the first play, which we all hope they will.

It’s been a rough weekend for overtly religious NFL stars, with Breesus and Tebow already shown the door. Could God’s Stabbacker, Ray Lewis, be next? Probably not, but it’s enticing to think about His Lordiness taking a weekend away from more pressing matters to spurn those most vocal about about faith’s impact on a stupid sport that affects nothing.

Who will more visibly venerate the Lord through on-field piety: Tebow Tebowing or Polamalu crossing himself after every play? Or will it be a surprise entrant? Like Demariyus Thomas showering the front row in communion wafers following a score?

Peter King says that the Steelers are the better team were they to meet in Wichita, but Tebow has invoked his evangelical warlock sorcery to bring Pittsburgh low, making The Ben and LaMarr Woodley gimpy, taking out Maurkice Pouncey and Rashard Mendenhall, and inflicting lifelong sickle cell on Ryan Clark. Now conditions are ripe for possible postseason Tebow Time, the legend of which will be passed down through the ages, but only after it has been altered to suit the whims of kings and other lords who will rewrite it every few generations.

There was a time when it was The Ben who was the young QB irritating people with vocal statements about his faith. You might recall that the NFL wanted to fine Roethlisberger $10,000 for writing PFJ (PRAY FER JEEBUS) on his shoes before every game his 2004 rookie season. Oh, how Benjamin changed where he strayed from the flock into the land of body shots and rapeyness. Such a shame. We can only hope for similar identity killing lapses out of Tebowmania.

Hours before the game, Jay Glazer reported that the Broncos might use Brady Quinn on critical 3rd downs, which might be proof of the existence of a benevolent God who enjoys our laughter.

With Mike Shanahan unlikely to qualify for the postseason anytime soon, the next two most red-faced head coaches must vie for supremacy on the big stage. Falcons-Giants is one of those games where a team that is consistently decent but never great goes against a wildly erratic opponent who can one week actually hang with Green Bay until the final whistle and then get plowed by the Redskins the next. So as much as it sucks for tepid Atlanta fans to hear, this game will be decided by which version of this schizophrenic Giants team shows up. Personally, I’d rather we wait a week for the petulant Eli derpface version, for that would at least give the blowout next week in Lambeau a watchable sideshow.

One of the main subplots for pundit yammering today will be whether Matt Ryan can be on a team that happens to win a game in the playoffs for the first time in three career tries. We’re obviously down with unfairly maligning a quarterback by boiling down his team’s shortcomings to his singular crushing failure, but it’s just not as fun to shake the choker stick at Matt Ryan as it was and is to do so at, say, Tony Romo or Peyton Manning. Clearly Matty Ice needs to be featured in more ubiquitous advertising campaigns.

There were three games this season that KSK live blogged that didn’t turn out to be complete disasters: the Saints-Packers opener, Bears-Eagles in early November and, finally and perhaps most spectacularly, the first meeting between the Giants and Cowboys that featured Tony Romo diving into his own end zone for a safety and ended with Jason Pierre-Paul blocking a potential game-tying Dallas field goal while Jerry Jones’ grandson looked on in delicious, delicious anguish. Should the second encounter, which will decide who “wins” the NFC East and hosts Atlanta next week, turn out anything like that, we can feel a tiny bit better about all those primetime games with Tyler Palko that we had to suffer through.